Chip behemoth Nvidia Corp yesterday expanded its ties with India’s big firms, such as Reliance Industries Ltd, and launched a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model for the widely used Hindi language, as it looks to tap a growing market.
The company is hosting an AI summit in India’s business capital of Mumbai, where chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) chatted with Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of conglomerate Reliance and Asia’s richest man.
“Nvidia is AI in India,” Huang said.
Photo: REUTERS
“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,” he added, referring to computing infrastructure.
From large companies to start-ups, businesses in India have focused on building AI models based on its diverse languages to expand their customer base and support activities such as AI customer-service assistants and content translation.
Nvidia said it was rolling out the new small language model, dubbed Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, with 4 billion parameters, for firms to use in developing their own AI models.
“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,” it said in a statement.
Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra Ltd is the first to use the Nvidia offering to develop a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focused on Hindi and dozens of its dialects, the US company said.
Just one-10th of the population of 1.4 billion speaks English in India, where the constitution recognizes 22 languages, it added.
In addition to Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with India’s other IT giants Infosys Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Wipro Ltd, to train about half a million developers to design and deploy AI agents using its software.
Reliance and Ola Electric Mobility Pvt were among the companies that would use its “Omniverse” simulation technology, allowing them to test factory plans in a virtual world.
Unlike large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, used to power ChatGPT, small language models are trained on much smaller and more specific datasets. Typically cheaper as well, they are more attractive for companies with scarce resources.
Global chip firms are investing and setting up facilities in India as it races to build up its semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs such as Taiwan, although analysts say the effort could take years.
Since first setting up shop nearly two decades ago, Nvidia has established engineering and design centers in India, as well as offices in key cities such as the southern tech hub of Bengaluru and neighboring Hyderabad.
In September last year, Reliance and Nvidia vowed to develop AI supercomputers in India and build large language models trained on its languages. Later last year, Nvidia unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS