New Delhi [India], June 12 (ANI): Avataar.ai launched Varya on Friday, an indigenous, distilled video model designed to make frontier video artificial intelligence affordable and culturally relevant for users across India. The model, unveiled at a press event in New Delhi, aims to lower execution costs while accurately representing the country's regional and visual diversity.

According to an Avataar press release, the company developed the model to understand and generate visual outputs spanning India's distinct regions, festivals, communities, and public spaces. The initiative specifically targets applications in education, commerce, governance, citizen services, and digital storytelling for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Avataar was selected by the IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundation AI capabilities. The research utilized subsidized national AI compute infrastructure to accelerate the development of the model.

Speaking at the launch, S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, said, 'The launch of one of the foundational models supported under the IndiaAI Mission marks a significant milestone in India's AI journey. Varya represents the kind of research-led capability building that we seek to enable.'

The technical framework of Varya relies on a distillation technique that reduces video generation from 50 steps to four steps. The company's internal inference-cost benchmarks indicate that the model 'generates video at Rs 0.48 per second, which makes it up to 10 times more cost-efficient than several leading global video models.'

'It is a proud moment that reflects our commitment to building indigenous AI capabilities and fostering a vibrant deep-tech ecosystem,' Krishnan added. 'Through strategic support for foundational models, we are enabling innovation at scale and creating the building blocks for the next generation of AI solutions. We look forward to further strengthening India's AI capabilities and advancing frugal innovation that is both world class and accessible at population scale.'

Sravanth Aluru, CEO and Co-Founder of Avataar, said, 'India's AI opportunity will not be defined only by the largest models. It will also be defined by the most efficient models. Varya demonstrates that frontier-quality video AI can be made dramatically more efficient and accessible. For a country of 1.4 billion people, affordability is not a feature, it is a prerequisite. We believe the next billion stories, lessons, advertisements, services and experiences will be created through AI, and those capabilities must be available to everyone, not just a few.'

The application functions on a sequence where users input text or upload an image to generate a video clip, with the ability to extend the sequence through additional clips. Avataar stated that it will publish a technical report detailing the model's architecture, distillation methodology, and benchmarks.

Aluru said, 'Affordable AI is inclusive AI. What Avataar is building with Varya is important because it shifts the conversation from AI capability alone to AI accessibility. India has the talent, the market depth and the imagination to build AI products for population-scale use,' Aluru added. 'Varya is a strong example of how Indian companies can compete globally, not by simply building bigger models, but by building more efficient, context-aware models that expand access.' (ANI)