One thing today in tech – Infosys to build 50,000 strong AI army on NVIDIA tech
In today’s episode we take a quick look at an expanded partnership between NVIDIA and Infosys that seeks to equip an army of AI specialists trained in the AI chip giant’s technologies, but first one other headline that caught my attention yesterday. WhatsApp continues to roll out new features in India that will allow users in its largest market by userbase to do much more without leaving the instant messaging app. Coinciding with its Conversations event yesterday in Mumbai, WhatsApp announced new payments options for users. Users in India can add items to their cart and send a payment using the method of their choice from all supported UPI apps, debit and credit cards, WhatsApp said in a blog post. The Meta Platforms company has partnered India’s Razorpay and PayU to provide these services. One thing today Now, as many of you know, Infosys has made several announcements this year around its AI investments, including the launch of Infosys Topaz, a comprehensive suite of services, solutions and platforms around generative AI. Yesterday, Infosys and NVIDIA said that they are expanding the scope of an existing partnership under which the Indian IT services company helps its customers deploy the semiconductor giant’s AI chips and technologies. The expanded partnership will see the two companies work on building generative AI solutions for global customers, according to an Infosys press release. The broadened alliance will bring the NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem of models, tools, runtimes and GPU systems to Infosys Topaz. Through the integration, Infosys will create solutions customers can adopt, to easily integrate generative AI into their businesses, according to the press release. Infosys also plans to set up an NVIDIA Centre of Excellence, where it will train and certify 50,000 of its employees on NVIDIA’s AI technologies as demand for such skills is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. “Infosys is transforming into an AI-first company,” co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani said in the release. Clients are looking at complex AI use cases to get more business value across their operations, he said. Infosys Topaz is complementary to NVIDIA’s core stack, Nilekani said. Combining the IT services company’s strengths, training 50,000 professionals on NVIDIA’s AI technologies, Infosys aims to create end-to-end industry-leading AI solutions for its customers, he said. “Generative AI will drive the next wave of enterprise productivity gains,” Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA, said in the press release. Huang was in India recently, meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and high-ranking Indian officials. He announced a slew of investments, including partnerships with India’s Tata Group and Reliance Industries, spanning data centres that will use NVIDIA’s chips to a collaboration on India-specific large language models. “The NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem is ramping quickly to provide the platform for generative AI. Together, NVIDIA and Infosys will create an expert workforce to help businesses use this platform to build custom applications and solutions,” Huang said in the press release. Infosys uses the full-stack NVIDIA generative AI platform, including hardware and enterprise-grade software in its own business operations, and it is helping customers create generative AI applications for business operations, sales and marketing. With NVIDIA AI Enterprise frameworks, pre-trained models and toolkits — including the NVIDIA NeMo LLM framework, NVIDIA Metropolis for computer vision and NVIDIA Riva for speech AI — Infosys has already developed some solutions.