Pact signed for using Parliament data to train indigenous AI model: Ashwini Vaishnaw

India AI Mission accesses Parliament data for training indigenous AI model, focusing on tech partnerships and skill development for AI.

The India Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission, helmed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Parliament to access its data for training an indigenous AI model, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday (March 18, 2025).

Speaking during a panel discussion on “Winning the AI marathon: India in the global AI race” at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, Mr. Vaishnaw said that under the India AI Mission, 14,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) have been made available at a common compute facility. Computing tasks like machine learning require the application of GPU-based operations on large dataset.

“Parliament dataset will be a very good resource for training our model, similarly Doordarshan and All India Radio are other sources where large datasets are available,” Mr. Vaishnaw said.

“Whatever world says, a model, if its open source today, may not remain open source tomorrow, which we have seen in case of Open AI. So it is important to have our own large language models (LLM),” he said.

Mr. Vaishnaw said the government was working with industry to evaluate options and was planning to rope in professors and start-ups willing to contribute to the journey of building LLM for India.

Citing examples of training students on 5G tech, he said that nearly 100 laboratories were set up in universities so that students could learn about the tech in real settings. Similarly, in case of semiconductors, 240 educational institutions have been given the latest tools to train students on chip design. “A similar approach will be adopted for AI,” he said.

Mr. Vaishnaw said in the next three to five years, India will develop capability to have GPUs up and running.