Google, MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 Indian startups in artificial intelligence

Google is working with the Ministry of Electronics and IT's (MeitY's) Startup Hub to train and support 10,000 Indian startups in artificial intelligence (AI), the American tech giant said on July 17.

The move is part of the company’s strategy to tap into the rapidly growing artificial intelligence developer ecosystem in India, a crucial market for its global AI efforts.

The announcement was made at the company's developer event Google I/O Connect Bengaluru.

As part of the initiative, Google is providing startups with AI-first programming and curriculum through its programmes such as Appscale Academy and Startup School, helping them with skills, knowledge, and mentorship.

The company will also provide up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits for eligible startups to invest in the cloud infrastructure and computational power required for AI development and deployment.

Google said it is also rolling a nationwide Gen AI Hackathon, GenAI Exchange, a three-month immersive experience in partnership with MeitY Startup Hub and the Startup India initiative between August and October.

A three-day bootcamp, Solve for India Startup Bootcamp | AI Edition, designed to support early-stage startups solving challenges across healthcare, climate change, agriculture, cybersecurity, and digital public infrastructure (DPI) is planned for September.

Google already runs an AI-focused accelerator programme in India called AI First, which provides three months of equity-free support to early-stage startups (seed-to-Series A startups) that use AI in their core products or solutions across varied industries and use cases.

Read: India well-positioned to help shape future of AI: Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean

Google also unveiled a series of tools, programmes and partnerships to help developers build AI solutions and products for India and the world.

The company is making Gemma 2, the next generation of its open-source model, available to all developers in India along with a 2 million token context window on Gemini 1.5 Pro model. Both these were first announced at Google I/O developer conference in May.

Context window size determines how much data — words, images, videos, audio or code — a model can process at once. This essentially means the bigger a model's context window, the more information it can take in and process in a given prompt.

Google also introduced IndicGenBench, a multilingual benchmark designed specifically for Indian languages. It can be used to evaluate language generation capabilities across diverse user-facing tasks in 29 Indian languages spanning 13 writing scripts and four language families. This includes Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi.

Google introduced India-specific pricing for developers using Google Maps platform, which the company claims is up to 70 percent lower on most APIs.