SBI Considering to Build an LLM to Leverage its Data

According to a senior official on Friday, State Bank of India, the biggest lender in the nation, is considering creating its own Large Language Model (LLM) to take advantage of the data it has. Speaking at the Asia Economic Dialogue event here, the bank's deputy managing director, Nitin Chugh, stated that the bank has been using artificial intelligence (AI) for more than seven years and that it wants to establish a scenario in which it can coexist with an open-source LLM.

The goal of developing its own LLM is a long-term, ambitious project, according to Chugh, SBI's head of digital banking and transformation.

"We should start building our own large language models that are at least domain-specific. For how long will we depend on open source models? We are looking at a situation where we can either co-exist with an open source models or have something of our own which also goes through all these tests of data sovereignty," he said.

Building such an LLM will offer an independence to the lender and ensure that it is dependent on technical aspects that are coming from elsewhere, he said.

Chugh stated that because of the abundance of data available at home, "there is an emphasis" on going back home. Approximately half of the engineers working on AI-based tools at multinational corporations are Indian.

Chugh emphasised the bank's abundance of data, AI models, and excellent staff of data scientists. He also mentioned that the bank is experimenting with use cases, either internally or through partnerships with technology vendors.

According to Chugh, the bank established a robust governance model for artificial intelligence (AI) long before privacy laws were passed. He also predicted that the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 would be notified in mid-2024.