Seetha Mahalaxmi Healthcare (SML), in collaboration with IIT-Bombay, recently introduced ‘Hanooman’, a series of Indic AI models with multimodal specialties at the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum held in Mumbai.

SML’s Hanooman is named after the Hindu deity Hanuman. “Hanuman is a great example of responsible power. Despite being the most-powerful entity, he never used his power for selfish needs,” said Vishnu Vardhan, founder of SML and Vizzhy, in an exclusive interview with AIM.

Vardhan said they came up with the name while framing the ethical framework for the model and added that it acts as a guideline to understand how their model should be – for the greater good.

Unleashing the Power of Hanooman 

The founder told AIM that the first-four open-source models in the Hanooman series (1.5 billion, 7 billion, 13 billion, and 40 billion parameters) are set to be released soon. 

“These will most probably be released by the end of this month. We are quite ready. But we will do a lot of testing,” said Vardhan. He added that Hanooman, being built by researchers, academicians, and professors, needs to undergo thorough testing before being released in the market.

Being multimodal, Hanooman will be able to converse in 11 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Marathi. “In the future, we plan to extend language support to all 22 official languages of India,” said Vardhan.

“We don’t want it to be like ChatGPT, which suffers from the ‘I’m God and I know everything’ syndrome. We don’t want to simply replicate its success [but be more than that],”said Vardhan, adding that they are currently focusing on specific use cases for Hanooman. 

As a healthcare provider, SML is currently focused on addressing the challenges faced by doctors. “We want to make it easy for doctors and people to keep their records and summarise them,” he said, adding that the conversations of doctors will be recorded, and Hanooman will summarise them using automatic speech summarisation.

The other use case, Vardhan mentioned, is helping rural kids with their homework, especially those whose parents can’t assist them. “We believe that the education barrier is a significant challenge in India,” said Vardhan, emphasising that healthcare and education are their primary focus areas. “We are very focused on healthcare and education, and maybe later, banking.”

In the near future, SML also plans to come up with closed-source models for enterprise customers. “We’ll build some highly data-efficient and cost-effective diagnostic solutions, which will be much cheaper than existing models. This will bring down the cost by 100x, and they will be specifically built for you,” said Vardhan.

Not Backed by Reliance Jio Infocomm 

“The media has sometimes gotten it totally wrong, like how Jio has invested in Hanooman. It’s an initiative of SML,” said Vardhan. However, he added that they might collaborate with them in the future on the use cases of telecom and retail.

Vardhan said that to build Hanooman, SML hasn’t raised any external funding, and it has been mostly internal funding. “We are totally inspired by what ISRO has done, and we want to do that for India, but it does cost a lot of money,” he said.

“We have 1000 GPUs with us, and our plan is to scale it up to 10,000 in 2024 because we see a lot of requirements coming up,” said Vardhan, adding that they are also receiving support from cloud service providers in India. Vardhan was all praise for Indian hardware players, including Yotta. “They’re bringing 16,000 GPUs and are really enablers, creating the whole ecosystem.”

Vardhan said, as of now, many enterprises and state governments are in touch with them to use Hanooman. “States such as Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Karnataka have shown interest, and many other state governments have been approaching us because we are working on multilingual projects,” he concluded.

[Update] March 6, 2024 10:21 | The story has been updated to reveal that Hanooman is not part of BharatGPT iniative. It is a model being developed by SML (a private entity), as shared by Ganesh Ramakrishnan, who leads the BharatGPT.