Two startups backed by the government’s India AI Mission – Soket AI and ZenteiQ – on Tuesday released their sovereign AI models that can work in air-gapped environments, meaning systems fully cut off from the internet and outside networks. The models were unveiled at a press briefing in New Delhi in the presence of IT Ministry secretary S Krishnan and India AI Mission COO Sudeep Shrivastava.
ZenteiQ’s Sashikumar Ganesan explained the difference of airgapped systems from popular chatbots. In an air-gapped setup, it happens locally. He named defence and cybersecurity as possible users.
It can also run on a mobile phone with at least 6 GB of memory. Because of the scarcity of GPUs, ganesan said ZenteiQ trained on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
With a service like ChatGPT, he said, the “inferencing”, the step where the model produces an answer, happens in a server at a remote location. “No data will go outside,” he said, adding that the model needs no network connection. Krishnan said smaller models have many uses, including cybersecurity, and can be deployed in air-gapped environments. He said the two models have different strengths – Soket’s is aimed at maths and coding, while ZenteiQ’s is aimed at science and research. He said TPUs are not inferior to GPUs, and that getting GPUs would have meant waiting another three to four months Soket founder Abhishek Upperwal said safeguards are in place, including protections against content on suicide and self-harm.
