Ola group founder Bhavish Aggarwal has announced a Rs 2,000-crore investment in his new AI startup Krutrim, with a commitment to scale it up to Rs 10,000 crore by next year. As reported by the Economic Times, the funding will be a mix of equity and debt.
Incidentally, Krutrim has deployed Chinese startup DeepSeek’s advanced AI models on domestic servers to ensure data privacy while reducing the cost of training AI models.
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Krutrim AI Lab
Announcing the development on social media platform X on Tuesday, the Ola founder unveiled the Krutrim AI Lab and said the startup is open-sourcing a series of AI models.
These models include Krutrim 2, its new large language model (LLM); Chitrarth 1, a vision-language model built on top of Krutrim 1; Dhwani 1, a speech-language model capable of tasks like speech translation; Vyakhyarth 1, an Indic embedding model for applications such as search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); and Krutrim Translate 1, a text-to-text translation model, and others.
“We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in 1 year,” Aggarwal said. “And by open sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem. We’re still learning to walk before we can run, hopefully within this year!”
He further informed the deployment of GB200 Superchips in partnership with chip major Nvidia. The system is expected to go live by March, aiming to become India’s largest supercomputer by the end of the year.
On January 31, Union Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that DeepSeek models would soon be hosted on Indian servers.
The Minister also said India will offer the world’s most affordable computing power for high-end chips powering generative AI, at less than $1 per hour, as part of the Modi government’s Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission.
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