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History

Project History

The Dharmamitra project has rapidly evolved from its inception, driven by a mission to provide state-of-the-art digital tools for ancient Asian languages. This page outlines the key milestones in our journey.

Inception and Early Breakthroughs (2023)

Dharmamitra was founded at BAIR, UC Berkeley in April 2023 by Kurt Keutzer and Sebastian Nehrdich. The project quickly gained momentum, and within just seven months, the team developed and released the Monlam-Mitra machine translation model in November 2023 in collaboration with monlam.ai. The team of monlam.ai did the necessary data collection, while we contributed automatized sentence alignment and machine translation model finetuning. This model represented a significant milestone as the first publicly available, functional solution for Tibetan-English machine translation.

Platform Launch and Growth (2024)

Building on this initial success, we soft-launched the comprehensive Dharmamitra web platform in April 2024, just one year after the project's start. The platform debuted with machine translation capabilities for Sanskrit, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, and Pāli to English.

Without any formal advertising, the platform's utility and power attracted an initial community of approximately 500 unique users within its first few weeks.

In autumn 2024 the release of the Dharmamitra Chrome Extension followed, which saw rapid adaption among translators and researchers around the world.

Scaling and Expansion (2025)

By mid-2025, two years after its founding, Dharmamitra had demonstrated significant growth and impact. The platform is now serving around 1,400 users daily, processing an average of 3,000–4,000 translation requests and 5,000–10,000 pages of OCR each day.

The Future of Dharmamitra

For the summer of 2025, the addition of the major features DharmaNexus, MITRA Search, and MITRA Deep Research is scheduled. These new tools are designed to drastically enhance the philological utility of the platform, empowering scholars and researchers to explore textual connections and historical context alongside machine translation in unprecedented ways.

Looking forward, Dharmamitra is committed to increasing API transparency and providing more options for other teams to build upon its robust infrastructure, fostering a collaborative ecosystem for digital humanities.

In the future we hope to provide Generative AI tools that enable elevating and transformative experiences through:

  • Immersive 3D experiences in maṇḍala
  • Generation of 2D art based on canonical guildelines