The story behind the Telugu SLM ‘Chandamama Kathalu’

Swecha, a Hyderabad-based nonprofit organisation, along with call centre software provider Ozonetel, has developed a small language model (SLM) for Telugu. Titled ‘Chandamama Kathalu’ (Chandamama stories), the SLM will be officially launched in the first week of January by Telangana principal IT secretary Jayesh Ranjan.

This SLM will have 7 to 13 billion parameters. The genesis of the SLM lies in a paper authored by Microsoft research scientists, titled ‘TinyStories: How small can language models be and still speak coherent English’.