New Delhi, Apr 9 (PTI) Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has partnered with Ziroh Labs, a California-based innovation-driven deep tech startup, to establish a Centre of AI Research (COAIR) to solve India’s compute accessibility challenges, officials said on Wednesday.
The COAIR will focus on developing practical, efficient AI solutions focusing on CPU and edge device inferencing. In a significant step towards making AI models solve accessibility problems, Ziroh Labs unveiled the first version of “Kompact” AI at IIT Madras, they said. Kompact AI is an AI platform that enables foundational models to be built and served using CPUs without requiring Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which are expensive and hard to obtain.
Kompact AI has been developed by scientists and engineers from India. Ziroh Labs has already optimised 17 AI models, including DeepSeek, Qwen and Llama, to run efficiently on CPUs. These models have been benchmarked with IIT Madras, evaluating both quantitative performance and qualitative accuracy.
Ziroh Labs team showcased Kompact AI’s unique capabilities during the event and demonstrated how it redefines AI development on top of CPUs by eliminating dependency on GPUs.
“Nature has taught us that one can effectively acquire knowledge and subsequently infer in only a limited set of domains. Attempts to acquire everything under the universe are not sustainable and bound to fail over a period of time,” said V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras.
“This effort by Ziroh Labs and IITM Pravartak is a nature-inspired one wherein they provide a platform that uses customised and trained domain-specific models to provide accurate inferences on affordable conventional compute machines. This effort is certainly a major step in arresting the possible AI divide between one who can afford the modern hyper scalar systems and one who cannot,” he added.
Kamakoti said that Kompact AI can play a transformative role as it leverages multiple optimisations algorithmically and implementation-wise to execute models on the low end without any support required for external communication, such as the Internet.
“At IITM Pravartak, our mission is to translate research innovations into tangible solutions that address real-world problems. Kompact AI is a game-changer in this regard. By making AI models executable on CPUs, we are unlocking the potential of AI without the heavy infrastructure costs typically associated with GPUs,” said Madhusudhanan B, principal consultant – IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation.
“Through the CoAIR, we will build specific, actionable AI models that can be deployed at scale, benefiting people in rural and underserved areas across India. This is about taking technology beyond the labs and putting it into the hands of those who need it the most,” he added.
This AI platform aims to democratise AI by allowing developers across the globe to build, train and infer AI using CPUs commonly found in Cloud Data Centres and Edge Devices. Kompact AI claims to enable AI development without violating any data privacy and data residency regulations across the globe. PTI GJS GJS MNK MNK
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