In this paper, we introduce SUTRA, multilingual Large Language Model architecture capable of understanding, reasoning, and generating text in over 50 languages. SUTRA's design uniquely decouples core conceptual understanding from language-specific processing, which facilitates scalable and efficient multilingual alignment and learning. Employing a Mixture of Experts framework both in language and concept processing, SUTRA demonstrates both computational efficiency and responsiveness. Through extensive evaluations, SUTRA is demonstrated to surpass existing models like GPT-3.5, Llama2 by 20-30% on leading Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmarks for multilingual tasks. SUTRA models are also online LLMs that can use knowledge from the internet to provide hallucination-free, factual and up-to-date responses while retaining their multilingual capabilities. Furthermore, we explore the broader implications of its architecture for the future of multilingual AI, highlighting its potential to democratize access to AI technology globally and to improve the equity and utility of AI in regions with predominantly non-English languages. Our findings suggest that SUTRA not only fills pivotal gaps in multilingual model capabilities but also establishes a new benchmark for operational efficiency and scalability in AI applications.

Computing started in April 1936 with the invention of the first electronic computer by IBM. It gave new hope towards coding languages which was a previously unknown field. What if someone told you, the hunt for codification in languages started way back? Like many ancient Indian forgotten legends. One example is Panini's "Ashtadhyayi".

Buddhism is an influential religion with a long-standing history and profound philosophy. Nowadays, more and more people worldwide aspire to learn the essence of Buddhism, attaching importance to Buddhism dissemination. However, Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese are obscure to most people and machine translation applications. For instance, general Chinese-English neural machine translation (NMT) fails in this domain. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to building a practical NMT model for Buddhist scriptures. The performance of our translation pipeline acquired highly promising results in ablation experiments under three criteria.

A Japanese company has introduced a new role for SoftBank's humanoid robot'Pepper' - a Buddhist priest for hire at funerals. Chanting sutras in a computerized voice while tapping a drum, the robot was on display on Wednesday at a funeral industry fair - the Life Ending Industry Expo - in Tokyo. Nissei Eco Co., an unlisted plastic molding maker, wrote the chanting software for'Pepper', which was introduced by SoftBank Group Corp. in 2014. With Japan's population ageing and shrinking, many Buddhist priests receive less financial support from their communities, prompting some to find part-time work outside their temple duties, said Michio Inamura, Nissei's executive adviser. A Buddhist monk looks at a'robot priest' wearing a Buddhist robe during its demonstration at Life Ending Industry EXPO 2017 in Tokyo A'robot priest' wearing a Buddhist robe stands in front of a funeral altar during its demonstration at Life Ending Industry EXPO 2017 in Tokyo The funeral robot could step in when a priest was not available, he said.

Robots excel at predictable, repetitive tasks, and what could be more predictable and repetitive than death? In Japan, a plastic moulding company called Nissei Eco (which also does funeral arrangements, I guess) is planning to introduce SoftBank's Pepper robot as a cheaper substitute for human priests reading sutras at Buddhist funerals. The average cost of a funeral in Japan is somewhere between two and three million yen, as of the most recent study of the industry, which is nearly a decade old. That works out to between US $25,000 and $30,000, which is twice or even three times as expensive as the average funeral in the United States. Like most things, much of the cost is related to the fact that there are humans involved who you have to pay to be there because they'd almost certainly rather be somewhere else.

SoftBank Group Corp.'s humanoid robot Pepper has taken on various roles since its mass-market debut in 2015. The 1.2-meter tall robots with round white heads have been deployed to banks, sushi shops and nursing homes. Now, Pepper will don a Buddhist monk's robe. Kanagawa-based Nissei Eco Co. will offer Pepper -- billed as the world's first robot that can read emotions -- to chant Buddhist sutras at funerals, providing a cheaper alternative to human priests. The maker of molded plastic products, which has also been in the funeral business since 2000, recently launched a new venture targeting budget-minded customers interested in customizing funeral services.