Sarvam AI selected to build indigenous foundational model under IndiaAI Mission
ETtech (L-R) Abhishek Singh, CEO, IndiaAI Mission; S Krishnan, secretary, Meity; Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister, electronics and IT; Vivek Raghavan, cofounder, Sarvam AI; Pratyush Kumar, cofounder, Sarvam AI. Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI is the first startup selected to build an indigenous foundational model under the Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission, the government announced on Saturday.The model will be completed in six months, said cofounder Vivek Raghavan at an event where the announcement was made.
Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model, people in the know said.'This model will have 70 billion parameters and many innovations in programming as well as engineering, with which a 70 billion parameter (model) can compete with some of the best in the world,' said union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, explaining the reasons for selecting Sarvam.ET on last Thursday reported that the startup backed by investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners could be among the first batch of companies to be shortlisted to receive incentives under the IndiaAI Mission to build frontier AI models.
The government has received more than 400 applications to build Indian models.
Capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, Sarvam's model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, the startup said in a statement.As part of the sovereign large language model proposal, Sarvam is developing three model variants, cofounder Pratyush Kumar said. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks.
'We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models,' said Kumar. Both Raghavan and Kumar were part of AI4Bharat before branching out to set up the startup in 2023.The multi-modal, multi-scale Indian foundation models will open up a 'universe of applications' for citizens and enterprises, said Raghavan.
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