Physics Wallah taps AI for building SLM support

Physics Wallah is building small language models (SLMs) to solve questions in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, as the edtech major seeks to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for scale and efficiency.

- Rwit Ghosh & Mansi Verma

BENGALURU:

"Our chief technology officer Devesh Mishra has dropped all his other responsibilities to focus on building SLMs for Physics Wallah," company founder and chief executive Alakh Pandey told Mint in an interview.

The Noida-based company aims to have these SLMs ready by the end of 2026.

SLMs are AI models that are significantly smaller than large language models (LLMs) because they're trained on significantly fewer parameters, ranging from a few million to a few billion. In comparison, LLMs are trained with hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters. Additionally, SLMs are cost-efficient because they require significantly less computational power and can be tuned to perform specific tasks—in Physics Wallah's case, answering questions on different subjects.

The SLM push is a part of the company's larger pivot to building AI products as it seeks to race ahead of other edtech companies joining the fray. To that end, Pandey is clear about how he's going about it.