Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal unveils India-first AI model Krutrim

Krutrim has entered the fiercely competitive field of AI, currently dominated by major players like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

At the company event, Bhavish Aggarwal said that AI would define the future paradigms of economy and culture. He underscored that India must establish itself as a leader in AI, to emerge as a true leader on the global stage.

Aggarwal pointed out that currently, all AI models, referred to as LLMs, are primarily trained in English, and foreign AI models are cannot fit India’s needs due to its multilingual and multicultural setting.

“Today, all AI models called LLMs are trained largely in English. But language is not just text but also the vehicle for cultural values, context and ethos. Due to India’s multicultural and multilingual context, the AI models just can't capture that. It needs to be trained on unique data sets specific to us.”

Aggarwal also highlighted the potential for an AI-first economy to enhance labour and capital productivity, propel the Indian technology industry on a nonlinear trajectory, establish it as a global knowledge center, and position it as a leader in scientific discoveries and a means of cultural expression.

“It also needs to be accessible to India, with India-first cost structures. An AI-first economy will improve labour and capital productivity. It will push the Indian technology industry on a nonlinear path and make it a global knowledge centre, a leader in scientific discoveries and a tool for cultural expression,” said Aggarwal.

Trained on a dataset exceeding 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim demonstrates superior performance across various globally recognized Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation benchmarks, including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC.

During the launch event, Aggarwal showcased an AI chatbot powered by Krutrim, which operates similarly to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

Ola's Krutrim model exhibits the capability to seamlessly switch between languages and engage in discussions on diverse and nuanced topics, ranging from Bengali poetry to Bollywood movies and creative masala dosa recipes.

The beta version of Krutrim will be made available as an Application Programming Interface (API) for enterprises and developers starting from January 2024, enabling the creation of AI-driven assistants capable of conversing in multiple Indian languages.

The advanced version, Krutrim Pro, is likely to be available in the fourth quarter of the financial year 2024.