Sarvam AI unveils multilingual LLM; tepid response poses questions over India's AI chops
Indian artificial intelligence (AI) startup
Sarvam AI
, the first company picked by the government to build a sovereign foundational model under the
India AI Mission
, dropped its multilingual open-source
large language model
(LLM) Sarvam M last week. It claims the LLM has achieved benchmarks across mathematics, programming, and a range of Indian languages.
But the launch has thrown up questions about the country's AI scene, with the model getting only a few hundred downloads in the first two days.
Let's take a deep dive to understand why.
About the model
Sarvam M is a 24-billion-parameter model, built on top of French AI company Mistral's model Small. The startup said the model is "built for versatility" and designed to support a wide range of applications, including conversational agents, translation and educational tools. It supports 10 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam.
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— SarvamAI (@SarvamAI)
"This is the first in a series of contributions as we help build out the Sovereign AI Ecosystem in India," the startup said in a post on X.
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Key features
Hybrid thinking mode:
This mode supports complex logical reasoning, solves mathematical problems and handles coding tasks. It also has a 'non-think' mode for general purpose conversation.
Indic skills:
It is post-trained in Indian languages along with English to better suit local needs.
Reasoning capabilities:
The company claims Sarvam M outperforms similarly sized models on coding and math benchmarks.
No traction
In the first two days after the launch, the model had just over 300 downloads. As of May 27, it had 1,200 downloads on Hugging Face, can be tested on Sarvam AI's playground, and accessed through its APIs.
This sparked a debate on social media platforms about the standing of India's AI scene when compared with global rivals OpenAI and China's DeepSeek.
Social media backlash
In a scathing post, Deedy Das, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, hit out at "India's biggest AI startup $1B Sarvam" for a muted launch with only 23 downloads in 2 days. "In contrast, 2 Korean college trained an open-source model that did ~200K last month (sic)," his post on X read.
— deedydas (@deedydas)
Das added in another post that he had nothing against Sarvam or India trying to build AI, but was "disappointed at their direction".
Many came to the defence of the model. "Before Sarvam M came out, people were complaining about the lack of IndicLLMs. After Sarvam M came out, people are still complaining," one user wrote.
Another person said we must offer encouragement, not shame entrepreneurs. "Teams in India are trying and they are working to build the muscle and culture of what good or amazing looks like."
— svembu (@svembu)
Sridhar Vembu of Zoho also jumped to the defence of Sarvam, saying that there was no such thing as an "instant hit". "Even when we were the first mover in a new market and we had done a lot of technical work, we only got slow traction. Instant success is neither necessary nor sufficient to succeed long term," he said in a post on X, telling the Sarvam team to "fight the good fight".
Sarvam's trajectory
The Bengaluru-based startup was the first to be selected to build an indigenous foundational model under the Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission. It was provided access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the mission's common compute cluster to train its model.
According to Tracxn, the company has so far raised $53.6 million in total and is valued at $111 million.
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