Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) major
Zoho is building its own large language model (LLM), similar to
OpenAI's GPT and Google's PaLM 2 models. The project is being overseen by founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu, and is being worked on by the company's R&D team in India.
"We have been working on artificial intelligence for a decade now. When customers needed ChatGPT integration, we gave them that by integration with 13 of our apps as we announced recently," Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience, Zoho said in Delhi on June 14.
"In the short term, we have built the integration with ChatGPT... But we are also building proprietary large language models that will be capable of summarising, paraphrasing and adapting to new tasks. However, we have not set a specific timeline for it," he added.
Zoho's announcement of building LLMs comes days after a controversy was stirred up around a comment made by OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman. He said that it would be "hopeless" for an Indian startup with $10 million in funding to work on a foundational LLM.
Altman later clarified that his quote had been taken out of context, but not before Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani declared that he took OpenAI chief's remark as a "challenge."
Meanwhile, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that OpenAI chief Sam Altman is not the final word on India's AI aspirations, and that there will be many areas where he disagrees with the founder of the immensely popular ChatGPT chatbot.
