India needs more infra to train larger AI models, says Krutrim's top executive
Ola's artificial intelligence arm
Krutrim
is looking to get its base infrastructure, from semiconductors to hardware, fast and cost-effective as the company scales up its AI services, senior vice-president and head of business A Navendu said.
Krutrim, which raised $50 million in 2024, has seen few takers for its AI products due to poor documentation and lack of adequate technical maturity, ET reported earlier this month, citing several developers and startup founders.
Navendu, who was previously chief information officer at
Ola Electric
, told ET that one of the biggest challenges in the country is the lack of infrastructure for training large models, as only 10,000 GPUs are currently available, and the rest of the GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission are still to be delivered.
'If you look at (US AI startup) Grok, it is trained on 100,000 GPUs and (ChatGPT developer) OpenAI, 200,000 every quarter. You have to cut some slack for Indian companies,' he said.
Early this year, Krutrim announced that it would invest Rs 2,000 crore in
Krutrim AI
labs as part of a total investment of Rs 10,000 crore by next year.
The second biggest challenge is data.
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There is a dearth of Indic language data, said Chandra Khatri, who heads AI at Krutrim. 'If you look at data on the web, only 1% of it is Indian languages whereas the Indian population is 20% of the group. If you want to build for India, you need to scrape, digitise, scam and collect data. This is a challenge.'
The company is working on a multibillion parameter model. To address the compute needs, it will use a mixture of its own and IndiaAI GPUs and will also explore building its own data centres, Navendu told ET. He did not disclose the details.
Navendu spoke to ET on the sidelines of the launch of the company's agentic AI assistant Kruti, a consumer application that is autonomous and can take action on behalf of the user. It is currently integrated with Ola's ecosystem offering four services, including cab booking, food delivery, bill payment and image generation, with plans to expand further.
The company is also in talks with multiple services across healthcare and shopping use cases. Sunit S, head of product design, said it will also pursue partnerships with ONDC, which offers services such as metro tickets and recharge.
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