One of the most advanced and widely used artificial intelligence models in the world is ChatGPT. It was developed by OpenAI, a research organization co-founded by Elon Musk, an influential entrepreneur. ChatGPT is an excellent tool capable of producing coherent texts in English that engage its users on any subject matter. It has been extensively used with content creation, chatbots, voice assistants, etc.
However, ChatGPT is fine; it only works in English. As a result, it fails to accommodate billions of others whose mother tongues differ from English, mostly from emerging markets such as India, where there are over 20 official languages and hundreds of dialects.
Thus, Bhavish Aggarwal—a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Ola (India’s largest ride-hailing service)—came up with Krutrim. This AI start-up aims to create big language models for Indian languages. Krutrim’s vision is to make AI available for everyone in their language without obstacles or hindrances.
Last month, Krutrim released its first product: a Hindi language model known as Krutrim-H. Its architecture is the same as ChatGPT’s, but it is trained on a large corpus containing various sources such as news articles, books, social media posts, and speech transcriptions in Hindi. Krutrim-H can generate natural and flowing texts in any area, like politics, sports, or entertainment, using Hindi.
Krutrim-H’s capabilities and quality have impressed the AI community and potential customers. According to Krutrim, its model can be used across different sectors, such as content creation, chatbots, voice assistants, and education. In addition, Krutrim intends to release more language models for other Indian languages soon.
Krutrim’s accomplishments are drawing much attention from investors who have been pouring money into the company. The start-up said today that it had raised $100m in a Series A funding round led by Sequoia India, thus valuing the firm at $1bn. By achieving this milestone, Krutrim became the first Indian AI start-up to become a “unicorn,” which is considered one of the fastest-growing start-ups worldwide.
However, Krutrim’s journey has challenges. Developing large language models for Indian languages is not trivial because it requires a lot of data, computational power, and expertise. In addition to that, other competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are also developing multilingual AI models. Moreover, in political, cultural, and religious domains, Krutrim has to grapple with ethical dilemmas associated with applying AI.
Nevertheless, this is okay with Krutrim. The startup has an effective approach to dealing with these challenges and achieving its objectives. One key part of the plan involves consolidating its strong network and partnerships with various stakeholders in India, including government agencies, academic institutions, media houses, and civil society organizations. These connections offer the business access to reliable data sources, domain knowledge, and user feedback.
Some examples of Krutrim’s partnerships in India are:
- Krutrim has partnered with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to collaborate on developing AI solutions for various sectors and domains in India.
- Krutrim has partnered with IIT Bombay to establish a research center for natural language processing (NLP) and speech processing.
- Krutrim has partnered with The Times Group to use its vast collection of news articles and other content in various Indian languages as a data source for training its models.
- Krutrim has partnered with Swarajya to create engaging and informative content in Hindi for its readers using its AI model.
- Krutrim has partnered with Entrepreneur India to showcase its AI innovations and achievements to the Indian startup ecosystem.
These partnerships not only help Krutrim improve its models and make them more relevant and useful for its users but also help it gain credibility and trust among various stakeholders in India.
Krutrim’s success is a testament to the power and potential of artificial intelligence and a sign of the growing demand and opportunity for AI solutions in non-English languages. As more and more people around the world access the internet and digital services, there is a need for AI models that can understand and communicate with them in their native languages. Krutrim is leading the way in this domain, and we expect to see more innovations and breakthroughs from them.
