Cohere launches a family of open multilingual models | TechCrunch
Summary
Cohere has launched Tiny Aya, a family of open multilingual models that support over 70 languages and can run on everyday devices, enhancing accessibility for developers and researchers.
Why It Matters
The introduction of Tiny Aya models is significant as it addresses the need for multilingual AI solutions that function offline, particularly in linguistically diverse regions like India. This development empowers developers to create applications that cater to native language speakers, promoting inclusivity and accessibility in technology.
Key Takeaways
- Tiny Aya models support over 70 languages and are open-weight, allowing for public use and modification.
- The models are designed to run on everyday devices, enabling offline functionality, which is crucial in areas with limited internet access.
- Cohere's approach emphasizes cultural nuance and linguistic grounding, making AI systems more relatable to diverse communities.
- The models are available on platforms like HuggingFace, facilitating easy access for developers and researchers.
- Cohere plans to release training datasets and a technical report to support further research and application development.
Enterprise AI company Cohere launched a new family of multilingual models on the sidelines of the ongoing India AI Summit. The models, dubbed Tiny Aya, are open-weight — meaning their underlying code is publicly available for anyone to use and modify — support over 70 languages, and can run on everyday devices like laptops without requiring an internet connection. The model, launched by the company’s research arm Cohere Labs, supports South Asian languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi. The base model contains 3.35 billion parameters — a measure of its size and complexity. Cohere has also launched TinyAya-Global, a version fine-tuned to better follow user commands, for apps that require broad language support. Regional variants round out the family: TinyAya-Earth for African languages; TinyAya-Fire for South Asian languages; and TinyAya-Water for Asia Pacific, West Asia, and Europe. Image Credits: Cohere “This approach allows each model to develop stronger linguistic grounding and cultural nuance, creating systems that feel more natural and reliable for the communities they are meant to serve. At the same time, all Tiny Aya models retain broad multilingual coverage, making them flexible starting points for further adaptation and research,” the company said in a statement. Cohere noted that these models, which were trained on a single cluster of 64 H100 GPUs (a type of high-powered chip by Nvidia) using relatively modest comput...