Everybody loves Llama. Not just the Indian ‘GPU-poor’ developers, even India’s richest billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, took the opportunity to laud Llama, and its impact in India.
In a fireside chat with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Ambani said that Llama, the open-source AI model by tech giant Meta, can be used as a base to build state-of-the-art technologies in India. “This move of Mark will be written in history when we look at it a hundred years from now,” he said, envisioning a ‘Jio Moment’ in AI for India.
His vision is becoming a reality in India’s tech ecosystem. “Like we did with data, a few years from now, we are going to surprise the world with what Indians can achieve in the intelligence market,” Ambani said.
At the Build With Meta Summit in Bengaluru, Manohar Paluri, VP at Meta, mentioned that Llama had 400 million downloads cumulatively since Llama 1’s release in early 2023. India emerged as one of the top three markets globally.
The ease of implementing, fine-tuning, and deploying an open-source model has found relevance in India to realise ideas that can change the lives of over a billion people.
Takes Centre Stage With Indian Consumer Apps
At the event, Meta announced partnerships with household consumer apps such as Flipkart, Meesho, Redbus, Dream11 and Infoedge. Meta, however, hasn’t revealed how Llama was integrated into these apps, but generative AI has helped ship features that can provide a personalised user experience. One can expect enhancements along these lines on such apps.
Flipkart mentioned that it uses Llama-Guard 28B, an LLM-based safeguarding tool that can assess the safety of user input towards an LLM. Flipkart has integrated Llama-Guard inside Aegis, its in-house safety layer, which prevents harmful and unwanted input responses from reaching an LLM. The tool is currently used for several chat-based experiences for sellers and buyers inside the platform.
The e-commerce giant has also backed Tune AI (previously NimbleBox.ai), a startup that helps developers build, deploy and manage AI models without expertise and high-end infrastructure. TuneAI is built on multiple large language models, including Meta’s Llama LLM.
Moreover, apps in India are already using Llama in their tech stack without any explicit partnership with Meta. For example, Paluri mentioned that Ola is also using Llama. “We didn’t know about it, so we’re going to follow up and understand that. It’s not just small companies or developers, but actually large companies that are actually building on top of this ecosystem,” he shared.
While we are yet to discover how Meta’s partnerships with these consumer products evolve, they may indicate a significant shift in how generative AI can provide value to millions of Indians. India’s existing generative AI ecosystem, developed with Llama, is indicative of this.
Enhancing the Lives of a Billion People
If there’s one thing that India thrives on, it’s its rich culture with a diverse set of languages, and if there’s one thing genAI is a champion at – that’s language!
Paluri also mentioned that Llama 3.1 is pre-trained in all prominent languages in India. That explains why we’ve seen a rise in synthetic data generation tools in Indic languages over the past few months.
We’ve also seen Indic LLMs that aid specific sectors like agriculture, transportation and education.
For example, KissanAI’s Dhenu Llama 3 is designed to help farmers with their queries and understand both Hindi and English.
In September of this year, Wadhwani AI, an independent nonprofit institute building AI solutions, was awarded a grant of $500,000 to realise their goal of improving the fluency and comprehension of English among students by using Llama 3’s capabilities. Wadhwani has also been focusing on building AI solutions to solve crucial problems in agriculture and healthcare since 2018. According to the company, their projects have already reached the hands of 10 million people across 15 states of India.
Even Indian Railways, which receives around 300,000 customer queries and complaints daily, has found a use case with Llama. They’ve partnered with Ubona, a speech recognition solutions provider that has used Llama, to build a custom LLM that supports multiple Indian languages in IVR calls.
Besides, Llama is helping Indians curb fake news and perform fact checks. The Sach AI chatbot, built by Factly uses Llama 3.1. The company was selected as one of the recipients of Meta’s Llama Impact Innovation Award. It helps users verify the legitimacy of news, and facts they come across.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report, India ranked the highest for the risk of misinformation and disinformation. Factly is solving a problem that may have severe consequences for the country’s public harmony, mental health, and political stability.
Llama’s open-source advantage benefits more than just the regular consumer; the enterprise sector hasn’t been left behind in this AI revolution.
Shaping the Future of the Indian IT and Engineering Ecosystem
Some of the biggest names in India’s IT industry have also turned towards Meta’s open-source language models. PwC India has partnered with Meta to democratise generative AI and build a combination of consulting advisory and technological expertise to make their services more valuable for companies
Infosys is also investing heavily in generative AI. Earlier, Yann LeCun revealed that one of Infosys’ founders is funding Llama 2 to fine-tune it to comprehend 22 Indian languages.
A few days ago, Infosys also announced a partnership with Meta, unveiling the ‘Meta Centre of Excellence’. This centre focuses on large-scale adoption of the Llama models and helps enterprises, open source groups, and its internal teams integrate the open source model to build solutions.
Also, Tata Technologies built an automotive design studio with Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion. Santosh Singh, executive VP at Tata Technologies, said, “The team uses generative AI to develop multiple design options on the fly. It helps reduce design time, engineering time, and product development time.”
Deserves all the Love in the World
And it isn’t all about open source; Llama 3 is up there with some of the best foundational models in the market. While Llama 4 is bound to be released next year, Meta’s Llama series of models is becoming the de facto standard in the country and around the globe—touted by Zuckerberg as the Linux moment in AI.
Meta also offers Llama in multiple variants based on their parameter size. This helps developers select an appropriate model for their use case.
Moreover, the recent additions of multimodal technologies SpiritLM and MovieGen to the Llama models have raised many eyebrows. That’s the beauty of Meta’s open-source models — choice, high performance and multimodal capabilities.
“Who would’ve thought that Mark Zuckerberg would be the good guy (in AI) ?” George Hotz, founder of Comma.ai, remarked in a podcast episode with Lex Fridman.
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