Indosat, Tech Mahindra Unite to Build Garuda to preserve Bahasa Indonesia

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (Indosat or IOH), the most preferred digital telecommunications company in Indonesia, and Tech Mahindra, a provider of digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions and services, has announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 to build 'Garuda,' a Large Language Model (LLM) to preserve Bahasa Indonesia, the official and national language of Indonesia and its dialects.

Garuda will be built on the principles of Tech Mahindra's indigenous LLM 'Project Indus', a foundational model designed to converse in a multitude of Indic languages and dialects.

The unique features of Garuda will create multiple use cases and enable Indosat's customers to leverage various applications, including customer support, experience, and content creation across industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, rural education, banking and finance, agriculture, and telecom. The model will offer personalized customer experiences by analyzing sentiment and understanding behavioral patterns, resulting in flexible learning based on customers' previous interactions. As part of this partnership, Tech Mahindra will leverage its technology expertise to gather and curate data in the Indonesia language, which will be pre-trained and released as a conversational model for Indosat.

Vikram Sinha, President Director and Chief Executive Officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, said, “We are excited to collaborate with Tech Mahindra on the 'Garuda' project, which aligns perfectly with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison's larger purpose of connecting and empowering every Indonesian. By preserving Bahasa Indonesia and its dialects through advanced technology, we promote linguistic diversity and enhance accessibility and inclusivity in the digital realm. This partnership underscores our commitment to Indonesia's digital transformation and our vision of Golden Indonesia 2045. Together, we are leveraging AI infrastructure and human capital readiness to drive innovation, create meaningful experiences, and unlock new opportunities for socio-economic growth nationwide.”

Garuda will be developed with 16 billion original Bahasa tokens, providing 1.2 billion parameters to shape the model's understanding of the Bahasa language. These parameters will influence how the model processes input and formulates output. A beta version of the Garuda model will be released for testing by Indosat and Bahasa Indonesia speakers. The model will be further improved using RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) techniques to ensure its robustness for conversation. Additionally, any specialized use cases will be developed using the LIMA (Less is More for Alignment) method.

Harshvendra Soin, President - Asia Pacific and Japan Business, Tech Mahindra, said, “The LLM market is expected to reach 40.8 billion USD by 2029. In this direction, the emergence of LLMs such as Garuda and Indus can enable people and enterprises to communicate online in their local dialects and languages, creating new opportunities in the digital world. We are delighted to partner with Indosat on the Garuda project, which will bring about a transformative impact by providing personalized experiences for the people of Indonesia. We believe that the model will significantly promote Indonesia's linguistic diversity and unlock new business opportunities for enterprises in the region.”

This partnership represents a strategic alliance between Indosat and Tech Mahindra, aligning their strengths to drive technological innovation in Indonesia. The joint endeavor signifies a shared vision to revolutionize language understanding technology, contributing to the preservation of linguistic diversity and advancing communication solutions tailored to the unique needs of the Indonesian market.