Questions such as ‘Why do we boil water before drinking it?’, ‘What happens after we die?’ or ‘What is Sagaropam?’ could be for a Jain Acharya to answer, but a generative artificial intelligence (AI) engine - JainGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) - is fielding them for the audience worldwide.
The platform, run by experts based in the US and Ahmedabad, has found more than 100,000 users from countries including India, the US, the UK and several Asian countries. It is an initiative by Jain eLibrary where top officials are from California, North Carolina, New York, Virginia and Illinois among others. The organization also has a presence in Ahmedabad. In an interview, Anish Visaria, director of innovations at Jain e-Library, said the organization has launched JainGPT and Jain Quantum to combine religion and technology.
“Both the initiatives originated from the need to search through vast amounts of literature. Many of the books and scriptures were in the image format, making it difficult for users to search through them. We had to employ optical character recognition (OCR) to extract all the text from over 4 million scanned pages,” he said.
The officials said that as part of the project, the books were manually scanned, primarily from libraries in Gujarat. Subsequently, the scanned files were uploaded to the e-Library and then processed further so that it could be used as data source for GPT and quantum products.
The officials said that based on trends and usage patterns, the long-term goal is to provide authentic material on Jainism and related topics online using new technology.