We were in for a pleasant surprise at the India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2024. At the Qualcomm booth, we saw a demo from Manu Kumar Jain, former head of Xiaomi India. He started his latest project named Nanda. Jain is now the CEO of G42 India, an Abu Dhabi-based AI venture.

The model was first unveiled in September 2024, however, today marks the first time the model has been demonstrated live. During the demonstration Manu Jain said, “As the Prime Minister said in his opening speech on the first day of IMC that everyone should benefit from AI, our goal is to provide equitable AI to users in India.”

Nanda, he says, is “probably the biggest Hindi AI model”. He further added, “It writes better in Hinglish than any other model.”

We tried the model, which was performed on a Qualcomm Cloud AI server; Nanda’s own UI develops on the Qualcomm interface and has been modified to look slightly different. However, we chatted with the model and her Hinglish responses are quite nice. It sounds quite natural due to the mixing of Hindi and English words in a sentence – like how many people speak English in India. Apart from Hinglish, it also understands and responds to signs written in Hindi language and Devanagari script.

We also asked Jain if we can expect a standalone app like ChatGPT for Nanda soon. Jain said yes. However, he added that “some version of Nanda may soon be available as a standalone”.

Nanda is a 13-billion parameter AI model trained using approximately 2.13 trillion tokens from a language dataset including content in Hindi. Its launch represents a major advancement for AI in India, empowering over 500 million Hindi speakers with access to generative AI capabilities.

In August 2023, G42 introduced JAIS, the world’s first open-source Arabic large language model (LLM). JAIS revolutionized Arabic natural language processing (NLP), offering generative AI capabilities in native Arabic to more than 400 million speakers worldwide. Expanding the model from 590 million to 70 billion parameters, JAIS sets a new benchmark for language-specific AI. ZEE42 is now trying to do the same with Nanda for the Indian audience. The company is also working on a similar model for regions where languages ​​are under-represented in AI.