Latest news with #IndianLanguages
Entrepreneur
a day ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Nandan Nilekani Increases Support to AI4Bharat with Total Grant of INR 70 Crore
In a statement, Nilekani said AI4Bharat is creating essential language infrastructure that enables Indian citizens to access digital services in their native languages You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. Infosys Co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani has committed an additional multi-year grant to AI4Bharat, a public-focused artificial intelligence (AI) initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, bringing his total funding to INR 70 crore. The announcement was made by the EkStep Foundation, which supports digital infrastructure and learning initiatives. AI4Bharat works on building foundational AI models aimed at improving accessibility to digital services in India's 22 scheduled languages. The initiative has focused on developing speech and translation datasets, including the collection of 15,000 hours of transcribed speech from over 400 districts and the creation of a bilingual corpus comprising 2.2 million translation pairs. These are curated by a team of more than 100 language experts. The latest funding comes directly from Nilekani and follows his earlier contribution in 2022, which led to the establishment of the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat. The initiative's models have been released as open-source public goods and are hosted on AI4Bharat's platform and AIKosh, India's open AI repository. In a statement, Nilekani said AI4Bharat is creating essential language infrastructure that enables Indian citizens to access digital services in their native languages. He also remarked on India's potential to emerge as a global leader in AI applications by leveraging its existing digital public infrastructure. Since the global release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI4Bharat's language models have seen increased adoption across sectors. These models are now integrated into tools for regional language chatbots, as well as education and governance platforms. AI4Bharat's work forms the language layer of India's AI stack and is used in Bhashini, the national language translation initiative under the IndiaAI Mission. Bhashini supports multilingual digital access in public service areas such as healthcare, finance, and governance, utilising AI4Bharat's open models in speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech technologies. The project continues to operate within an open-source framework, contributing data and tools intended for public use in India's evolving AI ecosystem.
Entrepreneur
a day ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
AI to Become Core of All Technical Courses, Says AICTE Chairperson TG Sitharam
The meeting in Indore focused on encouraging education in Indian languages at school and higher education levels, aligning with the broader goals of the National Education Policy You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. In a major push towards tech-driven education, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Chairperson TG Sitharam announced that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be embedded across all branches of technical education in India. Speaking at a parliamentary advisory committee meeting chaired by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Indore, Sitharam said that the AICTE has formed an expert panel to revise the model curriculums of engineering, IT, and management studies to integrate AI components. "The committee has already conducted three meetings and is expected to submit its recommendations within the next month," he noted. Following this, the updated curriculums could be finalised within two months, paving the way for AI-based education to begin as early as the next academic year. While the Council had already launched a BTech course in AI and Data Science in 2017, this marks the first major step towards embedding AI into the foundational framework of all technical disciplines. Sitharam also highlighted efforts to promote education in Indian languages. Over the last two years, AICTE has made 1,000 textbooks available online in 12 Indian languages, with over seven lakh downloads recorded. Currently, 54 technical institutions in the country offer various courses in these regional languages. The meeting in Indore focused on encouraging education in Indian languages at school and higher education levels, aligning with the broader goals of the National Education Policy.
Khaleej Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Kamal Haasan 'pained' that his statement on languages misunderstood
Actor Kamal Haasan has shared his response to the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce (KFCC) after the film union body decided to ban the release of his film Thug Life in Karnataka amid the ongoing controversy around his "Kannada is born out of Tamil' remark. Haasan said his statement about the Kannada language at his film Thug Life audio launch in Chennai has been "misunderstood" as he claims to have spoken it "out of genuine affection" for the legendary actor Dr Rajkumar's family in Karnataka. "... My words were intended only to convey that we are all one and from the same family and not to diminish Kannada in any way," Haasan said. The veteran actor said that he loves all languages and has immense "respect" for the love Kannadigas have for their language. "...Like Tamil, Kannada has a proud literary and cultural tradition that I have long admired. Throughout my career, I have cherished the warmth and affection extended to me by the Kannada-speaking community, and I say this with a clear conscience and conviction: my love for the language is genuine, and I have great respect for the love that Kannadigas have for their mother tongue," Haasan wrote. He reiterated his love for different languages and wrote, "My bond with Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam—and all languages of this land—is abiding and heartfelt. I have always stood for the equal dignity of all Indian languages and remain opposed to the dominance of any one language over another, as such imbalance undermines the linguistic fabric of the Union of India." He further wrote that he only knows and speaks the "language of cinema" as he believes that it is a "universal language" which only knows the way of "love and bonding." Meanwhile, the Karnataka High Court on May 3 began hearing petitions seeking direction to authorities, including the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce, not to take any measures—to restrain or refrain from screening and releasing Thug Life in Karnataka, which is scheduled for release on June 5.
CNA
26-05-2025
- Business
- CNA
India's many languages pose a challenge to the development of its large language model
NEW DELHI: India is building its own large language model it hopes one day may rival OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, but the country's countless languages and dialects have made training it a challenge. India has 22 officially recognised languages and more than 10,000 local languages. Some languages like Marathi share common roots with others such as Hindi and Gujarati, while others spoken in South India - such as Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam - are completely different. A large language model has to process these multiple languages seamlessly, and coding an AI model capable of understanding most of them, if not all, remains complicated. TRAINING AI ON LOCAL LANGUAGES One challenge faced by BharatGen, a consortium funded by India's government, in training their large language model is a lack of online content in Indian languages. The consortium said that while roughly half of all the data available on the internet is in English, Indian languages make up barely 1 per cent. Literary works in many Indian languages have never been digitised, while a raft of cultural and traditional information has been verbally passed down for generations without being stored online. On a more positive note, experts said that the diversity of languages and data collected from local sources could help create AI models with fewer biases. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, told CNA his work involved reaching out to magazines, data sources, foundations and non-governmental organisations who have been gathering data in their local languages. '(We have been) making it possible to digitise and digitalise and reflect that in the foundational model … so this is a big opportunity,' said Ramakrishnan, who is part of the BharatGen consortium. EXISTING CHATBOTS ARE INADEQUATE Some small business owners, who have tried using AI as part of their operations, said they have faced language challenges when using existing chatbots. Ghooran Yadav, a food cart owner in New Delhi, said that he used ChatGPT to enquire about the recipe of the food he sells, but received an underwhelming response. The app understood his question in the local dialect of Bhojpuri but replied in Hindi. Ghooran said foreign chatbots are not as accurate and that he prefers a locally-made app. 'If it's made in India, it's more likely to give me correct information. Nothing could be better than that,' he added. EASE OF USE BharatGen is also aiming to utilise generative AI to solve everyday problems and eventually help deliver services such as providing information about welfare programmes to the people. An app called Krishi Saathi ('With Farmers' in Hindi), which is powered by BharatGen's Hindi language model, is helping to answer farmers' questions about crop health and pest management. The app can translate text to local languages. It also allows those who are unable to read or write to communicate by speaking via the app. 'Making sure that the most remotely inaccessible regions also benefit from AI - that is part of the vision here,' said Ramakrishnan. The AI model can copy a speaker's voice and tone, communicating with the user like an actual person once it has been trained to do so. BharatGen, one of five major language-based AI projects currently supported by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, has already rolled out 19 language models since its inception last year. Experts said platforms like BharatGen need to invest billions of dollars on graphics processing units and data centres to achieve made-in-India generative AI at scale. The hefty price tag would be a small price to pay to transform India from a major tech service provider to a major tech disruptor, in what could soon be a trillion-dollar market. 'India is all about scale and complexity,' said Shekar Sivasubramanian, head of the LEHS-AI unit at non-profit AI institute Wadhwani AI. 'If it is solved in India, and if it works in India, chances are, it will work in the world. That's the opportunity.'
Entrepreneur
26-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Sarvam AI Launches 24B Parameter Open-Source LLM for Indian Languages and Reasoning Tasks
This release follows Sarvam's selection by the Indian government to build a sovereign LLM under the IndiaAI Mission, marking the first step in strengthening the country's domestic AI capabilities You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam AI has introduced its flagship large language model (LLM), Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter open-weights hybrid model built on Mistral Small. Designed with a focus on Indian languages and advanced reasoning capabilities, Sarvam-M is intended to power applications such as conversational agents, machine translation, and educational tools. According to Sarvam, the model has been fine-tuned through a three-step process involving Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), and inference optimisation. The SFT process involved crafting diverse, high-quality prompts to train the model in both general dialogue and complex reasoning. RLVR further improved its instruction-following and mathematical capabilities using custom reward engineering and curated datasets. Inference was optimised using FP8 post-training quantisation and techniques like lookahead decoding. Sarvam-M has demonstrated strong performance in multilingual and reasoning benchmarks. It achieved a significant 86 per cent gain on a romanised Indian language version of the GSM-8K math dataset and showed average performance boosts of 20 per cent on Indian language benchmarks, 21.6 per cent on math, and 17.6 per cent on programming tasks. It outperforms Llama-4 Scout and is on par with models like Llama-3.3 70B and Gemma 3 27B, though it slightly lags in English benchmarks such as MMLU. The model is accessible via Sarvam's API, its own playground, and available for download on Hugging Face. This release follows Sarvam's selection by the Indian government to build a sovereign LLM under the IndiaAI Mission, marking the first step in strengthening the country's domestic AI capabilities.
