NVIDIA believes India can be a leader in AI

NVIDIA remains optimistic in its AI development capabilities as it strengthens its presence in the fifth largest economy and biggest democratic country in the world.

The global AI race continues to heat up with India now looking to be a key contender as well. While the US and China have pretty much dominated the development and deployment of AI, India is now gearing up to bring AI to businesses in the country at a much faster pace.

Currently, one of the biggest challenges the country is facing is retaining its talent. Most of India’s top AI talents are often opting to work outside India with the US and Singapore among popular destinations. Interestingly, this all may be changing soon as Indian organizations are now beginning to widen the opportunities in the industry.

At the recent NVIDIA AI Summit in India, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated that AI will be the driving force behind India’s digital transformation. Addressing a crowd of entrepreneurs, developers, academics and business leaders, Huang positioned AI as the cornerstone of the country’s future, citing India’s strength in developing the skills needed to achieve this.

During the summit, Huang announced several new partnerships and investments that NVIDIA is making in the country to support the development of AI in the country. Primarily, NVIDIA will be working with India’s IT consulting giants like Tech Mahindra, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro to deploy AI with custom-built solutions that use the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.

To ensure that there is sufficient infrastructure to support the development of AI, Huang also announced that NVIDIA will be partnering Reliance to build AI infrastructure in the country.

“In order to lead AI, you need to have an AI model technology that India has, you need to have data and the last thing you need to have is AI infrastructure and we are announcing that Reliance and NVIDIA are partnering to build AI infrastructure here,” said Huang.

Huang also mentioned that India should manufacture its own AI and that the country should not export data to import intelligence. This is where Huang feels there are three areas in India where AI will transform industries.

First, there is sovereign AI, where nations use their own data to drive innovation. Next, there is agentic AI, which automates knowledge-based work and lastly, there is physical AI, which applies AI to industrial tasks through robotics and autonomous systems. India, Huang noted, is uniquely positioned to lead in all three areas.

Small language model for Hindi

With a population of 1.4 billion, Hindi is the most spoken language in India. Hence, it only makes sense to have a language model for Hindi. As such, NVIDIA has released a small language model for Hindi. Available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, the model, dubbed Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, can be easily deployed on any NVIDIA GPU-accelerated system for optimized performance.

According to a blog post by NVIDIA, Tech Mahindra will be the first to use the Nemotron Hindi NIM microservice to develop an AI model called Indus 2.0, which is focused on Hindi and dozens of its dialects. Indus 2.0 harnesses Tech Mahindra’s high-quality fine-tuning data to further boost model accuracy, unlocking opportunities for clients in banking, education, healthcare and other industries to deliver localized services.

With 4 billion parameters, the Nemotron Hindi model is derived from Nemotron-4 15B, a 15-billion parameter multilingual language model developed by NVIDIA. The model was pruned, distilled and trained with a combination of real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data and an equal amount of English data using.

Apart from the Hindi model, Sarvam 1 is India’s first homegrown multilingual LLM that offers businesses speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and data parsing models. Developed by Sarvam AI, the model is trained from scratch on domestic AI infrastructure.

Another company, Gnani.ai has also built a multilingual speech-to-speech LLM that powers AI customer service assistants that handle around 10 million real-time voice interactions daily for over 150 banking, insurance and financial services companies across India and the US.