India AI, Facebook Parent Meta Sign Pact To Foster Collaboration In Artificial Intelligence And Emerging Technologies

India AI and Facebook-parent company Meta on Wednesday (26 July) signed a pact to foster collaboration in the field of AI and emerging technologies.

India AI is an Independent Business Unit under Digital India Corporation.

The objective of the MoU is to establish a framework for collaboration and cooperation between ‘India AI’ and Meta in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies including to make Meta’s open-source AI models available for use by Indian AI ecosystem, the Ministry of Electronics & IT said in a statement on Wednesday (26 July).

“India is at the forefront of adopting digital technologies and it is evident that AI and Emerging Technologies will play a pivotal role in expanding the advantages of technology to a broader population. Through this partnership with Meta, the joint research and development endeavours will tackle large-scale challenges by leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies like Llama and other open-source solutions," said Abhishek Singh, CEO of ‘India AI’.

Sir Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs, Meta said, “Meta’s open approach to AI innovation is complementary to India’s leadership on digital issues. Giving businesses, startups and researchers access to these technologies can open up a world of social and economic opportunities. ‘India AI’ is an exciting programme and with close collaboration between government and industry, we can strengthen India’s digital leadership and help to ensure AI tools are built for India’s unique needs".

Additionally, both organisations may also consider establishing a Centre of Excellence to nurture the startup ecosystem of AI and other Emerging Technologies.

Leveraging Meta's AI research models like LlaMA, Massively Multilingual Speech, and No Language Left Behind, the partnership will focus on building datasets in Indian Languages to enable translation and large language models, with priority given to low-resource languages, the statement said.

This effort will foster social inclusion, improve government service delivery, and spur innovation using large language models, Generative AI, cognitive systems, and translation models, it added.

Furthermore, ‘India AI’ and Meta will strive to enhance accessibility to AI compute resources for researchers, startups, and organisations with limited resources.

Knowledge sharing and collaboration in AI and Emerging Technologies will be facilitated through workshops, seminars, conferences, and similar platforms, the statement said.