Meta has named CognitiveLab as one of many international recipients of its 2024 Llama Influence Grants, recognising the lab’s work on multilingual AI by means of its Nayana venture. The Bangalore-based analysis group will use the grant to broaden entry to AI throughout over 22 languages, aiming to succeed in greater than three billion individuals.
Introduced at present, the Llama Influence Grants assist open-source initiatives utilizing Meta’s Llama fashions to deal with social challenges. Nayana, developed by CognitiveLab, is a multilingual, multimodal language mannequin that integrates Llama for doc and picture processing, with assist for low-resource Indic languages. The mannequin contains capabilities throughout textual content, imaginative and prescient, and speech, and has outperformed current benchmarks in OCR for ten Indian languages.
Shivnath Thukral, vp and head of public coverage at Meta India, stated, “Open-source AI is a strong instrument to bridge digital divides, particularly in a various nation like India. With the 2024 Llama Influence Grant, we’re proud to assist the Nayana venture. Its work embodies the spirit of open innovation—making superior AI usable for billions of individuals.”
CognitiveLab founder Shashi Kumar stated the grant would speed up their growth efforts. “The Llama Influence Grant allows us to supercharge our efforts with Nayana—increasing language protection, enhancing multimodal capabilities, and constructing high-quality coaching datasets for low-resource language communities,” he stated. “Open-source and Llama have empowered us to construct world-class techniques like Ambari and Nayana with minimal sources.”
Based in 2023, the Llama Influence Grant programme helps work constructed on Meta’s open-source LLMs—Llama 2, Llama 3, and Llama 4. With over 1 billion downloads and greater than 85,000 by-product fashions, the Llama household has turn into broadly adopted throughout international analysis and growth communities.
CognitiveLab plans to make use of the funding to broaden Nayana’s language and multimodal protection, enhance its Indic tokeniser, and develop new datasets for speech, textual content, and picture processing. The lab additionally goals to launch instruments for deployment in low-resource environments and collaborate with the neighborhood to set new benchmarks for multilingual AI.
India continues to be one of many largest markets for Llama adoption, the place open-source builders are utilizing the fashions to construct options for native wants.
The publish Bengaluru-based CognitiveLab Wins 2024 Meta Llama Influence Grant for Multilingual AI Mission Nayana appeared first on Analytics India Journal.
