All about BharatGPT, the joint AI project of Reliance Jio & IIT Bombay

Reliance Jio, a prominent player in the telecommunications and streaming industry, is expanding its presence in the field of artificial intelligence. In collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Jio is preparing to launch its new AI project called, appropriately named as BharatGPT.

The announcement was made by Akash Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio during the annual Techfest of IIT Bombay. As the largest telecom service provider in India, Jio aims to leverage the capabilities of generative pretrained transformers and large language models, in partnership with Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT Bombay's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

The focus of this project is to develop AI solutions for key business verticals such as telecom and retail. Ambani emphasized that Jio is committed to integrating AI across all sectors of their organization, not just as a standalone vertical. "We are working very hard to launch AI not only as a vertical inside our organization, but horizontally across all our sectors," Akash Ambani said.

Through BharatGPT and Jio's AI advancements, they plan to introduce new offerings in media, commerce, communications, and devices.

The project involves collaboration with a consortium of other IITs, in addition to IIT Bombay.

"The BharatGPT consortium, which aims to deliver India-centric multi-lingual and multi-modal GPT/LLMs, is a unique Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiative led by IIT Bombay. The consortium consists of other premier academic institutes such as IIT Madras, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore and Bhashini (a division of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology)," Prof Ramakrishnan told Indian Express.

The specific release date for BharatGPT has not been disclosed at this time. However, it is anticipated that Jio will announce the release date within the first few months of 2024.

BharatGPT is projected to be designed as an artificial intelligence system for Jio's telecom products. It is expected to be activated through voice commands and gestures, aiming to reduce the need for extensive human research and enhance the user experience across all Jio platforms.

(With PTI inputs)