MUMBAI, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Chip behemoth Nvidia ( NVDA )

launched a lightweight artificial intelligence model on Thursday

for India's widely-used Hindi language, as it looks to tap into

a growing market for AI technologies.

Chief Executive Jensen Huang is set to chat with the

chairman of conglomerate Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, who

is also Asia's richest man, at a conference in the business

capital of Mumbai, the California-based company said.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) is rolling out its new small language model, dubbed

Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, with 4 billion parameters, for firms

to use in developing their own AI models, the company said.

"The model was pruned, distilled and trained with a

combination of real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data and

an equal amount of English data," it said in a statement.

Indian IT services and consulting company Tech Mahindra is

the first to use the Nvidia ( NVDA ) offering to develop a custom AI

model called Indus 2.0, focused on Hindi and dozens of its

dialects, the U.S. company said.

Just a tenth of the population of 1.4 billion speaks English

in India, where the constituion recognises 22 languages, it

added.

From large companies to startups, businesses in India have

focused on building AI models based on its diverse languages to

grow consumer appeal and drive activities such as customer

service AI assistants and content translation.

Unlike large-language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4, used

to power ChatGPT, small language models are trained on much

smaller and more specific datasets.

They are typically cheaper, making them more attractive for

companies with fewer resources.

Global chip firms are investing in India and setting up

facilities to expand their presence as the country races to

build up its semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs

such as Taiwan, though analysts say the effort could take years.

Nvidia ( NVDA ), which first set up shop in India nearly two decades

ago, has engineering and design centers there, as well as

offices in major cities such as the southern tech hub of

Bengaluru and neighbouring Hyderabad.