Nvidia rolls out Hindi-language AI model in India as CEO Jensen Huang visits

Chip behemoth Nvidia launched a lightweight artificial intelligence model on Thursday for India's widely-used Hindi language, as it looks to tap into a growing market for AI technologies. Chief Executive Jensen Huang is set to chat with the chairman of conglomerate Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, who is also Asia's richest man, at a conference in the business capital of Mumbai, the California-based company said.

Nvidia is rolling out its 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 company said.

"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 and consulting company Tech Mahindra 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 a tenth of the population of 1.4 billion speaks English in India, where the constitution recognises 22 languages, it added. From large companies to startups, businesses in India have focused on building AI models based on its diverse languages to grow consumer appeal and drive activities such as customer service AI assistants and content translation.

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. They are typically cheaper, making them more attractive for companies with fewer resources.

Global chip firms are investing in India and setting up facilities to expand their presence as the country races to build up its semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs such as Taiwan, though analysts say the effort could take years.

Nvidia, which first set up shop in India nearly two decades ago, has engineering and design centers there, as well as offices in major cities such as the southern tech hub of Bengaluru and neighbouring Hyderabad.