G42, a UAE-based technology holding company, has initiated talks with startups and technology companies in India to build generative AI solutions based on its Hindi-language large language model (LLM) NANDA, said Manu Jain, CEO of its India subsidiary, in an exclusive interaction with Mint.
With this fundamental model, Hindi speakers can harness the potential of generative AI and specific use cases can be created in sectors like banking, aviation and insurance, and people can build their own applications.
“This model satisfies all the sovereign requirements… This will ensure that if a bank uses this model for training, for building something on top of it for fraud detection, for any other purpose, then their data will remain within India, not just in India, they can choose to keep it within their own premises,” Jain said. The beta version of the model was ready to be taken to public and private entities for potential partnerships.
Launched in India on Tuesday, NANDA is a 13 billion-parameter model, trained on a dataset of 2.13 trillion tokens, created through a collaboration between G42, Inception (a G42 company), Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Cerebras Systems.
The model was trained on Condor Galaxy, one of the most powerful AI supercomputers built by G42 and Cerebras, the companies said in a statement. The data was sourced from several organizations in India, including the Indian Institutes of Technology and AI for Bharat.
The development of NANDA reflects the growing collaboration between India and the UAE in the field of AI. The two nations had signed a memorandum of understanding to set up large-scale data centres and supercomputers, and G42 was chosen as the private entity to lead these projects. Jain noted that NANDA was the first significant outcome of this memorandum.
NANDA was built along the lines of JAIS, G42’s LLM in Arabic, and is proficient in English and Hinglish (writing Hindi words using the English alphabet), commonly used by Indians.
Subscription option
Andrew Jackson, interim CEO of Inception, said NANDA would provide multi-faceted monetisation opportunities and would be in line with what was envisioned for JAIS. The model can be offered as a service on Microsoft Azure or on a subscription basis. G42 and Microsoft are partners in expanding the data centre infrastructure in the UAE.
Another option is to offer it in a box on-premise and then license the software. Jackson added that the latter option was adopted more by companies using JAIS, as it gives them more control over the AI and integrates security measures adopted by the specific country.
The company has set up a local entity, G42 India Technology Pvt Ltd, to lead these efforts. As the business grows, G42 plans to build a larger team with a focus on developing digital and AI infrastructure in India. Jain did not elaborate on the investments the group has made in the Indian company.
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