Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (Indosat or IOH), Indonesia’s premier digital telecommunications company, and Tech Mahindra, a global leader in digital transformation solutions and services, have inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, unveiling plans to develop ‘Garuda,’ a Large Language Model (LLM) aimed at preserving Bahasa Indonesia, the nation’s official language, and its various dialects. Drawing inspiration from Tech Mahindra’s pioneering LLM ‘Project Indus,’ designed for conversational proficiency in numerous Indic languages and dialects, Garuda is set to redefine language preservation and customer engagement in Indonesia.
Garuda’s groundbreaking features will unlock a myriad of applications, empowering Indosat’s customers across sectors such as healthcare, e-commerce, rural education, banking and finance, agriculture, and telecom. By harnessing sentiment analysis and behavioral understanding, Garuda will deliver personalized customer experiences, adapting and learning from each interaction. Tech Mahindra’s role in this collaboration involves leveraging its technological prowess to collect and curate Bahasa Indonesia data, which will then be utilized to pre-train and deploy the conversational model for Indosat’s customers.
Vikram Sinha, President Director and Chief Executive Officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, said, “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. By preserving Bahasa Indonesia and its dialects through advanced technology, we promote linguistic diversity and enhance accessibility and inclusivity in the digital realm. This partnership underscores our commitment to Indonesia’s digital transformation and our vision of Golden Indonesia 2045. 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.”
With an impressive foundation of 16 billion original Bahasa tokens and 1.2 billion parameters, Garuda will possess a deep understanding of the Indonesian language, influencing its input processing and output formulation. The beta version of Garuda will undergo rigorous testing by Indosat and Bahasa Indonesia speakers, with further enhancements planned through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) techniques to ensure robust conversational capabilities. Moreover, specialized use cases will be addressed using the LIMA (Less is More for Alignment) method, ensuring optimal performance across diverse scenarios.
Harshvendra Soin, President – Asia Pacific and Japan Business, Tech Mahindra, said, “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. 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.”
This strategic collaboration between Indosat and Tech Mahindra signifies a concerted effort to drive technological innovation in Indonesia. By combining their respective strengths, both entities are committed to revolutionizing language understanding technology, thereby preserving linguistic diversity and delivering tailored communication solutions that cater to the unique requirements of the Indonesian market. Garuda represents a significant step forward in the quest to empower Indonesian communities and foster inclusive digital experiences for all.
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