Chip behemoth Nvidia Corp yesterday expanded its ties with India’s big firms, such as Reliance Industries Ltd, and launched a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model for the widely used Hindi language, as it looks to tap a growing market.
The company is hosting an AI summit in India’s business capital of Mumbai, where chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) chatted with Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of conglomerate Reliance and Asia’s richest man.
“Nvidia is AI in India,” Huang said.
Photo: REUTERS
“By the end of this year, we will have nearly 20 times more compute here in India than just a little over a year ago,” he added, referring to computing infrastructure.
From large companies to start-ups, businesses in India have focused on building AI models based on its diverse languages to expand their customer base and support activities such as AI customer-service assistants and content translation.
Nvidia said it was rolling out the new small language model, dubbed Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, with 4 billion parameters, for firms to use in developing their own AI models.
“The model was pruned, distilled and trained with a combination of real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data and an equal amount of English data,” it said in a statement.
Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra Ltd is the first to use the Nvidia offering to develop a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focused on Hindi and dozens of its dialects, the US company said.
Just one-10th of the population of 1.4 billion speaks English in India, where the constitution recognizes 22 languages, it added.
In addition to Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with India’s other IT giants Infosys Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Wipro Ltd, to train about half a million developers to design and deploy AI agents using its software.
Reliance and Ola Electric Mobility Pvt were among the companies that would use its “Omniverse” simulation technology, allowing them to test factory plans in a virtual world.
Unlike large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, used to power ChatGPT, small language models are trained on much smaller and more specific datasets. Typically cheaper as well, they are more attractive for companies with scarce resources.
Global chip firms are investing and setting up facilities in India as it races to build up its semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs such as Taiwan, although analysts say the effort could take years.
Since first setting up shop nearly two decades ago, Nvidia has established engineering and design centers in India, as well as offices in key cities such as the southern tech hub of Bengaluru and neighboring Hyderabad.
In September last year, Reliance and Nvidia vowed to develop AI supercomputers in India and build large language models trained on its languages. Later last year, Nvidia unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.
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