Meta Awards CognitiveLab 2024 Llama Impact Grant to Boost Multilingual AI Development
Meta has announced CognitiveLab as one of the recipients of its prestigious 2024 Llama Impact Grants, recognizing the Bangalore-based research group's work on multilingual AI through its innovative Nayana project. The grant will help CognitiveLab expand AI accessibility across 22 languages, aiming to impact over three billion people.
Bridging Language Barriers with AI
The Llama Impact Grants, unveiled today, are designed to support open-source projects that leverage Meta’s Llama models to tackle social challenges. The Nayana project integrates Llama for processing both documents and images, with a specific focus on low-resource Indic languages. This multimodal, multilingual language model not only caters to text, vision, and speech, but has also set a record of sorts by surpassing existing benchmarks in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for ten Indian languages.
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Shivnath Thukral, vice president and head of public policy at Meta India, emphasized the potential of open-source AI in a country like India. He said, “Open-source AI is a powerful tool to bridge digital divides, especially in a diverse country like India. With the 2024 Llama Impact Grant, we’re proud to support the Nayana project. Its work embodies the spirit of open innovation—making advanced AI usable for billions of people.”
Expanding Language and Multimodal Capabilities
CognitiveLab plans to use the Llama Impact Grant to accelerate the development of Nayana, enhancing its language coverage, multimodal capabilities, and training datasets for underserved language communities. Shashi Kumar, founder of CognitiveLab, stated that the grant would enable their team to expand Indic language processing and improve tools for speech, text, and image processing.
Founded in 2023, the Llama Impact Grant program supports the development of open-source systems built on Meta’s Llama models. These models, including Llama 2, Llama 3, and the latest Llama 4, have gained wide adoption in global AI research and development communities.
The grant comes at a time when India remains a significant hub for the adoption of Llama models. Developers in the region are using these tools to create solutions that meet the unique needs of local communities.
