Latest news with #PratyushKumar
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Under fire, Sarvam AI co-founder says worries about Indic GenAI model premature
Chennai/Bengaluru: India's latest home-grown generative AI language model, Sarvam-M, has drawn fire from sections of the developer community for what they describe as "under-whelming" performance. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now But Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam AI, insists the scepticism is premature and betrays a misunderstanding of how AI frontier models mature. "The ecosystem is early and people are worried too early," he tells TOI. "We are scrambling amongst ourselves when the world moves fast. We want to create an AI ecosystem where more people can positively collaborate." Released this month, the relatively small 24-billion-parameter Sarvam-M model was trained to reason across ten Indian languages while tackling maths and coding tasks. Kumar says benchmarks on Hugging Face (a platform and open-source library primarily used for leveraging machine learning models) show the model matching or outscoring popular open-source rivals (like Meta's Llama, Mistral Small and Gemma 3) in mathematics, programming and Indic-language comprehension. "With this we want to show that we cracked post-training (process of refining and optimising a machine learning model after its initial training phase) problems and our methodology is comparable with other models," he explains. "We open-sourced this because we want to show that such a model can be built and encourage other people to do it." Much of the social-media push-back has centred on relatively modest early-stage download numbers and the perception that Sarvam-M offers few breakthrough capabilities. Kumar counters that India's sovereign-AI ambitions demand more than one blockbuster release. "These things involve both scientific explorations and resource consumption," he says. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "I think we are on the path to building state-of-the-art models. " Sarvam AI is the first startup chosen to build a frontier model under the government's IndiaAI Mission, which is funding compute, data and research partnerships to reduce reliance on overseas platforms. Although the latest model is a private effort separate from the IndiaAI Mission, Kumar says the initiative will benefit everyone. He declines to give a timeline for the AI Mission-backed foundation model, noting that the company has yet to receive graphics-processing units (GPUs) from government suppliers. "We will open-source the foundational model," he says, but warns that schedules depend on hardware access and collaborative research cycles. Industry weighs in Seasoned AI practitioners say early criticism overlooks the scale of what Sarvam is attempting. "Building a 24-billion-parameter model in India is not easy, especially when deep research isn't encouraged in most universities or companies," says Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder of consultancy AI&Beyond. "Sarvam-M demonstrates robust multilingual reasoning by supporting ten Indian languages – no other model in the world has such a strong Indic component. " Sourabh Deorah, CEO & co-founder of an AI-powered employee engagement and rewards platform, says that as someone deeply involved in machine learning, he understands how challenging it is to create a 24-bn parameter model that not only handles reasoning tasks like math and programming but also delivers high-quality performance across multiple Indian languages – many of which have long been underserved in the AI space. Piyush Goel, CEO & founder of IT consulting company Beyond Key, says that the new model's potential to drive agentic AI in education, healthcare, and automation is exciting. Agentic AI is a type of AI that makes decisions and takes actions based on context and objectives without constant human intervention. Karthikeyan G, senior director of engineering architecture at software company Ascendion, says Sarvam-M's architecture will enable AI agents to interact among themselves (to take complex decisions) thanks to the standardised protocols being used. This will be crucial for the next stage of the AI wave.
Time of India
16-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI receives 506 foundation AI model proposals
Live Events The country's push to build artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities is getting an overwhelming response, with IndiaAI Mission on Friday revealing it has received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational selections will be announced shortly, IndiaAI model will have 70 billion multi-modal, multi-scale Indian foundation models will open up a "universe of applications" for citizens and enterprises, Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan had said on April 26. The model will be completed in six months, he had of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, Sarvam's model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, the startup had said in a to cofounder Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is developing three model variants. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device 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 had said.'We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models,' Kumar had said.
Time of India
06-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI-academia tango: The global leaders
For instance, IIT Madras researchers-turned-startup founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI were recently selected to build Indian language foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads While the research to product path is less trodden in India, shifts are underway. With starting up becoming increasingly popular and young people having a growing appetite for both research, innovation and risk, things may be changing. For instance, IIT Madras researchers-turned-startup founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI were recently selected to build Indian language foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission. ET looks at AI researchers from top universities around the world who went from lab to launch, starting and supporting AI businesses
Indian Express
26-04-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Centre selects start-up Sarvam to build country's first homegrown AI model
The government has selected the Bengaluru-based start-up Sarvam to build the country's first indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) amid waves made by China's low cost model DeepSeek. The start-up, chosen from among 67 applicants, will receive support from the government in terms of compute resources to build the model from scratch. Sarvam is the first start-up to get approved for sops under India's ambitious Rs 10,370 crore IndiaAI Mission to build a model, with the government currently assessing hundreds of other proposals. Sarvam said that its model will be capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, and it will be ready for population-scale deployment. A senior official said that in terms of government support, the company will receive access to 4,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months for the company to build and train its model. The model is not expected to be open-sourced, but will be fine tuned particularly for Indian languages. The GPUs will be provided to Sarvam by the companies which have been separately selected by the government to set up AI data centres in India. 'This (Sarvam's) model will have 70 billion parameters and many innovations in programming as well as engineering. With these innovations, a 70 billion parameter (model) can compete with some of the best in the world,' said IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. As part of the Sarvam's LLM proposal, the company is developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks, said Pratyush Kumar, one of the the company's two co-founders. The development comes amid the meteoric rise of DeepSeek, a low-cost foundational model from China, which shook up the AI industry. DeepSeek's entry into the AI space – touted for being open source, its accuracy and claims that it has been built at a fraction of the cost as its US competitors – sent Nvidia's stock on a downward spiral, since its R1 model was trained on inferior GPUs compared with the likes of OpenAI. Sarvam's model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India, using local infrastructure and developed by a new generation of Indian talent. This initiative aims to promote strategic autonomy, accelerate domestic innovation, and secure India's leadership in AI for the long term, the company said in a press release. Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam, said, 'This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders'. Earlier this year, the government had also selected 10 companies to supply 18,693 GPUs — high-end chips needed to develop machine learning tools — that can go into developing a foundational model. This is more than the initial aim of the IndiaAI Mission, under which the government was looking to procure 10,000 GPUs. The companies empaneled to provide the GPU services include Jio Platforms, the Hiranandani Group-backed Yotta, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, NxtGen Datacenter, CMS Computers, Ctrls Datacenters, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Orient Technologies, and Vensysco Technologies.
