Sarvam AI, an Indian start-up, is trying to create a viable competitor for the domestic market, unveiling an artificial-intelligence model that it says is more tailored to the languages and cultures of the world’s biggest market than the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.
The Bengaluru-based company announced two models at the ongoing AI summit in New Delhi — built to be used through voice commands and are accessible through 22 Indian languages, which it says will be a competitive advantage in the country of 145 crore population, where the vast majority can’t read, write or type in English.
“Today we show we can bring our own AI to a billion Indians,” said Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar during an event in Delhi, Bloomberg reported.
Sarvam also offers what’s known as “agentic” AI models that can carry out tasks like coding autonomously and with minimal human intervention.
The start-up’s unveiling of India-specific models trained from scratch comes as New Delhi is funding AI accelerators and pushing model makers to launch services locally.
Sarvam has steep challenges in fending off global competitors. The start-up was last valued at about $200 million — tiny compared with the likes of OpenAI, last valued at $500 billion.
Sarvam touts its India-first approach and the security it offers by running its models from inside the country. The start-up’s models are trained on trillions of Indian data sets, particularly those in Indian languages, making it suitable for real-time deployment at scale.