Meta inks MoU with Indian govt to partner on AI, emerging technologies

Last year, the government told Meta that India can use its position as Chair of the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence to push for innovation-friendly regulations at the multilateral forum if the company became its trusted AI partner

Tech major and Facebook's parent Meta has signed an initial pact with the Indian government to partner on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, amid a visit by the company's policy czar, former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, to the country.

The objective of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is to establish a framework for collaboration and cooperation between ‘India AI’, the country's official programme to promote the development of the technology, and make Meta’s open-source AI models available for use by Indian AI ecosystem.

Immediately after Clegg's previous visit to India in November last year, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported that the government told Meta that India can use its position as Chair of the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) to push for innovation-friendly regulations at the multilateral forum if the company became its trusted AI partner.

India had taken over as the chair of the GPAI for 2022-23 at a meeting of the body in Tokyo in November 2022.

In a press statement on July 26, the government said that India's official AI programme and Meta may also consider establishing a Centre of Excellence to nurture the AI startup ecosystem.

"Leveraging Meta's AI research models like LlaMA, Massively Multilingual Speech, and No Language Left Behind, the partnership will focus on building datasets in Indian Languages to enable translation and large language models, with priority given to low-resource languages," the government said.

"This effort will foster social inclusion, improve government service delivery, and spur innovation using large language models, Generative AI, cognitive systems, and translation models," it added.

The partnership will seek to enhance accessibility to AI compute resources for researchers, startups, and organisations with limited resources. Knowledge sharing and collaboration in AI & Emerging Technologies will be facilitated through workshops, seminars, conferences, and similar platforms.

Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs, Meta, said, “Meta’s open approach to AI innovation is complementary to India’s leadership on digital issues. Giving businesses, startups and researchers access to these technologies can open up a world of social and economic opportunities."

"‘India AI’ is an exciting programme and with close collaboration between government and industry, we can strengthen India’s digital leadership and help to ensure AI tools are built for India’s unique needs," he added.