When Amrith Shenava began experimenting with large language models shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, he quickly realized that Tulu — the language he and some 2 million people spoke in the southern Indian state of Karnataka — had virtually no digital data set. He decided to build one. Shenava, who has a degree in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio, had earlier launched a translation app, and a language learning app for Tulu. To build the data set for the LLM, he had to collect...