Ramchand Kumaresan

The post is @Mechramc launch of Agaram 2.5B, a Tamil-first AI model trained from scratch by his non-profit lab 1/ what is agaram 2.5B ? a tamil-first AI model from @MuraiLabsHQ Labs, trained from scratch not an english model with tamil added later it chats in tamil script, tanglish and english, translates, and can call tools like a weather lookup (As per their paper and launch video) 2/ why tamil needs its own model most AI reads text in small pieces called tokens for one tamil word, Qwen2.5 needs about 9.4 pieces, agaram needs about 1.55 so the same tamil text takes about a sixth of the space that is the first fix, a tokenizer built for tamil 3/ how it was trained 2.5 billion parameters, 50 billion tokens, 58% of them tamil one node of 8 H100 GPUs, about 6 days, zero restarts after that they opened a public preview for 4 days real people talked to it, and the team rebuilt the fine-tuning from what failed, on 222,662 examples 4/ how good is it ? on translation (FLORES test) it scores 56.9 into tamil, Google's Gemma 4 E4B scores 49.3 and it beats Sarvam-1 in all six directions they measured these are their own tests, but they published the full paper and the weights so anyone can check 5/ what it can't do yet, and they say so factual knowledge is weak, near chance on knowledge tests they say not to rely on it for medical, legal or financial advice honest limits in a paper are a good sign 6/ the people and the cost a team of three, one founder and two volunteers about USD 13,900 total for two models, partly from grants and credits the name agaram, from the first letter அ, was chosen by public vote on X free, Apache-2.0 licence, 2.7 GB file runs offline Language literature grows when adoption increases !!