Soket AI Labs, an Indian AI research firm, dedicated to the ethical development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) announced the launch of a fully open-source multilingual foundation model ‘Pragna-1B’ leveraging Google Cloud services. The launch marks a significant milestone in India’s AI landscape, tailored specifically for vernacular languages. Proficient in Hindi, English, Bengali, and Gujarati, Pragna-1B is meticulously crafted using data specific to Indian contexts, ensuring transparency and clarity for enterprises integrating AI into their operations.
Abhishek Upperwal, Founder, Soket AI Labs said, “Our partnership with Google Cloud has been pivotal in the pre-training of the Pragna-1B model. By leveraging Google Cloud’s AI Infrastructure we achieved both efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the development of Pragna-1B. Despite being trained on fewer parameters, Pragna-1B showcases unparalleled efficiency and innovation to achieve comparable performance and effectiveness in language processing tasks to similar category models”. He further added, “Tailored specifically for vernacular languages, Pragna-1B offers balanced language representation and enables faster and more efficient tokenization suited for organizations seeking optimized operations and enhanced functionality”.
Bikram Singh Bedi, Vice President and Country MD, Google Cloud India said, “We are thrilled to partner with Soket AI Labs to democratize AI innovation in India. Built on Google Cloud, the launch of Pragna -1B marks a pioneering leap in Indian language technology, offering enhanced scalability and efficiency for organizations.”
Soket AI Labs and Google Cloud will further deepen their collaboration and will soon be listing Soket’s AI Developer Platform to the Google Cloud Marketplace and the Pragna series of models to the Google Vertex AI model registry. This integration will provide developers with a powerful, streamlined experience for fine-tuning models. Soket’s AI Developer Platform’s intuitive interface, combined with the high-performance resources of Vertex AI and TPUs, will ensure optimal efficiency and scalability for AI projects. Additionally, this collaboration will enable technical collaboration on foundation work for training large scale models and curating high quality datasets for Indian Languages.
