The government will “pause” accepting fresh proposals for building an indigenous foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model after April 22.

In a statement, IndiaAI Mission said that it has extended the deadline for submitting applications under the third phase to April 22 from April 15 previously due to the “large volume of proposals” received. Thereafter, the nodal AI body will put on hold any new applications.

“We continue to receive a high volume of applications in the ongoing phase 3 (16th March to present). In light of the large volume of responses received till now, it has been decided to pause acceptance of new applications… To ensure all applications that are in process are accommodated, the deadline for submission for phase 3 has been extended by 7 days,” read the statement.

IndiaAI Mission noted that it has so far received 197 applications for building a homegrown AI model. In the first phase, , out of which 22 were for large language models (LLMs) while the remaining 45 were for small language models (SLMs).

In Phase 2, the Centre received 120 applications. Of these, 36 were for LLMs while 84 were for building SLMs.

“We appreciate the applicants for their interest in this initiative. The IndiaAI team is actively evaluating the received proposals and will continue to give regular updates on the same,” said IndiaAI Mission in a statement.

This comes four months after the , startups, and research organizations to build an indigenous AI foundational AI model trained on Indian datasets. The project is part of the larger INR 10,370 Cr IndiaAI Mission.

While inviting applications, the Mission said that the project will look to develop a scalable platform that can demonstrate capabilities to address India-specific challenges and opportunities across sectors.

As part of this, the Centre has expressed willingness to offer both equity-based funding as well as compute credits for the selected entity(s) that will undertake the task.

This follows the union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, in February, saying that the . He also said then that India would be able to develop its own high-end graphics processing unit (GPU) in the next three to five years.

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