Krutrim Si Designs, the artificial intelligence (AI) venture of Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, on Friday, unveiled Krutrim, its base Large Language Model (LLM). He has joined the increasingly competitive AI race dominated by players such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Krutrim has been built with the largest representation of Indian data used for its training, powering generative AI applications for all Indian languages.

It has been trained by a team of leading computer scientists, based in Bengaluru and San Francisco. This model will also power Krutrim’s conversational AI assistant, which understands and speaks multiple Indian languages fluently.

“AI will define the future paradigms of economy and culture. To become a true leader of the world, India needs to become a global leader in AI. Today, all AI models called LLMs are trained largely in English. But language is not just text; it is also the vehicle for cultural values, context, and ethos. Due to India’s multicultural and multilingual context, the AI models just can’t capture that. It needs to be trained on unique data sets specific to us. And on top of it all, it needs to be accessible to India, with India-first cost structures. An AI-first economy will improve labour and capital productivity. It will push the Indian technology industry on a nonlinear path and make it a global knowledge centre, a leader in scientific discoveries, and a tool for cultural expression,” said Aggarwal, at the company event.

“With that vision, we have introduced Krutrim, the country’s own AI for 1.4 billion Indians. We are extremely excited to launch India’s first complete AI computing stack, Krutrim, which understands our unique cultural context, connecting our future to our roots. With an India-first cost structure, Krutrim will have the largest representation of Indian data, enabling us to create novel models beyond LLMs across sectors, making India the most productive, efficient, and empowered economy in the world.”

Krutrim, meaning “artificial” in Sanskrit, is a family of Large Language Models, including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro, which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference. Trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim accomplishes better performance on multiple well-known, global LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC.

During the launch event, Aggarwal demonstrated an AI chatbot powered by Krutrim. It functions similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

The Ola Krutrim model can fluently switch between languages and discuss nuanced topics ranging from poetry in Bengali, to Bollywood movies, to creative masala dosa recipes. It will be available in beta version from January 2024 as an API (application programming interface) for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI-driven assistants that can converse in multiple Indian languages. Krutrim Pro will be available in Q4, FY 2024.

Ola said that Krutrim’s superior linguistic skills make it a valuable tool for a wide range of purposes, from education to business communications. It incorporates the latest techniques in safe AI to reduce inappropriate responses. The company is also working on AI infrastructure to develop indigenous data centres and eventually, server-computing, edge-computing, and super-computers. Production is scheduled for mid-2024 for prototypes and a roll-out production roadmap by the end of 2025.

“We’re also building our own technology for data centres. It is not just the physical investment into the data centre, but also the technology because it’s very important to make data centres more efficient, to bring down cost, and also to make those greener and sustainable solutions,” said Aggarwal. “While AI is the soul, the infrastructure and the silicon is the body in which it runs. In India, we need to design our own silicon chips for building this.”

The company is running an early access programme starting today until January 2024 with a simple sign-up page on the website. Additionally, the open release is scheduled for January 2024 and open APIs will open to all developers by February 2024. Ola also plans to use Krutrim across its group companies for its sales, service, support, and other processes.

Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023. It was set up by Aggarwal with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti.

Tenneti is one of the board members of ANI Technologies Ltd, which owns Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.

Krutrim’s launch comes at a time when Indian generative AI start-up Sarvam AI recently unveiled OpenHathi, the first Hindi large language model. Sarvam recently raised $41 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed and supported by Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam is developing a “full-stack” product that can be used for training custom AI models or as an enterprise-grade platform. The company said a full-stack approach will accelerate GenAI adoption in India, given that enterprises acknowledge the technology’s potential but are grappling with how to leverage it for business.

Tech giant Alphabet recently introduced its most advanced artificial intelligence model, a technology capable of crunching different forms of information such as video, audio, and text. Called Gemini, the Google owner’s highly anticipated AI model is capable of more sophisticated reasoning and understanding information with a greater degree of nuance than Google’s prior technology, the company said.

First Published: Dec 15 2023 | 5:59 PM IST