Sarvam AI Co-founder Urges Native AI Development
The co-founder of Sarvam AI has called for India to build its own native artificial intelligence technology. The statement emphasized the need for sovereign capabilities to avoid becoming a "digital colony" dependent on foreign AI platforms and infrastructure.
- Sarvam AI was founded in July 2023 by Dr. Vivek Raghavan, who has experience building India's digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar, and Dr. Pratyush Kumar, a former researcher at Microsoft and IBM who is a pioneer in open-source Indic AI through his work with AI4Bharat. - In December 2023, the company announced a $41 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, marking one of the largest early-stage investments for an Indian AI startup. - The Indian government selected Sarvam AI under its ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission to develop the nation's first sovereign large language model. This provides Sarvam AI with access to thousands of government-supported GPUs for training its models. - The company has released "OpenHathi-Hi-v0.1," the first Hindi Large Language Model in its OpenHathi series, which is built on the Llama2-7B architecture and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-3.5 for Indic languages. - Sarvam AI is building a full-stack generative AI platform, offering tools like "Saaras" for speech-to-text and "Sarvam Vision" for processing complex documents in Indian scripts. - The company's foundational models are trained on trillions of data tokens, with a significantly higher concentration of Indian language data (10-20%) compared to the fraction typically found in global models.
