Companies making significant strides in Indic LLMs - Tech Mahindra, Gnani.ai, Sarvam

tech.hindustantimes.com:

We are officially in the era of Artificial Intelligence or AI. AI is set to enter our lives in a big way and ChatGPT from Open AI is one of the prime examples of AI going mainstream. Large Language Models (LLMs) are at the heart of the AI revolution that is taking place. However, most of the large language models from the west offer limited support for Indic languages. But this is set to change with significant development now focused on regional LLMs and Indic languages.

Bhashini, a Govt of India AI based language translation initiative aims to break language barriers across India. It supports 22 languages, over 300 AI models and has clocked 500K+ mobile app downloads. AI4Bharat, a research lab at IIT Madras, is dedicated to advancing Indian language technology by developing open-source datasets, tools, models, and applications. Their pioneering work in this field has been recognized at leading international conferences. Among their key contributions are projects like IndicCorp, BPCC, Shrutilipi, Kathbath, IndicBERT, IndicTrans, IndicXlit, IndicWav2Vec, Indic Whisper, and TTS.

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Sarvam AI, a startup in the Generative AI space founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar and backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, is developing generative AI models focused on Indic languages. Sarvam AI aims to enhance the accuracy of generative AI apps in India at lower costs.Recently, Sarvam AI introduced a 2-billion parameter model, Sarvam 2B, which they have open-sourced and made available on Hugging Face. Sarvam AI claims that its model is significantly more efficient for Indian languages compared to Meta's Llama 3.1, Google's Gemma 2, and GPT-4o.

Tech Mahindra recently announced Project Indus with a focus on developing the largest Indian LLM from scratch. Kunal Purohit, President – Next Gen Services, Tech Mahindra said “India has traditionally been a consumer of