Jio said that the new AI-based offering will be called ‘Bharat GPT’
Indian operator Reliance Jio Infocomm is currently working with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay to launch an indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) model, local press reported, citing the company’s chairman Akash Ambani, as saying.
The executive noted that the new AI-based offering will be called ‘Bharat GPT’.
According to the report, Reliance Jio is working with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, to develop a generative pre-trained language model-based solutions for key business verticals such as telecom and retail.
“At present, we have just scratched the surface with large language models and generative AI and the next decade will be defined by these applications,” Ambani said.
Ambani also highlighted that AI will transform every area of products and services. “We are working very hard to launch AI not only as a vertical inside our organization, but also horizontally across all our sectors,” he said.
Apart from IIT-Bombay, a consortium of other academic institutes will also be working on the project. “The Bharat GPT consortium, which aims to deliver India-centric multi-lingual and multi-modal GPT/LLMs, is a unique Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiative led by IIT Bombay. The consortium consists of other premier academic institutes such as IIT Madras, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore and Bhashini, Ramakrishnan said.
Reliance Jio Infocomm has been rapidly expanding its 5G network using Standalone (SA) architecture since October 2022. The telco has already deployed its 5G service in 7,764 cities across 36 states in India, according to the carrier’s website.
Reliance Jio had previously secured a mix of wireless spectrum for 5G across the 700 MHz, 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz bands. Jio is the only Indian operator with the 700 MHz low-band spectrum.
Reliance Jio Infocomm previously said it expected to complete the national rollout of 5G by the end of 2023.
“We will have nearly one million 5G cells operational in the network by December. In just nine months, Jio 5G is already present in over 96% of the census towns of our country. And we’re on track to cover the entire country by December of this year. This makes Jio 5G the fastest-ever 5G rollout of this scale anywhere in the world,” said Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Jio’s parent company Reliance Industries.
Also, Reliance Jio Infocomm’s 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) offering, dubbed JioAirFiber, is already commercially available in 514 cities in 25 states across India, according to recent press reports.
JioAirFiber is available in these states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Kerala, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Maharashtra, Odisha, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Tripura, Telangana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
The telco had announced the launch of its 5G FWA service in eight cities across the country in September. The service was initially launched in the cities of Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune.
