Asia Tech Wire (Feb 21) -- A research consortium backed by Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) plans to launch its first ChatGPT-like service in March.

The BharatGPT group has unveiled a series of Indic large language models (LLMs) dubbed Hanooman, and gave a first look at them at a technology conference in Mumbai on Tuesday.

The models currently support 11 Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi, and the developers hope to extend their capabilities to 22 Indian languages.

BharatGPT and its partners envision the models playing a role in four key areas: healthcare, governance, financial services and education.

Publicly available information shows that BharatGPT is led by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and seven other IITs.

In addition, the research consortium has the support of India's Ministry of Science and Technology as well as Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and India's largest mobile network operator.