Physics Wallah’s AI push: Immortalizing ‘star teachers,’ building SLM assistants

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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. “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. “The investment is huge and I’m investing blindly. I’m not thinking too hard about it because I don’t want to miss this [AI], because timing here will make a lot of difference," Pandey said.

The company is able to make substantial investments in AI because the rest of Physics Wallah’s projects run “frugally". SLMs are trained on significantly fewer parameters, ranging from a few million to a few billion. In comparison, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are trained with hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters.

SLMs are also 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. “Every business will potentially do this. And if you look at the broader spectrum of AI, they say that anything related to STEM skills—like the subjects PW is potentially using AI for—will likely be impacted by AI," said Amit Nawka, technology deals partner at PwC India.