Just when you thought AI news and developments have reached peak saturation, it seems there’s always something new that captures our collective imagination.

Every week brings a new large language model – the backbone of many AI implementations.

This time, AI is getting a Hindi-language breakthrough. It’s part of NANDA, a project unveiled earlier this month at the UAE-India Business Forum in Mumbai.

Named after one of India’s highest peaks, NANDA is a technological – and cultural – feat in itself that’s supposed to open the doors to AI for more than half a billion Hindi-language speakers.

NANDA is a partnership between G42, the UAE-based tech holding group, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and the American AI company Cerebras.

G42 describes the project as a cutting-edge Hindi Large Language Model – trained on one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world.

That’s a departure from the usual news about AI LLMs, which for a long time, have been centred around the English language, leading some to worry about an uphill battle for other languages and cultures trying to get a foot into artificial intelligence.

So, this is a monumental step forward in artificial intelligence – and broader tech accessibility. But in a world where mentions of AI conjure concerns of tech ethics and information wars, where do up-and-coming LLMs fit in?

In this episode of Business Extra, host Cody Combs hears from Preslav Nakov, a professor at MBZUAI specialising in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, about what this means for linguistic and cultural diversity – or whether we're just scratching the surface of what’s possible.