Meet Bhavish Aggarwal's Krutrim, India's answer to ChatGPT
Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of Ola, ventured into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) with Krutrim Si Designs. The company has now unveiled its first family of multilingual AI models, called Krutrim. The Sanskrit word for "artificial," Krutrim will be available in two sizes: a base model and a larger, more advanced one named Krutrim Pro, set to debut early next year.
Some info about the Krutrim AI models
The base Krutrim model has been trained on two trillion tokens (subwords used in conversations) as well as datasets. It can generate content in languages like Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Odiya, and Kannada, among others. Meanwhile, Krutrim Pro will be utilized for "advanced problem-solving and task execution." Its details are not fully known yet. The team behind Krutrim claims that its Indic language support is larger than even OpenAI's GPT-4.
Krutrim's capabilities and team
At the launch event, Aggarwal demonstrated an AI chatbot powered by Krutrim, which is similar to Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT. This chatbot can comprehend 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 of them. The Krutrim team operates from both India and the United States. Krutrim Si Designs was founded in April 2023 by Aggarwal and Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, a board member of ANI Technologies Ltd, the parent company of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.
What's the goal?
Krutrim has been touted as "India's first full-stack AI" solution, made for India and Indians. According to Aggarwal, it is "an AI model of (India's) own, built on local Indian knowledge, languages and data." "AI will transform everything, and touch our economic, and cultural lives so deeply. This time instead of using Western products, India will build our own!" he added.
Competition and recent developments in AI
Krutrim's unveiling comes on the heels of OpenHathi, the first Hindi large language model by Indian start-up Sarvam. Sarvam recently secured $41 million in funding from investors like Lightspeed Ventures, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures. Moreover, tech giant Google launched Gemini, its most advanced AI model to date, earlier this month. Aggarwal has previously stated that Krutrim aims to be an AI company specifically tailored for Indian customers, utilizing the country's data resources.
