Tech Mahindra Finally Takes on OpenAI

While most Indian IT companies are still figuring out how to use generative AI effectively, Tech Mahindra has taken the lead. Through Project Indus, they're creating their own advanced language model to enhance communication across various Indian languages, starting with Hindi. This puts them at the forefront, challenging OpenAI.

Led by CP Gurnani, Project Indus is part of Makers Lab, an innovation arm of Tech Mahindra. With this latest project, the company is embarking on a journey to create India’s very own foundational model. In the first phase, it aims to cover 40 Hindi dialects (Kinnauri, Kangri, Chambeli, Garhwali, Kumaoni, Jaunsari and more), followed by other Indian languages and dialects, and serve 25% of the world’s population.

Click here to contribute.?

What about the others??

Even though a majority of Indian IT companies – the likes of Infosys, TCS and Wipro – have an equivalent of Makers Lab, there haven’t been substantial advancements in the generative AI landscape so far, barring a few strategic partnerships with technology companies, educational institutes, and cloud enablers to cater to the customers’ needs.?

Tech Mahindra seems to be ahead of the curve. India is home to 122 major languages and 1599 other languages, along with 22 official languages. There is a significant dearth of local language content in training AI models and tools, and Project Indus is really a good start.?

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharath is also solving similar problems, where the team is working on developing open-source datasets, tools, models and applications for Indian languages. Last year, the Indian government also introduced Project Bhashini, in collaboration with Microsoft, creating language datasets and AI applications with crowdsourcing initiatives such as Bhasha Daan and others.?

Project Indus is a much-needed initiative in this direction. Gurnani urged people of different vocabularies to contribute to making this project successful as an LLM is only as good as the data it is trained on. Looks like Tech Mahindra is the only company to be working on its promises, at the moment.

Read: Generative AI is Just Fluff Talk for Indian IT

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