In what could be a significant boost to the country's AI ecosystem, Google announced its collaboration with Startup Hub, which is under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, for the training of 10,000 start-ups on Artificial Intelligence. Announcing this at an 'I/O Connect' event, it was marked by a slew of tools, programs, and partnerships that take the Indian developers and startups upfront in the global AI revolution.

Key among the new offerings would be expanding access to Google's more sophisticated AI models, including a two million token context window in Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2, the next generation of open models. The VP at Google, Ambharish Kenghe, mentioned that the company is deeply committed to enabling Indian innovators to realize the full potential of AI. "We are focused on creating solutions to India's special needs while making sure we shape the future for AI globally", Kenghe said.

India, with one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio, therefore stands to benefit greatly from these developments. Google emphasized multimodal, mobile, and multilingual AI tremendous opportunities laying ahead and showed their enthusiasm to contribute to India's AI journey.

Furthering support, Google's DeepMind India team expanded Project Vaani in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, which gives more than 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages from 80,000 speakers across 80 districts. The search giant further announced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses the generation capabilities of LLMs on Indic languages, and open-sourced Composition of Language Models, known as CALM.

It added new Google Wallet APIs that will make it way easier to integrate loyalty programs, tickets, and gift cards. It had also provided India-specific pricing for Google Maps Platform, which will reduce the cost of using most APIs by up to 70 percent. It also said it will provide up to 90 percent off on its select Google Maps Platform APIs with Open Network for Digital Commerce in a bid to boost innovation for digital commerce.
"From consumer experiences to agriculture and for social enterprises, AI has huge potential to make a positive impact and solve some of the biggest challenges of our time". Added Ajjarapu, the Senior Director at Google DeepMind.

On its part, Google will soon be launching an Agricultural Landscape Understanding Research application programming interface that is set to enable farmers and all those operating within the agricultural space to make more data-driven and efficient farming practices. The development shows continuous commitment by Google to deliver impactful and practical AI solutions out of an agricultural value chain.

It is through such strategically stemmed initiatives and collaborations that Google envisions the development of a new set of Indian startups and developers to build newer solutions that make for an innovation-rich positioning of India as central to the global AI race.