Avatar, an AI-native transformational company, announced Varya, a compact video AI model designed specifically for India, to make cutting-edge video creation affordable and accessible to a wide range of users. The launch event in New Delhi was also attended by Shri S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, who emphasized the government’s support for indigenous AI innovations. Built to understand the rich culture of India’s regions, festivals, communities, food, clothing, public spaces, and daily life, Varya enables anyone from a teacher in a village classroom to a small business creating a product ad to turn a simple idea into a fully realized video story.
Distillation technology improves AI efficiently and cost-effectively
Varya leverages distilled video generation, a machine learning technique that compresses large, slow “teacher” models into smaller, faster “student” models that reproduce the same output quality with much less computation. While traditional video models require more than 50 iterative steps to generate a single clip, Varya can achieve comparable results in just four steps, making video production dramatically faster and more affordable. Internal benchmarks show that the model can generate videos for as little as 0.48 ₹ per second, making it up to 10x more cost-effective than some leading global video models, ensuring that AI video creation is accessible to a wider range of people, not just the privileged few.
Indigenous AI for India’s next billion stories
Developed with support from the IndiaAI Mission and the grant-funded National AI Computing Infrastructure, Varya represents India’s push towards an indigenous-based model that can operate at population scale. CEO Sravanth Aluru emphasized that affordability is key to joining a country of 1.4 billion people, and Varya demonstrated that high-quality video AI is efficient and context-aware to meet India’s diverse needs. By allowing users to transform their ideas into video stories with just a few prompts, this model opens the door to lessons, advertisements, public information, and personal content that reflect a country’s culture and daily life, demonstrating that efficient and accessible AI can inspire creativity at scale.
