NGO ‘Swecha’ announces internship program on AI

This initiative is being undertaken by Swecha, in collaboration with the IIIT Hyderabad, Ozonetel, a provider of cloud communication solutions, Meta and TASK.

Hyderabad: Swecha, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Free Software and Free Knowledge movements, announced a internship program on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ‘Summer of AI’, for over a lakh engineering students this summer, to equip and make them job ready with AI skills, while aiding Swecha to develop Telugu language centric LLM.

This initiative is being undertaken by Swecha, in collaboration with the IIIT Hyderabad, Ozonetel, a provider of cloud communication solutions, Meta and TASK.

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This initiative is significant, considering that Indian language and India-centric LLM (Large Language Models) are virtually non-existent. Most Indian languages are considered low-resource languages, making it challenging to develop LLMs for them.

The Summer of AI looks at a very large scale internship program for first and second year engineering students, trained in basics of AI and then be engaged in very large scale data collection through interviews.

It aims to interview people in the villages and towns, collect information and knowledge on various folks, local skills and information, which includes the Telugu folk tales, songs, food, local-places-history and more.

The approach of the project is to collect speech, transcribe the speech and create a dataset for both speech and as a base LLM. In addition to this, the team is also working with few large libraries and Telugu academy to also ingest a lot of books.

This process will be done through 100k interns month long internships and the first batch with 10,000 interns has started.