Centre of AI Research Initiative
In an effort to address the AI compute accessibility gap in India, IIT-Madras, along with its technology arm, IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, has collaborated with Ziroh Labs, a deep-tech startup based in California, to establish a Centre of AI Research.
Kompact AI Platform
The central feature of this initiative is Kompact AI, a cost-efficient AI platform designed to reduce reliance on expensive graphic processing units (GPUs) by using conventional central processing units (CPUs).
- Kompact AI aims to make high-performance AI accessible and scalable, particularly in low-resource environments.
- The platform enables the training and deployment of foundational models using CPUs instead of GPUs, which are both costly and scarce.
- Developed by Indian scientists and engineers, Kompact AI has already been applied to optimize models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, and Llama for CPU inferencing.
- IIT-Madras researchers provided benchmarking support for these applications.