New Delhi, February 17 Ethics will be a key factor in determining how effectively artificial intelligence (AI) is used in the healthcare sector, said Jitendra Singh, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, on Tuesday.
Citing the example of the government's sovereign multilingual AI engine, BharatGen, he said that the current government is ready to take on a new phenomenon, even in its early stages.
"Ethics will be a very important factor in determining how optimally AI can be used in the healthcare sector," the minister said.
He was speaking at a session at the AI Impact Summit.
Singh said that BharatGen is a government-owned sovereign model, but there are also other private sector players working on similar models, such as digital health and digital case histories.
"In the future, we will also need to integrate. Neither can we work in isolation, nor can they," he said.
Launched in October 2024, BharatGen is a government project to develop a sovereign AI model that will provide services such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for Indian languages.
At the session, BharatGen unveiled its new 17B (billion) parameter LLM (large language model).
Currently, BharatGen's AI models support several Indian languages, including Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu.
BharatGen has released domain-specific fine-tuned models for Ayurveda (Ayur Param), Indian agriculture (Agri Param), and the Indian legal domain (Legal Param). In addition, all BharatGen models (text, speech, and vision) are useful for applications across healthcare, agriculture, education, and governance.
The 17-billion-parameter multilingual AI model, called Param2, will support 22 Indian languages. The model is developed under the BharatGen consortium, which operates out of the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay and is supported by the Department of Science and Technology.
Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen, said that Param2 is a "mixture of experts" model designed to work across 22 Indian languages.