CognitiveLab Wins Meta's Prestigious Llama Impact Grant 2024

We are thrilled to announce that CognitiveLab has been selected as a recipient of Meta's prestigious Llama Impact Grant 2024! This significant recognition comes with substantial non-dilutive funding that will accelerate our mission to democratize AI across global languages.

About the Llama Impact Grant

The Llama Impact Grant is Meta's initiative to support innovative projects leveraging AI to drive positive societal impact. Selected from thousands of global applicants, CognitiveLab stood out for our transformative vision of building truly inclusive AI that serves diverse linguistic communities.

This grant provides:

• Substantial financial support to accelerate our R&D
• Increased visibility in the global AI ecosystem

Powering Project Nayana: Our Vision for Inclusive AI

The Llama Impact Grant will primarily fuel our flagship initiative: Project Nayana (meaning "eyes" in Hindi)—a revolutionary, unified foundation model ecosystem designed to see, understand, and generate content across languages and modalities.

The AI Language Gap We're Solving

Today's cutting-edge AI remains largely English-centric, creating a technological divide that excludes billions from fully participating in the AI revolution. This gap is particularly pronounced across India and the Global South, where linguistic diversity is rich but AI support is limited.

The consequences are significant:

• Limited access to advanced AI tools for non-English speakers
• Barriers to knowledge discovery in regional languages
• Uneven distribution of AI benefits across global communities
• Cultural and linguistic nuances lost in translation

Introducing Nayana: Breaking Down AI's Language Barriers

Project Nayana represents our comprehensive solution to these challenges—a unified AI ecosystem with deep multilingual (22 languages, including 10 Indic), multimodal (vision + text), and multitask intelligence capabilities.

What Makes Nayana Revolutionary:

1. Unprecedented Language Coverage: While most AI models focus on a handful of major languages, Nayana supports 22 diverse languages, with special emphasis on 10 Indic languages that serve over 1 billion people.

2. Our Technical Breakthroughs:

   • Novel Synthetic Data Engine: We've developed a groundbreaking pipeline that generates millions of high-fidelity, layout-preserving, annotated document images across all 22 target languages
   • Unified Architecture: Instead of fragmented pipelines, Nayana uses a single, powerful architecture for multiple tasks
   • Cultural Context Preservation: Our models understand cultural nuances and context-specific language use

3. Current Research Focus Areas:

   • Layout-Preserving Translation: Maintaining document structure across languages
   • Cross-Script Transfer Learning: Leveraging patterns across different writing systems
   • Efficient Multimodal Fusion: Integrating text, vision, and potentially audio in resource-efficient ways
   • Low-Resource Language Optimization: Specialized techniques for languages with limited data

The Nayana Ecosystem: Building Blocks of Inclusive AI

Nayana isn't just one model; it's a comprehensive ecosystem with multiple components:

1. Model Family (Powered by Llama Insights):

   • Nayana OCR: Our award-winning OCR technology delivers unparalleled accuracy for 22 languages
   • Nayana-2B: Compact multilingual, multimodal model optimized for edge deployment
   • Nayana-7B: Our flagship model with advanced reasoning capabilities across all supported languages
   • Nayana Retriever: Specialized models for efficient cross-modal, multilingual information retrieval

2. Supporting Infrastructure:

   • NayanaBench: Comprehensive evaluation framework for rigorous multilingual, multimodal testing
   • ViViD Framework: Our unified architecture handling multiple document intelligence tasks
   • Open-Source Tooling: Developer-friendly libraries and APIs for community adoption

Our Roadmap: What's Next for Nayana

With the Llama Impact Grant accelerating our progress, here's what we're working on:

Immediate Focus (Next 6 Months):

• Completing our pre-training pipeline for all 22 languages
• Releasing Nayana OCR open-source with comprehensive documentation
• Publishing our synthetic data generation methodology
• Establishing partnerships with key educational and governmental organizations

Medium-Term Goals (6-12 Months):

• Launching Nayana-2B and Nayana-7B general-purpose models
• Developing specialized fine-tuned versions for key sectors (education, healthcare, governance)
• Creating an accessible API for developers to integrate Nayana capabilities
• Expanding our benchmark suite to cover more languages and tasks

Long-Term Vision:

• Extending language coverage to 50+ global languages
• Integrating speech recognition and generation capabilities
• Building specialized domain models for critical sectors
• Establishing a sustainable open-source community around the project

Real-World Impact: How Nayana Will Transform Lives

The Llama Impact Grant significantly boosts our ability to deliver transformative solutions across sectors:

• Preserving Cultural Heritage: Digitizing and making accessible millions of historical documents and manuscripts in regional languages
• Revolutionizing Education: Creating AI tutors and translation tools that understand cultural context and regional educational needs
• Transforming Governance: Making public services truly accessible in citizens' native languages
• Improving Healthcare: Breaking down communication barriers in medical settings and enabling multilingual health records
• Driving Economic Opportunity: Empowering local businesses with AI tools that understand regional markets and languages

Join Our Journey

The recognition from Meta's Llama Impact Grant marks a pivotal moment for CognitiveLab and for inclusive AI globally. We invite researchers, developers, organizations, and language enthusiasts to join us in building an AI future where language is never a barrier.

Get involved with Nayana:

• Explore the full Nayana ecosystem on our dedicated page
• Read Meta's Llama Impact Grant announcement
• Check out our models and research on Hugging Face

For enterprise inquiries, research collaborations, and partnership opportunities, please contact us at contact@cognitivelab.in.

Let's build an AI that truly speaks everyone's language.