Indian Startup Sarvam Launches Offline AI Chatbot
Indian AI startup Sarvam has launched Indus AI, a multilingual chatbot app designed to run on-device without an internet connection. The app, which has been praised by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, signals a shift towards edge AI for enterprise use cases in connectivity-challenged environments. Sarvam's development aims to provide a rival to ChatGPT that is tailored for the Indian market.
- Sarvam AI was founded in July 2023 by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, who were both previously associated with AI4Bharat, an open-source AI initiative for Indian languages based at IIT Madras. - The company secured $41 million in a Series A funding round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. This represents the largest Series A funding for an Indian AI startup. - Co-founder Vivek Raghavan was a key figure in developing India's Aadhaar identity program, serving as Chief Product Manager and Biometric Architect. Pratyush Kumar has a background in AI research at Microsoft Research and IBM. - The Indus AI chatbot is powered by Sarvam's own large language models, including a 105-billion parameter model, and supports all 22 official Indian languages through both text and voice. It is designed to handle "code-switching," where users mix languages in a single conversation. - Prior to the Indus app, Sarvam released OpenHathi, an open-source Hindi large language model based on Meta's Llama 2-7B architecture, which performs on par with GPT-3.5 for Indic languages. - The on-device functionality of Indus AI is part of a broader trend of edge AI, which reduces latency and improves reliability for applications like warehouse automation and logistics by processing data locally, a key consideration in areas with poor connectivity. - The startup was selected by the Indian government's IndiaAI Mission to develop a foundational large language model for the country, granting it access to significant government-supported computing infrastructure. - For enterprise clients, Sarvam is co-building domain-specific AI models and has announced partnerships with companies like HMD and Bosch to embed intelligence into devices and infrastructure.
