Athira Sethu
Kochi, 24 October 2024
The first-of-its-kind Indian language model, a lightweight Hindi language model from one of the leading chip companies, Nvidia, has been launched. With this step, Nvidia is striving for new moves to sustain the emerging AI technologies in India.
Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, is scheduled to meet Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, and Asia’s richest man, at a conference in Mumbai, India’s business center.
The new AI model called Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, has 4 billion parameters. The purpose is to enable companies to build their own applications using this AI. Nvidia said that this model was fine-tuned and trained on a blend of real Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data, as well as an equal amount of English data.
This new model has first been adopted by Tech Mahindra, an Indian IT services and consulting company. It is working on a custom AI application called Indus 2.0 that focuses more on Hindi and its many dialects.
India alone has 1.4 billion people, of which only about 10% speak English, while still the constitution recognizes 22 languages; this all brings so much importance to AI models accounting for that diverse linguistic landscape of India.
From large conglomerates to startups, Indian businesses are abuzz with investing in AI technologies based on local languages. These models are aimed at enhancing user engagement and supporting tasks such as customer support and content translation.
Unlike the larger models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 on which ChatGPT draws its powers, the smaller language models rest on smaller datasets and can be rather specific. This makes them cheaper and thus more attractive to companies with limited budgets.
Nvidia isn’t alone in its view of the potential in India. Global chip manufacturers are putting money into the country and setting up facilities to expand operations, and investment in strengthening India’s semiconductor industry. Analysts expect it will still take time to build a competitive industry.
Nvidia had been operating in India for nearly two decades and had centers for engineering and design. Amongst other offices in key cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad among others, popularly known as a tech hub, the company has offices in other important cities of India.
In making the highly advanced technology available in India, the launch by Nvidia marks the next significant move toward providing this highly advanced technology to the masses within this huge population, thereby helping in the adoption of AI in everyday applications.
