BENGALURU, India - Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup founded by entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has launched India’s first multilingual large language model (LLM), which can generate text in 10 Indian languages.
“Our LLM is voice-enabled, and able to understand several languages and even as a mix of languages such as Hinglish — Hindi and English,” Aggarwal said on Friday at an event held on the campus of Ola Group, where he is the CEO. “It’s uniquely Indian.”
Krutrim, which translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, is also developing data centres and will ultimately aim to create servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem. The chatbot will be available in a beta version in January. Prototypes of the servers will be ready in mid-2024 and production will start by the end of 2025, the company said in a statement.
Indian startups and academic groups have been racing to build large language models in Indian languages, so-called Indic LLMs, since the launch of ChatGPT a year ago. Many countries are hoping to build their own competing AI systems, rather than relying on technology from the US or China.
In Europe, investors are pouring cash into Mistral AI, a French firm now valued at $2 billion after being founded earlier this year. The United Arab Emirates touts its Falcon model, which is backed by an Abu Dhabi government research institute.
India, with 1.4 billion people, is focusing on building smaller, more cost-efficient AI systems. The generative AI startup Sarvam, which built its system using available open-source models, launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM, earlier this week.
At Friday’s event, Aggarwal prompted the open-source Krutrim model to welcome guests in English, write a poem in Tamil, compose an ode to monsoons in Bengali and produce software code.
“The AI models known around the world are trained largely in English,” he said. “They cannot capture our culture, language and ethos.”
The company is also focused on developing chips, including a “multiple chiplet” strategy that it said will cut costs and make data center design, he said.
Krutrim — which is widely deployed within the Ola Group ride-hailing company to aid voice chat, sales calls and customer support emails — also plans to roll out an enterprise model called Krutrim Pro in the next quarter.
Aggarwal said he uses the software to write performance reviews for his team and compose job descriptions for hiring.
