It’s a wrap: News this week (Dec 9 — Dec 15)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From the New Delhi Declaration to AI base model from Ola, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

India to get AI Mission

India will now launch an artificial intelligence (AI) mission with the aim of establishing capability for AI compute power for startups and innovators, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was speaking at the inauguration of the Global Partnership on AI Summit 2023, which is headed by India as the Council Chair this time after being handed over the baton from last year’s Council Chair France.
Speaking more on the AI mission, Modi said that it will promote AI solutions across industries like agriculture, healthcare, and education. Further, through industrial training institutes (ITI), AI skills training will be imparted to people living in tier-2, and -3 cities. 

At the summit, participating 29 nations adopted the New Delhi Declaration on AI. This declaration firstly recognises the advancement of AI technology and its role in generating economic growth, innovation, jobs across sectors, and its potential to generate jobs across sectors. It also notes that AI poses risks pertaining to misinformation and disinformation, unemployment, lack of transparency and fairness, personal data and intellectual property protection, and a threat to democratic values.

GlobalLogic’s new acquisition

Digital engineering company GlobalLogic has announced its acquisition of Australia-based Katzion. With the acquisition of the automotive-based engineering firm, GlobalLogic will expand its offering in the mobility sector and support geographical expansion in regions like Australia/Asia-Pacific, Spain, and the Middle East. Along with expanding offerings in the automotive sector, the acquisition will help the Hitachi-owned company to dive into emerging segments such as micro-mobility, fleet vehicles and rental cars.

India’s first AI foundational model

Ride-hailing app maker Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal has launched Krutrim, an artificial intelligence base model focusing on Indic languages, cultural scenarios, and settings. Touting it to be the first of its kind, Aggarwal said that Krutrim could understand India’s ‘uniqueness and right cultural context’. Krutrim is already being used by different teams in the company for activities like customer support, sales, and human resources tasks, among other processes.  Krutrim is trained on 2 trillion tokens. It can understand queries in 20 languages and generate responses in 10 of them including Marathi Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Odia. 

To be sure, Aggarwal launched his AI venture called Krutrim Si Designs to compete with the likes of OpenAI in April. In the past, Aggarwal had spoken about the need for India’s own foundational models and libraries. 

This week, homegrown startup Sarvam AI, that emerged from stealth and secured funding of $41 million, launched OpenHathi, a Hindi-based LLM. Unlike Krutrim which is a base model, OpenHathi has been fine-tuned on Meta’s Llama 2 model.

Lenovo’s new hybrid cloud platform

Chinese technology major Lenovo announced on Thursday that it has launched new hybrid cloud platforms and services. The move comes as part of the company's $1 billion investment over the next three years in the expansion of infrastructure solutions to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses globally.

Lenovo unveiled ThinkAgile hyper-converged solutions and ThinkSystem servers that offer improved performance, management, and efficiency capabilities. These solutions are powered by the next generation of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and provide up to 15% better performance. 

ONGC-IBM partnership

In an effort to streamline and standardise vendor payments, state-owned oil and gas company ONGC has partnered with IBM Consulting on Thursday to launch the ONGC Shared Finance Services (SFS) in Noida. According to the company, this initiative represents a significant step towards improving the overall vendor experience. The SFS will centralise and standardise all vendor payments for ONGC, expediting the processes to enhance the vendor experience.