In a bold move to bolster India’s presence in the highly competitive AI arena, Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal is injecting a hefty $230 million into an AI startup he founded. This strategic investment comes at a time when the country is striving to carve out a significant space for itself in a field typically dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms.
Here are some key points regarding Aggarwal’s investment in Krutrim and the startup’s ambitious goals:
- Aggarwal is bankrolling the investment in Krutrim mainly through his family office, with plans to draw in a total investment of $1.15 billion by next year.
- Krutrim, a unicorn startup, has recently made its AI models open source, signaling a shift towards transparency and collaboration within the Indian AI community. In partnership with Nvidia, the company also aims to build what they claim will be India’s largest supercomputer.
- Notable achievements include the release of Krutrim-2, a 12-billion parameter language model that has exhibited impressive performance in handling Indian languages, with a remarkable 80% success rate in code generation tasks.
Furthermore, Krutrim has ventured into specialized models for various tasks, such as image processing, speech translation, and text search, all meticulously tailored for Indian languages. This move showcases the company’s commitment to bridging the gap between global benchmarks and the Indian AI ecosystem.
As part of its technical strategy, Krutrim employs a 128,000-token context window, enabling its systems to tackle longer texts and more intricate conversations. The startup’s performance metrics, including outstanding scores in grammar correction and multi-turn conversations, reflect substantial progress in a relatively short span.
In conclusion, Aggarwal’s substantial investment in Krutrim and the startup’s dedication to enhancing AI capabilities in India are instrumental steps towards establishing a robust AI landscape in the country. With innovations like Krutrim-2 and the upcoming supercomputer deployment, India is poised to make significant strides in the AI domain and foster collaboration within the industry. As the global AI landscape evolves, initiatives like Krutrim’s open-sourcing efforts exemplify the spirit of innovation and collective growth essential for India’s AI ecosystem to thrive.
