Startups under India AI Mission launch offline AI models

Two startup companies supported by the government's India AI Mission have introduced sovereign AI models that can function in air-gapped environments. An air-gapped environment refers to systems that are completely disconnected from the internet and external networks. These two startups, named Soket AI and Zentec, announced their new models on Tuesday. The models were unveiled during a press briefing organised in New Delhi, which was attended by IT Secretary S. Krishnan and India AI Mission CEO Sudeep Srivastava.

Soket AI company has launched a model named 'EKA-1'. This model possesses 26.3 billion parameters and has been specifically developed for mathematics and coding. This model has been trained on approximately 7.5 trillion tokens, which includes English and all 22 scheduled languages of India. On the other hand, Zentec company has introduced two open-source models named 'Dhīr 2B' and 'Dhīr 5B'. These models act as multilingual assistants that support English and 10 Indian languages. These models have been designed for use in particularly important sectors for secure, on-premise, and offline usage.

Explaining the difference between popular chatbots and air-gapped systems, Zentec's Shashikumar Ganesh stated that in services like ChatGPT, 'inferencing'—the process of the model providing an answer—takes place on a server located at a remote location. However, in an air-gapped setup, this process occurs locally. He further added that in this, no data will go out and this model does not even require a network connection. This model can run even on mobile phones having at least 6 GB memory. He identified the defence and cyber security sectors as potential users of this.

IT Secretary S. Krishnan stated that small models have many uses, including cyber security, and can be deployed in air-gapped environments. He also said that the strengths of both models are different; Soket's model is for mathematics and coding, while Zentec's model is built for science and research. According to Ganesh, due to the shortage of GPUs, Zentec had trained on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). He clarified that TPUs are not inferior to GPUs and if they had attempted to procure GPUs, they would have had to wait for an additional three to four months.

Soket AI founder Abhishek Upadhyay stated that security measures have been taken in these models, which include protection against content related to suicide and self-harm.