Tech giant Google on Wednesday unveiled a range of tools, programmes, and partnerships aimed at empowering Indian developers and startups to lead 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, expanding access to its AI models like Gemini and Gemma. Google is also introducing new language tools from Google DeepMind India and enhancing the software development process with AI-powered features, maintaining a steadfast focus on responsible AI.
As part of its Gemini era, Google is focused on bringing the power of multimodality to everyone. It is expanding the types of questions that can be asked with advances in long context windows. Today, more than 1.5 million developers globally use Gemini models across its tools. The fastest way to build with Gemini is through its developer platform, Google AI Studio. India has one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio today.
“At Google, we’ve been investing in AI for over a decade, driving fundamental advancements that have led us to the exciting Gemini era. AI is a powerful enabler and a major inflection point that will require us to continuously reimagine what’s possible,” said Ambharish Kenghe, Vice President, Google. “We’re committed to empowering Indian innovators to harness AI’s full potential, creating solutions that not only address India’s unique needs but also 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 key areas with transformative potential in India: multimodal, multilingual, and mobile. The company is working with MeitY Startup Hub to support 10,000 Indian startups in their AI journeys through Google Cloud credits, an AI-first programming curriculum, and the launch of a nationwide GenAI Hackathon and AI Startup Bootcamp. Developers in India 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 shared updates to empower developers building language solutions for India. This includes the expansion of Project Vaani, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). This initiative 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 specialised language models with Gemma models. Google also introduced the MatFormer framework, 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 you can see from the innovation that Indian companies are pioneering. 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 remain committed to helping developers and entrepreneurs advance and deploy technology that makes a palpable difference in people’s lives.”
Google is also introducing Google Wallet APIs to simplify the integration of loyalty programmes, tickets, and gift cards. For developers using Google Maps Platform, India-specific pricing is being introduced with up to 70 per cent lower costs on most APIs (application programming interface). Google is also collaborating with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), offering developers building for ONDC up to 90 per cent off on select Google Maps Platform APIs.
“AI is transforming the very fundamentals of 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 want to make it as easy as possible for them to build with AI across surfaces, be it web, mobile, or cloud,” said Jeanine Banks, Vice President and General Manager, Developer X, Google. “We’ve been thrilled and inspired by the enthusiastic embrace of our AI capabilities by India’s growing developer ecosystem, and we can’t wait to see the innovations they will pioneer with Google’s expanding AI models, tools, and app development suite announced today.”
The company will also soon launch the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, a limited availability tool designed to make agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient. Google also gave a glimpse into innovative AI agents aimed at streamlining workflows, with open-sourcing Project Oscar, a reference for an AI agent that helps with open-source project maintenance.
