India, Feb. 25 -- IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India is looking to build small language models (SLMs) for solving "distinct" problems, alongside a large language model (LLM).

"We are looking at our own digital models as well as our own smaller models, which can (solve) focused problems, distinct problems," Moneycontrol quoted Vaishnaw as saying.

Speaking virtually at the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2025, the IT minister also said that the government is focussed on creating a "large number of non-personal and anonymised datasets" for training indigeneously-built foundational artificial intelligence (AI) models.

"Can we create a very strong research base? For that, we have started centres of excellence (CoEs), three...