Google is targeting India’s thriving AI developer community with a suite of new tools, programs, and partnerships aimed at fostering AI-driven product development for both local and global markets.
‘India is at the cornerstone of our global AI mission. With its large mobile-first population, booming startup ecosystem, and diverse linguistic landscape, we’re uniquely positioned to drive AI innovation globally,’ said Seshu Ajjarapu, Senior Director at Google DeepMind, in an interview with Moneycontrol.
Ajjarapu highlighted that India leads in adopting Google’s Gemini AI models, with over 1.5 million developers worldwide. India also boasts one of the largest user bases of Google AI Studio, a platform designed for rapid prototyping with generative AI models.
Key Focus Areas: Multimodal, Multilingual, Mobile
Manish Gupta, Director at Google DeepMind, emphasized the company’s focus on multimodal, multilingual, and mobile AI opportunities. ‘We have been working together with our colleagues globally to infuse all these capabilities into Gemini,’ he said.
New AI Models and Enhanced Capabilities
On July 17, during a developer event in Bengaluru, Google announced the release of Gemma 2, the next generation of its open-source AI model. Gemma 2, featuring improved architecture for better performance and efficiency, will be available in 9 billion and 27 billion parameter sizes.
Gemma’s tokenizer, designed to handle India’s diverse languages, was showcased with Navarasa, a multilingual variant for Indian languages built by Telugu LLM Labs. Navarasa supports 15 Indian languages and aims to enhance AI experiences for Telugu speakers globally.
Google also unveiled a 2 million token context window for its Gemini 1.5 Pro model, allowing developers to process more data in a single prompt, such as up to 1 hour of video or extensive codebases.
Benchmarking Indian Languages
Google introduced IndicGenBench, a multilingual benchmark suite for Indian languages, developed by Google DeepMind’s India unit. This suite evaluates the language generation capabilities of large language models across 29 Indian languages, including underrepresented ones like Manipuri, Maithili, Konkani, Marwari, and Bodo.
‘For many of the languages, this is the first such benchmark, which will spur more innovation,’ Gupta noted.
New Technologies for Developers
Google is open-sourcing CALM (Composition of Language Models), a technology that allows developers to combine their specialized language models with Gemma models. This innovation aims to create powerful, efficient, and nuanced solutions for specific use cases and linguistic variations.
‘Our team developed a small model called Morni, which understood Indian languages very well. We wanted to combine it with the power of Gemini, a much richer model with a deeper understanding of the world, but not as good in understanding Indian languages. So how do you combine the two to get the best of both worlds?’ Gupta explained.
Google’s DeepMind India team also contributed to the Matformer framework, which enhances on-device AI capabilities. The framework will be included in the upcoming Gemini Nano version, allowing developers to optimize for performance and resource consumption.
Project Vaani and Agricultural API
Project Vaani, a collaboration between Google, IISc, and ARTPARK, has completed its first phase, providing developers with over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts. The project aims to collect speech data from all 773 districts of India in three phases.
Google also announced the upcoming Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API in limited preview, aimed at making agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient. This API will offer landscape insights at the farm field level and is built on Google Cloud.
India-Specific Pricing for Google Maps
Google introduced India-specific pricing for its Maps platform, claiming a reduction of up to 70% on most APIs. The company also partnered with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to offer developers up to 90% off on select Google Maps Platform APIs.
This comprehensive initiative underscores Google’s commitment to empowering India’s AI developers and fostering innovation across the country’s diverse technological landscape.
