Reliance Jio Infocomm and eight IITs have formed a BharatGPT group to make an LLM model Hanooman which can work in 11 local Indian languages in four main fields — financial services, education, governance and healthcare. The model has been backed by the Central Government. It can also offer speech-to-text capabilities. Reliance Jio will build customized models for specific uses. BharatGPT is the first private-public partnership.
A swath of startups (such as Sarvam and Kutrim) are building up open-source models customized for India. Silicon Valley builds larger LLMs. Since there are computational constraints, Indian efforts involve workarounds and build simpler models affordable to smaller business and government departments. It is a different genre of LLMs.