India's AI Strategy: Backing Small Language Models Alongside Frontier Systems

• India's new AI policy white paper emphasizes developing both large foundation models and smaller, specialized AI systems (SLMs) for indigenous growth.
• SLMs are crucial for efficient deployment in sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, and MSMEs, complementing larger AI systems.
• The IndiaAI Mission, with ₹10,371.92 crore investment, supports compute infrastructure (IndiaAI Compute Portal), datasets (AIKosh), and language technologies (Bhashini project).
• Indian organizations like Sarvam AI, Gnani.ai, IIT Bombay's BharatGen, Zoho, and CoRover.ai are actively developing domestic AI solutions.
• A "blanket licence" model is proposed for AI training data to balance large-scale development with fair compensation for content creators.