Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO of Ola, has announced his latest project, Krutrim AI. Touted as "India's first full-stack AI" solution, built for India and Indians, Ola claimed that Krutrim is "an AI model of (India's) own, built on local Indian knowledge, languages and data. AI will transform everything, and touch our economic, and cultural lives so deeply. This time instead of using Western products, India will build our own!"
The project — touted as India's first AI — was announced through a hybrid event that was streamed live on YouTube. Krutrim means "artificial" in Sanskrit, and Aggarwal said the model can understand 20 Indian languages and can generate in 10 Indian languages, including Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, and Odiya, among others.
Aggarwal said India needs to become a global leader in AI.
"Today, all AI models, called LLM, are trained largely in English, but language is not just text. Language is also the vehicle for cultural values, context and ethos, and its current AI models just can't capture India's culture, knowledge, and aspirations given our multicultural, multilingual heritage," Aggarwal claimed.
Aggarwal said there are very few moments in time when a technology comes along that can impact both the economy and culture profoundly, making us the most productive, efficient and empowered economy in the world.
"An AI-first economy will push the Indian technology industry on a nonlinear path, and make it a Global Knowledge Centre. And an AI-first economy will make India a leader in scientific discovery. And (Krutrim) AI will be a tool for cultural expression, rather than assimilation into a single global paradigm. And with that vision, today, we introduce Krutrimm" Aggarwal said.
What is Krutrim?
Krutrim is a large language model (LLM) that Ola claims has been trained on over 2 trillion tokens — which are subwords used in conversations, While acknowledging that Krutrim still has its training wheels on, Aggarwal showcased a demo of the AI model, in which it wrote stories, poems and more in multiple Indian languages.
Krutrim aims to have a wide-ranging impact on individuals and businesses.
"This is a model with many innovations in architecture and trained on 2 trillion tokens. This LLM by far has the largest representation of the data used in training ever to offer the right balance for performance and price, and will be able to power most database applications," Ravi Jain, Ola's CMO, said during the demo.
He further said they will soon launch Krutrim Pro, which will be a very large multimodal AI model, which he said will have more sophisticated problem-solving and task execution capabilities.
Krutrim Pro will come out in the next quarter.
Aggarwal has always been optimistic about the potential of AI as a powerful force for cultural assimilation. He underscored the need for India to possess its own AI, emphasising that many popular language models are trained on non-Indian data.
According to the team that developed Krutrim, it is larger than even GPT-4 in Indic language support.
