Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024: New India-Focused AI Models, Tools, and Initiatives Announced

Google hosted its Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event on Wednesday (July 17). During the event, the tech giant announced new artificial intelligence (AI) models, a new benchmarking tool, and several new initiatives, all focused on the Indian AI community. The company opened access to the Gemma 2 AI model to all developers, highlighting that it was designed to better adapt to Indian languages. Google also announced its partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Startup Hub to support the country’s startup ecosystem.

In a press release, Google claimed that more than 1.5 million developers globally used Gemini models to build AI-powered tools and apps. The company is also focused on empowering the developer community by providing access to multimodal AI models with longer context windows. Google also highlighted that India had one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio, which can be used to build new AI tools with Gemini.

To further assist developers build better tools, the Gemini 1.5 Pro model with a two million token context window was made available to all developers in India. Notably, the company added a waitlist to access the model earlier this year. Additionally, the Gemma 2 small language model (SLM) was also released to developers.

Google said that Gemma’s tokeniser, which breaks down text into smaller units for AI processing, could be an important tool for building multilingual solutions and cater to India’s diverse languages.

The tech giant also open-sourced its Composition of Language Models (CALM) framework that allows developers to combine their specialised language models with Gemma to create more efficient solutions. Presenting an example, the company said a developer building a coding assistant in English might be able to offer coding assistance in Kannada as well by composing with a Kannada specialist model in CALM.

Apart from AI models, Google also introduced IndicGenBench, a new benchmarking tool designed for Indian languages. The company claims that it covers 29 different regional languages including those that have not been benchmarked so far.

Several partnerships and initiatives were also announced during the event. Notably, Google is partnering with MeitY Startup Hub to support the Indian startup ecosystem in their AI endeavours.

Google will offer up to $350,000 (roughly Rs. 2.9 crore) in Google Cloud credits to eligible AI startups to help them with the infrastructure and computational power needed to build and deploy AI technologies. The company will also help startups develop skills, knowledge, and mentorship about AI by providing AI-first programming and curriculum through existing programmes such as Startup School and Appscale Academy. It will also host a nationwide Gen AI Hackathon, a three-month experience to support early-stage startups.