NEW DELHI: Indonesian telecom operator Indosat and Indian IT and consulting firm Tech Mahindra have signed a pact to develop ‘Garuda’, a large language model (LLM) for the Bahasa Indonesia and its dialects.
“Garuda will be built on the principles of Tech Mahindra’s indigenous LLM ‘Project Indus’, a foundational model designed to converse in a multitude of Indic languages and dialects,” the companies said in a joint statement at the Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC 2024).
The unique features of Garuda will create multiple use cases and enable Indosat’s customers to leverage various applications, including customer support, experience, and content creation across industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, rural education, banking and finance, agriculture, and telecom.
As part of this partnership, Tech Mahindra will leverage its technology expertise to gather and curate data in the Indonesia language, which will be pre-trained and released as a conversational model for Indosat.
“We are excited to collaborate with Tech Mahindra on the ‘Garuda’ project, which aligns perfectly with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison‘s larger purpose of connecting and empowering every Indonesian,” said Vikram Sinha, President Director and Chief Executive Officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison. “Together, we are leveraging AI infrastructure and human capital readiness to drive innovation, create meaningful experiences, and unlock new opportunities for socio-economic growth nationwide.”
The companies said the Garuda LLM will be developed with 16 billion original Bahasa tokens, providing 1.2 billion parameters to shape the model’s understanding of the Bahasa language.
A beta version of the Garuda model will be released for testing by Indosat and Bahasa Indonesia speakers. The model will be further improved using RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) techniques to ensure its robustness for conversation. Additionally, any specialised use cases will be developed using the LIMA (Less is More for Alignment) method.
According to Harshvendra Soin, President – Asia Pacific and Japan Business, Tech Mahindra, the LLM market is expected to reach $40.8 billion by 2029.
“We are delighted to partner with Indosat on the Garuda project, which will bring about a transformative impact by providing personalized experiences for the people of Indonesia. We believe that the model will significantly promote Indonesia’s linguistic diversity and unlock new business opportunities for enterprises in the region,” Soin said.
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