Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw met with Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun on Saturday as part of discussions for opportunities to collaborate on AI. Taking to X, he reflected on the success of India’s AI mission, speaking to the imperative of how all sectors – industry, government and academia-need to come together. “Met @ylecun (Yann LeCun) of Meta to discuss Bharat’s AI potential. Our AI mission is moving forward with strong collaborations between industry, government and academia: GenAI CoE with IIT Jodhpur and Meta. YuvAI Skilling with AICTE and Meta to train 1,00,000 students on LLM,” he shared.
On October 25, IndiaAI and Meta announced that they are going to jointly launch at IIT Jodhpur the Center for Generative AI, Srijan, which along with a launch of the “YuvAi Initiative for Skilling and Capacity Building” was joined in by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The coordination targets towards fulfilling the objective of supporting towards open-source AI, promoting indigenous AI innovation, and making progress in training even more competent and skilled AI-related professionals in India that would make it push towards being called as technology sovereignty and tailored AI solutions for the country.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT said Meta will support the Centre for Generative AI, Srijan at IIT Jodhpur (“GenAI CoE”) with the aim to promote responsible AI technologies and open science in this field. The centre will make advances in AI research while encouraging accountable development in AI and providing policy advice. It will equip future researchers, students, and practitioners with the tools required to develop responsible GenAI.
Meta has also collaborated with MeitY and AICTE to launch “YuvAi Initiative for Skilling and Capacity Building”, which will bridge India’s AI talent gap. The initiative aims at skilling and reskilling 1,00,000 developers between the age group of 18 to 30 years in three years with open-source large language models (LLMs). Therefore, this initiative will speed up the skill building for AI in health, education, agriculture, smart cities, and financial inclusion sectors.
YuvAI will include a Gen AI Resource Hub, which comprises courses, case studies, and open datasets; the Meta-designed LLM for Young Developers Course; and foundational AI Master Training Workshops. The Unleash LLM Hackathons will challenge students to propose AI solutions for real-world problems while offering successful ideas mentorship, seed funding, and access to markets. In addition, the AI Innovation Accelerator will fund 10 student-led startups experimenting with open-source AI models and will provide incubation and more visibility.
