Through its Research and Development Center for Large Language Models (LLMC) [*2] and the LLM-jp project [*3] , NII advances the research and development of transparent and reliable LLMs, in which all components—from training corpora to models and evaluation benchmarks—are developed and released in a form fully open to researchers. The development of such open foundation models which disclose their training processes and constituent elements, is of growing importance for the scientific verification and safety of AI and for building AI foundations rooted in the languages and needs of individual countries.
BharatGen is a government-funded sovereign AI initiative, building foundational multimodal large language models across 22+ Indic languages, including text, speech, and document vision. It is run by the BharatGen Technology Foundation (BTF), and its mission is to build an open, inclusive AI ecosystem that reflects India's linguistic diversity and socio-economic realities. The initiative is spearheaded by IIT Bombay and includes IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, and IIIT Delhi.
Both Japan and India pursue the establishment of open and sovereign AI foundations through academia-led efforts, and possess mutually complementary knowledge and experience.
Through this collaboration, NII will deepen Japan–India research exchange in the academically important field of LLMs endowed with scientific reasoning capabilities, and will contribute to the international advancement of open and trustworthy AI foundations and to strengthening Japan’s research capacity.
Notes
[Note 1] Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay)
One of India’s leading institutions of higher education and research in science and engineering. It is internationally recognized for delivering cutting-edge education and research and development (R&D) across the fields of science, engineering, design, management, and the humanities.
https://www.iitb.ac.in/
[Note 2] BharatGen Technology Foundation (BTF)A Section 8 not-for-profit backed by India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the IndiaAI Mission (MeitY), building India's sovereign AI ecosystem through foundational multimodal large language models.
BharatGen: https://bharatgen.com/
[Reference]
*1 Japan–India Joint Statement on cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan): https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/101054202.pdf
*2 Research and Development Center for Large Language Models (LLMC): https://llmc.nii.ac.jp/en/
*3 the LLM-jp project: https://llm-jp.nii.ac.jp/en/home-en/
About the National Institute of Informatics (NII)
NII is Japan's only academic research institute dedicated to the new discipline of informatics. Its mission is to "create future value" in informatics. NII conducts both long-term basic research and practical research aimed at solving social problems in a wide range of informatics research fields, from fundamental theories to the latest topics, such as artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things, and information security.
As an inter-university research institute, NII builds and operates academic information infrastructure essential for the research and educational activities of the entire academic community (including the Science Information Network) as well as developing services such as those that enable the provision of academic content and service platforms.
https://www.nii.ac.jp/en/
About the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS)
ROIS is a parent organization of four national institutes (National Institute of Polar Research, National Institute of Informatics, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and National Institute of Genetics) and the Joint Support-Center for Data Science Research. It is ROIS's mission to promote integrated, cutting-edge research that goes beyond the barriers of these institutions, in addition to facilitating their research activities, as members of inter-university research institutes.