Tech Mahindra, Indosat ink pact to develop AI programme for preserving Indonesia's national language

IT services and consultation company Tech Mahindra on Thursday said it has signed an agreement with Indonesian telecommunications firm Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison to develop an artificial intelligence-based model to preserve Indonesia's national language.

'Garuda', a Large Language Model (LLM) or a machine learning tool, will be developed for preserving Bahasa Indonesia, the official and national language of Indonesia, as well as local dialects of that country, Tech Mahindra said in a statement.

Garuda will be developed with 16 billion original Bahasa tokens, providing 1.2 billion parameters to shape the model's understanding of the Bahasa language, the company said.

It will be built on the principles of Tech Mahindra's indigenous LLM 'Project Indus', wherein Tech Mahindra will gather and curate data in the Indonesian language, which will be pre-trained and released as a conversational model for Indosat.

According to the statement, Garuda will 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.

"The LLM market is expected to reach 40.8 billion USD by 2029."

"In this direction, the emergence of LLMs such as Garuda and Indus can enable people and enterprises to communicate online in their local dialects and languages, creating new opportunities in the digital world," said Harshvendra Soin, President - Asia Pacific and Japan Business, Tech Mahindra.

The agreement was signed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, which is being held in Barcelona from February 26-29.