Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim Unveils ‘AI Models For India’

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Friday (December 15) unveiled AI models of his new startup Krutrim AI and touted its solutions as “India’s first full-stack AI”.

During the launch event, Aggarwal also showcased an AI chatbot, powered by Krutrim, which functions in a way similar to other open source large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama 2, and Google’s Bard. 

“Today, all AI models, called LLM, are trained largely in English. But language is just not text but also the vehicle for cultural values, context, and ethos. Hence, the current AI models just can’t capture India’s culture, knowledge, and aspirations, given our multicultural, multilingual context. An India-first AI… needs to be trained on datasets specific to us,” said Aggarwal.

Ola Krutrim AI claims to have built its AI models from scratch, having trained them on 2 Tn tokens and unique datasets. The AI models can understand over 20 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi.

The word Krutrim is taken from the Sanskrit language and means “artificial”. 

The sign-ups for the base model ‘Krutrim’ will open today on the Krutrim website. Its next model called ‘Krutrim Pro’, with more sophisticated problem solving capabilities in text, speech, and vision, is expected to be launched in the next quarter.

With superior linguistic skills, Ola Krutrim expects to become a valuable tool for a wide range of purposes – from education to business communications. It also incorporates the latest techniques in safe AI to reduce inappropriate responses. 

Aggarwal incorporated the startup, Krutrim Si Designs Private Limited, in April this year with Ola’s parent ANI Technologies’ long-time board member Tenneti Venugopala Krishnamurthy as its director. Recently, the startup also raised $24 Mn in debt funding from Matrix Partners.

Aggarwal’s new AI entity comes at a time when he is also increasing his focus on bolstering his emobility business – Ola Electric. Both Ola and Ola Electric are already using Krutrim AI for sales, service, support, and several other processes.

Meanwhile, Krutrim is also working on AI infrastructure to develop indigenous data centres and eventually, server-computing, edge-computing, and super-computers. The startup is also working on silicon chips.

“For a well-run AI computing story and a business, you need to build AI models and you need to build the infrastructure and the silicon, and you need to integrate them very tightly. And that’s what our endeavour is,” said Aggarwal, speaking about the further upcoming developments.

Production is scheduled for mid-2024 for prototypes and a roll-out production roadmap by the end of 2025, said the startup.