On Wednesday, tech giant Google unveiled a suite of tools, programs, and partnerships designed to empower Indian developers and startups to spearhead the global AI revolution. At the Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event, the company announced its collaboration with the MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 startups in AI, providing expanded access to AI models like Gemini and Gemma. Additionally, Google is introducing new language tools from Google DeepMind India and enhancing software development with AI-powered features, while maintaining a focus on responsible AI.
In the Gemini era, Google aims to make multimodal AI accessible to everyone, expanding the range of questions that can be addressed with advancements in long context windows. Today, over 1.5 million developers globally use Gemini models across its tools, with Google AI Studio serving as the fastest platform to build with Gemini. India boasts one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio.
“For over a decade, we’ve been investing in AI at Google, driving fundamental advancements that have brought us to the exciting Gemini era. AI is a powerful enabler and a major inflection point that requires us to continuously reimagine what’s possible,” said Ambharish Kenghe, Vice President, Google. “We are committed to empowering Indian innovators to harness AI’s full potential, creating solutions that address India’s unique needs and shape the future of AI globally. The opportunities with multimodal, mobile, and multilingual AI are immense,” Kenghe added.
Google is democratizing AI for Indian developers by focusing on three transformative areas: multimodal, multilingual, and mobile AI. In collaboration with MeitY Startup Hub, Google will support 10,000 Indian startups with Google Cloud credits, an AI-first programming curriculum, and the launch of a nationwide GenAI Hackathon and AI Startup Bootcamp. Indian developers now have expanded access to Google’s powerful AI models with the 2 million token context window in Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2, the next generation of open models.
The Google DeepMind India team announced updates to empower developers creating language solutions for India. This includes expanding Project Vaani, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which provides developers with over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts. The team also introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in Indic languages, and open-sourced CALM (Composition of Language Models), a framework that allows developers to combine specialized language models with Gemma models. Additionally, the MatFormer framework was introduced, enabling developers to mix and match AI models within a single framework for optimal performance and resource efficiency.
“India is at the forefront of the AI revolution, as evidenced by the innovation pioneered by Indian companies. From consumer experiences to agriculture to social enterprises, AI has the power to address some of the biggest challenges of our time across many sectors and industries,” said Seshu Ajjarapu, Senior Director, Google DeepMind. “At Google, we are committed to helping developers and entrepreneurs advance and deploy technology that makes a significant difference in people’s lives.”
Google is also introducing Google Wallet APIs to simplify the integration of loyalty programs, tickets, and gift cards. For developers using the Google Maps Platform, India-specific pricing is being introduced with up to 70 percent lower costs on most APIs. Additionally, Google is collaborating with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), offering developers building for ONDC up to 90 percent off on select Google Maps Platform APIs.
“AI is fundamentally transforming software development, including how developers think about what’s possible and how they build it. At Google, we believe all developers are AI developers, and we aim to make it as easy as possible for them to build with AI across web, mobile, or cloud surfaces,” said Jeanine Banks, Vice President and General Manager, Developer X, Google. “We are inspired by the enthusiastic embrace of our AI capabilities by India’s growing developer ecosystem, and we look forward to the innovations they will pioneer with Google’s expanding AI models, tools, and app development suite announced today.”
Additionally, Google will soon launch the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, a limited availability tool designed to make agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient. The company also provided a preview of innovative AI agents aimed at streamlining workflows, with the open-sourcing of Project Oscar, a reference for an AI agent that assists with open-source project maintenance.
