• IIT Madras partners with US-based Ziroh Labs and IITM Pravartak to launch AI Centre of Excellence focused on solving India’s grassroots challenges.

• Ziroh Labs unveils ‘Kompact AI’ a groundbreaking platform to run advanced AI models on CPUs without GPUs, ensuring affordability and scalability.

• 17 optimized AI models tested with IIT Madras show 3x performance gains on CPUs, aiming to democratize AI access and eliminate dependency on costly infrastructure.

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is collaborating with Ziroh Labs, an Innovation-driven Deep-Tech Startup from California, and IITM Pravartak Technology Foundation to set up an AI Centre of Excellence to address India's grassroots problems. this Centre will create pragmatic, effective AI solutions for real-world problems.

In a significant move towards AI Models addressing grassroots issues, Ziroh Labs launched the first version of Kompact AI at IIT Madras recently. Kompact AI is a platform based on AI that allows foundational models to be constructed and served on CPUs without needing GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, which are costly and difficult to procure).

Ziroh Labs has already optimized 17 AI models, such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Llama, to be run optimally on CPUs. These models have been tested with IIT Madras with both quantitative performance and qualitative accuracy benchmarks. For the first time, high-performance AI is constructed and deployed effectively on CPUs, making AI affordable, scalable, and cost-efficient.

Kompact AI allows for models to be deployed across CPUs without compromising on quality and a minimum of 3x the performance of today's state of the art, thus offering GPU-like scale and speed.

Explaining the necessity for such advancements, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, stated, "This initiative by Ziroh lab and IITM Pravartak is a nature-inspired one where they offer a platform that employs customized and trained domain-specific models to make accurate inferences on affordable conventional compute machines. This initiative is definitely a significant step in halting the potential AI divide between one who can afford the new hyper scalar systems and one who cannot".

This platform for AI works towards democratizing AI by giving developers worldwide the ability to create, train, and infer AI using CPUs prevalent in Cloud Data Centers and Edge Devices. Kompact AI facilitates AI development without breaching any data residency and data privacy laws worldwide.

Kompact AI can have a revolutionary impact as it uses several optimisations algorithmically and implementationally to run models on the low end without any support for external communication, e.g., the Internet. As part of this future CoE, IIT Madras will develop smaller AI models for particular use cases, using Kompact AI to optimize execution, making high-performance AI more efficient, accessible, and applicable to real-world scenarios.