Open call · researchers & engineers

Build भारत’s open foundation model with us.

Akshara is a truly open-source, bilingual 1B foundation model — every datapoint, line of code, and checkpoint released and reproducible. We’re a small team at the start of the build, looking for collaborators who want their work to be fully in the open.

Phase 0 · forming the founding research group
Where you'd plug in
PHASE 1

Data & provenance grading

Grade-A-only manifests, A1/A2 sub-grading, dedup & decontamination over Dolma 3 + Sangraha verified.

PHASE 2

Multilingual tokenizer

Custom BPE, Indic fertility benchmarking across scripts, vocab/embedding budget.

PHASE 3–6

Training & infra

OLMo-core trainer, ladder validation, the bilingual pretrain → midtrain → long-context flow.

PHASE 6–7

Eval & post-training

OLMES + an Indic eval layer; SFT/DPO/RLVR for the Instruct & Think variants.

SPINE

Provenance & reproducibility

The ledger, manifest emitter, repro tooling — the part that makes "truly open" real.

PHASE 0

Compute & ops

IndiaAI empanelment, cluster bring-up, the things that unblock everything else.

How we verify applicants

✓ We check that you’re a researcher — once.

Because the project is fully open, we keep the contributor circle real. Give us one public, resolvable link that establishes your research background. We resolve it ourselves; we don’t share it.

  1. Provide an ORCID iD (best) — or a Google Scholar, arXiv, or GitHub profile. At least one is required.
  2. Apply from an institutional / academic email where you can — it strengthens the check.
  3. If we move forward, we confirm ownership with a magic link sent to your email before any access is granted.
Application
Institutional / academic email preferred
16 digits, e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097. Find yours at orcid.org.
Submissions are POSTed to the configured endpoint as JSON.
What happens next
01

You apply

Takes ~5 minutes.

02

We verify

We resolve your research link(s).

03

Short call

A conversation about fit and a first task.

04

Start in the open

Email magic-link, repo access, a Phase task.