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Why this tech boss thanked Sam Altman after building Indian LLM under $5 million: ‘For daring us to dream’
Tech Mahindra developed an Indian LLM that can communicate in about 40 different local languages and dialects.
CP Gurnani, former CEO of Tech Mahindra and founder of AIonOS, thanked OpenAI boss Sam Altman after developing a large-language model (LLM) for just $5 million. In a keynote speech at the fifth annual MachineCon GCC Summit in Bangalore last week, CP Gurnani said the LLM was developed within five months. Tech Mahindra developed an Indian LLM that can communicate in about 40 different local languages and dialects.
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“Sam Altman challenged everybody that India will never be able to have an LLM. I spoke to my chief innovation officer that time at Tech Mahindra... Six hours later, he says I have a plan,” he said.
"I am happy to share that they spent less than five million dollars on what Sam Altman said India will never be able to deliver," he added.
Last year in June Sam Altman said that it is “totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models”, asserting, "You shouldn't try. It's your job to like try anyway. I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless."
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The comments resulted in a major controversy owing to which Sam Altman clarified on X (formerly Twitter), "The question was about competing with us with USD 10 million, which I really do think is not going to work. But I still said try! The right question is what a startup can do that's never been done before, that will contribute a new thing to the world. I have no doubt Indian startups can and will do that! and no one but the builders can answer that question."
Talking about how India is a major player in the AI race, CP Gurnani said, “I'm very convinced that in India, as the semiconductor industry develops, five to seven years later, we would not be looking at someone else.”
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What you need to know about Project Indus
Tech Mahindra launched first phase of its LLM called Project Indus. Nikhil Malhotra, global head of the makers lab at Tech Mahindra, said, "Project Indus is our seminal effort to develop an LLM from the ground up. Through Makers Lab, our R&D arm, we created a roadmap, collected data from the Hindi-speaking population, and built the Indus model."
Indus LLM uses "GenAI in a box" framework to allow for a simple deployment of the model for enterprise use.
