India is expanding its role in sovereign artificial intelligence through its participation in Project Tapestry, an AI Alliance initiative, with BharatGen contributing to the project’s first major technical milestone.
The AI Alliance has announced the completion of Project Tapestry’s first major technical milestone, along with expanded collaborations with India and Vietnam during the United Nations General Assembly Week in New York.
During UNGA Week, India’s Consul General Binaya Srikanta Pradhan hosted Project Tapestry leaders at the Consulate General of India in New York, where the delegation included Ganesh Ramakrishnan of BharatGen, Ritwik Banerjee of Stony Brook University and Kaushik Bhatta of AI Alliance.
“India is a microcosm of the world. AI built for its languages and cultures preserves agency,”said Pradhan.
Project Tapestry is developing an open global consortium that allows countries and institutions to work together on advanced AI models while retaining control over their own data, models and deployments.
The initiative aims to prove that powerful AI systems can be developed collaboratively without bringing all data and computing resources under one institution.
As part of its first technical milestone, teams successfully demonstrated collaborative model training across four geographically distributed locations. Importantly, the underlying training data remained within the participating institutions.
The project also demonstrated cultural alignment by adapting AI models to better understand the languages, cultures and social contexts of India and Vietnam.
BharatGen, India’s government-backed open-source foundation model initiative, played a key role in the project. It conducted one of the two proof-of-concept exercises under the guidance of Dr Maneesh Singh, VP, Machine Learning at BharatGen.
The exercise involved joint training with Monash University in Australia, while both institutions kept their data within their respective countries.
The latest development comes ahead of a Project Tapestry workshop in Mumbai on October 15, hosted by BharatGen. The workshop is expected to bring together technical and institutional leaders to discuss the next phase of India’s participation.
Also Read: BharatGen to Represent India in Project Tapestry Under AI Alliance
