MUMBAI, OCT 19: Chip giant Nvidia expanded partnerships on Thursday with major Indian firms such as Reliance Industries and launched a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model for the widely-used Hindi language, aiming to tap into a growing market.
At an AI summit in Mumbai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke with Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man. "Nvidia is AI in India," Huang said. "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," referring to the growing computing infrastructure.
Indian businesses, from large companies to startups, are increasingly focused on building AI models based on diverse languages, driving applications such as customer service AI assistants and content translation. Nvidia rolled out a new language model called Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, featuring 4 billion parameters, for companies to develop their own AI models. "The model was pruned, distilled, and trained using real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data, and English data," the company said.
Tech Mahindra, an Indian IT services firm, is the first to use Nvidia’s new model to create a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focusing on Hindi and its dialects. India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has only about 10 per cent of its people speaking English, while the constitution recognises 22 languages.
In addition to Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with other Indian IT giants, including Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, to train half a million developers to design and deploy AI systems using its software. Reliance and Ola Electric will also leverage Nvidia's "Omniverse" simulation technology to test factory plans in a virtual environment.
Nvidia's AI summit drew a massive crowd, with thousands attending to see Huang, a prominent figure in the AI chip industry. Unlike large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4, small models such as Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B are trained on more specific datasets, making them more cost-effective and accessible for companies with limited resources.
Global chipmakers are investing heavily in India as the country works to build a competitive semiconductor industry. While it may take years to catch up with major hubs like Taiwan, Nvidia has been present in India for nearly two decades, with engineering centres and offices in cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
In 2023, Reliance and Nvidia announced plans to develop AI supercomputers and build large language models in India. Nvidia later unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.— Reuters
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