Overview

Bud Ecosystem has developed Hex-1, India’s first commercially usable open-source large language model (LLM) tailored for Indic languages, in collaboration with AMD. Trained on AMD-powered compute infrastructure, Hex-1 bridges the linguistic AI gap for millions of users in India by delivering state-of-the-art performance in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam while enabling developers and businesses to build inclusive language applications.

The Language Divide: A Problem Bud Set Out to Solve

India’s linguistic diversity is both cultural wealth and a challenge for AI. With only about 10% of the population fluent in English, most global AI models are ineffective for the rest of the country’s users. Bud identified this gap and decided to build an LLM that could:

• Understand and generate multiple Indian languages reliably
• Be fully open source and commercially usable
• Enable fast innovation and adoption across sectors such as education, enterprise productivity, customer support, and more

Introducing Hex-1: An AI Model Designed for India

Hex-1 is a 4-billion-parameter LLM engineered specifically for Indic languages. Unlike many global models trained primarily on English data, Hex-1 was built to handle the linguistic richness and nuances of Indian languages—making generative AI practical, usable, and inclusive for the Indian market.

When benchmarked against leading models like Gemma-2B, LLaMA-3.2-3B, and Sarvam-1, Hex-1 delivers best-in-class performance across Indic languages on key evaluation metrics such as MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding).

Crucially, Hex-1 is released with an open-source and commercial license, enabling startups, developers, and enterprises to integrate and innovate freely without restrictive usage terms—accelerating AI adoption across India.

Choosing the Right Infrastructure: Why AMD Technology Mattered

Bud’s engineering and research teams chose AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPUs—deployed via Microsoft Azure—and the AMD ROCm™ open-source software stack to train Hex-1. This technology selection was central to meeting Bud’s aggressive training timeline and performance goals.

Key infrastructure advantages included:

• Faster training speeds: AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs helped Bud train Hex-1 up to 30% faster than alternative configurations, shortening development cycles and enabling rapid iteration.
• Lower GPU usage: High memory capacity and computational efficiency meant Bud used about 40% fewer GPUs, cutting infrastructure costs significantly.
• Greater memory capacity: With 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory, Bud could run larger batch sizes and longer context lengths without complicated memory workarounds.
• Open-aligned software: AMD’s ROCm stack, compatible with PyTorch and other open tools, fit Bud’s open-source philosophy and helped streamline model training and optimization.

This AMD-powered infrastructure gave Bud the compute performance and flexibility needed to deliver an LLM capable of competing with larger global models while keeping costs and development time under control.

What Hex-1 Delivers: Performance and Practical Impact

Hex-1 isn’t just another language model—it’s a tool built for real impact:

Best-in-Class Language Understanding

When evaluated across Indic language benchmarks for comprehension and reasoning, Hex-1 frequently outperformed larger models, including popular global alternatives. Its strong performance on MMLU and related metrics demonstrates real technical capability for diverse language use cases.

Commercially Usable and Open

By offering Hex-1 under an open-source license that allows commercial use, Bud is enabling a broader ecosystem of innovation—from AI-powered learning tools to localized enterprise assistants that truly understand and respond in native Indian languages.

Supporting India’s AI Growth

Hex-1 helps foster a stronger Indian AI ecosystem by empowering developers, researchers, and companies with a model that’s both high-performing and freely usable—a combination that lowers barriers to adoption and fuels AI-driven solutions tailored to local needs.

Conclusion: A Platform for Inclusive AI Innovation

With Hex-1, Bud Ecosystem has built a powerful, accessible, and India-centric generative AI model that broadens the reach of language technology. AMD’s high-performance GPUs and open-aligned software played a meaningful role in enabling the training and optimization of this model, helping Bud deliver superior performance and cost-efficiency at scale.