Cropin’s AI model to aid farmers
sohini.bagchi@livemint.com BENGALURU
Google-backed agritech startup Cropin Technology unveiled its latest initiative on Tuesday: an open-source micro language platform named ‘Aksara’, built on Mistral’s foundation model.
The solution is designed to enhance major crop production in South Asia, with a focus on sustainable and energy-efficient farming practices while offering comprehensive language support.
Krishna Kumar, co-founder and chief executive of Cropin, said the goal is to democratize access to digital technologies as well as modernize agricultural processes.
Cropin aims to empower agricultural researchers and developers to tackle global challenges like food security, climate change, resource conservation (water and soil), and regenerative agriculture practices by offering access to contextual, factual, and actionable information.
Initially, it will cover nine crops, including paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and millet, spanning five countries in Indian subcontinent. These food crops account for a substantial portion of the world’s food requirements and are essential staples for the population in the global south, Kumar said.
Praveen Pankajakshan, vice president of data science and AI, Cropin, said the technology is both cost-effective and scalable, built and fine-tuned on top of the Mistral-7B-v0.2 model, developed by Cropin and hosted on Hugging Face.
It compressed ‘Aksara’ from 16-bit to 4-bit, utilising quantization and low-rank adapters to reduce the environmental impact of running large language models. The model outperforms GPT-4 Turbo by 40% on randomly selected test datasets, as measured by the ROUGE scoring algorithm, said Pankajakshan. It ensures that the responses are factually relevant and brief while minimizing computing and storage resource requirements.
The model was fine-tuned with over 5,000 high-quality question-response pairs specific to agriculture and over 160,000 in-context tokens. These numbers are expected to increase as more geographic locations, crops and use cases are added, said Pankajakshan. The model is faithful to questions by using techniques like retrieval augmented generation through cross-referencing expert knowledge bases. feedback@livemint.com
Mark Zuckerberg won his bid to avoid personal liability in about two dozen lawsuits accusing Meta Platforms Inc. and other social media companies of addicting children to their products.
US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is overseeing the cases, sided with the Meta chief executive officer (CEO) in a ruling issued on Monday.
The decision dismisses Zuckerberg as an individual defendant without affecting claims against Meta as a company.
Lawsuits filed on behalf of young people have alleged that Zuckerberg was repeatedly warned that Instagram and Facebook weren’t safe for children but ignored the findings and chose not to share them publicly.
Rogers ruled that Zuckerberg was not required to disclose safety information absent a “special relationship” with the users of Meta’s products, according to the order.
The judge also said Zuckerberg couldn’t be held liable just because he’s the public face of Meta.
The judge said Zuckerberg couldn’t be held liable just because he’s the public face of Meta
Finding otherwise would create “a duty to disclose for any individual recognizable to the public,” Rogers wrote in the ruling. “The court will not countenance such a novel approach here.”
Rogers said the Meta users and family members who sued can amend and refile their complaints.
At a hearing in February, the judge appeared sympathetic to plaintiffs’ arguments that Zuckerberg could be held liable for personally concealing information as a corporate officer at Meta. A Meta representative and an attorney for the plaintiffs didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The cases naming Zuckerberg are a small subset of a collection of more than 1,000 suits in state and federal courts by families and public school districts against Meta along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, ByteDance Ltd’s TikTok and Snap Inc., owner of the Snapchat platform. Rogers allowed some claims to proceed against the companies while dismissing others. The companies have denied wrongdoing, saying they have taken steps to keep young users safe on the platforms.