Swecha, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting free software and free knowledge movements, announced an internship programme on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for engineering students to equip and make them job-ready with AI skills, while aiding Swecha to develop Telugu language-centric Large Language Models (LLM).
The initiative is being undertaken in collaboration with IIIT Hyderabad, Ozonetel — a leading provider of cloud communication solutions, Meta and TASK.
The project “Summer of AI” attempts to combine the two objectives — a large-scale internship programme for first and second-year engineering students, trained in the basics of AI and then engaged in very large-scale data collection through interviews. The project aims to interview people in the villages and towns and collect information and knowledge on various folks, local skills and information, which includes Telugu folk tales, songs, food, local 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 a few large libraries and Telugu Academy to also ingest a lot of books. This process will be done through a lakh interns during the month-long internships. The first batch of 10,000 is already on the job.
Upon successful completion of this project, a similar approach will be adopted to collect data for other languages and regions also. This initiative is significant, considering that the Indian language and India-centric LLMs are virtually non-existent. Registration for the internship can be done on https://www.swecha.org/summer-of-ai
