Joining the league of indic LLMs like Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Oriya Llama, is MahaMarathi 7B. Boasting 7 billion parameters, the Marathi LLM is built on Meta Llama-2 and Mistral AI framework.

With computing resources and data provided by Microsoft for Startups funded company CourtEasy.ai, this open-source LLM is domain-adapted, continually pre-trained, and instruction fine-tuned using the Meta Llama-2 and Mistral AI framework.

The brains behind this research include Dr. Aakash Patil, postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, Mrunmayee Shende, cofounder of CourtEasy.ai, and Niraj Singh, ML engineer at Inbound Health. 

To democratise ML research, the team has released the initial version of the pre-trained base model on Hugging Face, inviting developers, startups, and public and private organisations to innovate by developing fine-tuned models for various use cases. 

Marathi’s unique linguistic characteristics, complexity, and cultural context are addressed by MahaMarathi 7B, making it suitable for handling complex conversations and instructions. The language model is available for free on Hugging Face, promoting broader access and encouraging applications in various fields, including business and e-governance.

Marathi, spoken by over 83 million people predominantly in Maharashtra, is the 13th most spoken language globally and the third most common in India. Acknowledging Maharashtra’s significant economic contribution, with Marathi businesses and consumers contributing over 15% to India’s GDP, the MahaMarathi 7B aims to catalyse innovation in the region. The creators envision the potential impact of this Marathi LLM on diverse sectors such as skill training, education, healthcare, agriculture, environment, urban planning, and traffic management. 

The release of the Marathi LLM is a step towards making AI more accessible and applicable to non-English languages. The team plans to release instruction-tuned and preference-optimised models in the coming months.