Homegrown AI startup Sarvam is slated to be among the first to roll out India’s first large language model (LLM) by early next year, helped by government scaling up computing capacity for developers, students and startups to 40,000 GPUs as part of the IndiaAI Mission, which is four times the initial target.
“One of them, most probably Sarvam, will be the first to come off the mark with a reasonably sized, well-trained, Indian language-trained model, with data that is not having the bias of many other models,” Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw told Moneycontrol in an exclusive interview.
“Against a 10,000 target, 34,000 GPUs are already empanelled, and another 6,000 are in process. That means 40,000 GPUs we are able to provide to our development community," he added.
The IndiaAI Mission, backed by a Rs 10,000 crore fund to build India’s sovereign foundational model, has disbursed Rs 111 crore in GPU subsidies so far.
The biggest winner to date is Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, which bagged a record 4,096 NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs via Yotta Data Services, receiving nearly Rs 99 crore in subsidies.
Sarvam was earlier announced as the first startup selected to build India’s foundational AI model under the mission.
Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharat, Sarvam develops a full-stack offering for Generative AI, ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment.
Raghavan, an entrepreneur and technologist who was instrumental in building Digital Public Goods (DPGs) like Aadhaar, said that Sarvam will work with Indian enterprises to co-develop domain-specific AI models leveraging their data.
The startup aims to create population-scale impact layering Gen AI on top of its highly successful India stack, specifically for public-good applications.
In December 2023, Sarvam AI raised $41 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Vaishnaw said that India is seeing significant adoption of AI at the application layer, while at the fundamental level, four startups are developing indigenous algorithms.
On AI safety, the minister said India is pursuing a ‘techno-legal’ approach, building technological tools alongside legal frameworks to counter threats and risks from AI.
The AI Safety Institute, set up as a network of institutions, is already working with IIT Jodhpur and others to build tools that can detect defects and identify biases with high accuracy, he said.
European regulators have also taken note of India’s approach, Vaishnaw said, adding that the progress now hinges on focused execution and continued private sector participation.
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