Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal's AI Startup Krutrim Launches Indian Large Language Model

Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup founded by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has launched India’s first multilingual large language model.

“Our LLM is voice-enabled, and able to understand several languages and even as a mix of languages such as Hinglish — Hindi and English,” Ola CEO BhavishAggarwal said. (Bloomberg)

 Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup founded by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has launched India's first multilingual large language model, 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 at the Friday event in Bangalore, hosted on the campus of Ola Group, where he's chief executive officer. “It's uniquely Indian.”

Krutrim, which translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, is also developing data centers and will ultimately aim to create servers and super computers for the AI ecosystem. The chatbot will be available in a beta version in January. Prototypes of the servers will be out in mid 2024 and production will start by the end of 2025, the startup said in a statement.

A clutch of Indian startups and academic groups are racing to build large language models in Indian languages, so-called Indic LLMs, after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT a year ago. 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 France's Mistral AI, 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. Generative AI startup Sarvam, which built its system using available open-source models, launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM earlier this week. The announcement came days after it had raised $41 million in an investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.

At the 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 next quarter. Aggarwal said he uses the software to write performance reviews for his team and compose job descriptions for hiring.