Param

Yotta Powers PARAM-1: India’s Own Foundation Model for AI Age

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the defining technology of our era, transforming industries, economies, and the way people live and work. But despite their remarkable capabilities, today’s most powerful foundation models – such as GPT and LLaMA – are predominantly built and fine-tuned for Western languages, cultures, and contexts. They excel in English and a few global tongues yet struggle to adapt to India’s vast linguistic diversity and rich cultural nuances.

For over a billion Indians, this creates a serious challenge. The very technology designed to democratise access to knowledge, boost productivity, and drive innovation often feels distant, inaccurate, or inaccessible. Imagine a farmer seeking crop guidance in Marathi, a student learning in Tamil, or a policymaker analysing data in Bengali- the AI gap becomes clear and urgent.

To solve this, BharatGen, India’s first government-funded, indigenously developed multimodal large language model (LLM) initiative, set out with a bold vision: to build an AI that not only speaks India’s languages but also understands its cultural and social context.

Through its research, BharatGen identified three core shortcomings in how global AI models engage with India:

1. Linguistic Fragmentation – Indic languages are morphologically rich and complex. Conventional tokenizers often split words incorrectly, leading to poor comprehension and broken outputs.

2. Cultural Disconnect – With little exposure to Indian cultural data, most models generate responses that are irrelevant or even inappropriate in local contexts.

3. Code-Mixing Blind Spots – Everyday Indian communication blends English with regional languages (e.g., Hinglish, Tanglish), a nuance that mainstream models fail to handle effectively.

It was to address these very challenges that BharatGen created PARAM-1 – a foundation model built from the ground up for the Indian ecosystem. PARAM-1 is not just about making AI more powerful; it is about making AI truly inclusive, giving India a model that reflects its languages, culture, and people.

PARAM-1

PARAM-1 was designed with three guiding principles:

1. Representation – At least 25% of training data dedicated to Indic languages across multiple scripts and domains.

2. Tokenization Fairness – A custom multilingual SentencePiece tokenizer optimised for Indic morphology to reduce word fragmentation.

3. Evaluation Alignment – Benchmarked against India-specific tests like IndicQA, code-mixed reasoning, and socio-linguistic robustness.

Yotta’s Shakti Cloud Powers PARAM-1 Training

BharatGen executed the training of the PARAM-1 foundation model on Yotta’s managed SLURM-cluster—an engineering marvel built on 64 NVIDIA HGX H100 nodes. Each node unleashes the raw power of 8× H100 Tensor Core GPUs, seamlessly interwoven through a fully meshed NVLink/NVSwitch fabric that delivers blistering terabytes-per-second of bandwidth at sub-microsecond latencies. This bleeding-edge architecture annihilates communication bottlenecks and achieves near-perfect linear scaling, propelling distributed training workloads into a new realm of performance and efficiency. For inter-node communication, the cluster leverages a high-speed InfiniBand fabric optimized for low-latency GPU-to-GPU transfers, a setup critical for efficiently scaling large model training across multiple nodes. Each compute node also has high-throughput storage, enabling smooth handling of massive multilingual corpora during data streaming and checkpointing.

The training workflow was orchestrated using SLURM for job scheduling, combined with NVIDIA’s NCCL for collective GPU communication. This robust infrastructure provided a scalable and reliable foundation for pretraining PARAM-1 over tens of trillions of tokens using thousands of H100 GPUs in parallel.

 

A Step Towards AI Sovereignty

PARAM-1 is more than a model – it’s a statement. India’s languages, culture, and context now have a place at the heart of the AI era. From government services and education to healthcare, agriculture, and creative industries, PARAM-1 can power applications that truly serve over a billion people.

Powered by Shakti AI Factory; secure, high-performance infrastructures purpose-built to accelerate frontier AI workloads. This backbone ensures that BharatGen can scale with unmatched speed and reliability. Through this partnership, India is not merely a participant in the sovereign AI revolution – it is positioning itself at the very forefront, shaping and leading it.

 

Source: https://bharatgen.com/param-revolutionizing-ai-for-india/