Ola unveils AI model Krutrim, designed for Indian languages

Krutrim SI Designs, the new artificial intelligence (AI) venture of Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, has unveiled a family of multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) models to cater to the unique requirements of the Indian ecosystem.

Krutrim, ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will come in two sizes: a base model named Krutrim trained on 2 trillion tokens and unique datasets, and a larger, more complex model called Krutrim Pro, launching next quarter for advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

Aggarwal said that Krutrim can understand 22 Indian languages and generate content in about 10, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam.

People can now sign up for the base model, with early access rolling out in batches starting today. The full open release of Krutrim is scheduled for January 2024, and Krutrim APIs will be accessible to developers from February 2024.

The company also plans to launch a super computer in the next two years, he added. The company is also working on AI infrastructure to develop indigenous data centers and eventually, server-computing, edge-computing and super-computers. Production is scheduled for mid-2024 for prototypes and a rollout production roadmap by the end of 2025.

Senior executives presenting the model claimed Krutrim outperforms OpenAI’s GPT4 in Indian languages, both in terms of timing and computation. In English, company executives said Krutrim performed better than Meta’s Llama 2 chat, but was still behind GPT4, Google’s Bard and Gemini.

Krutrim is able to operate in multiple modes including text and voice. In the future, the model will be available for both wide-scale consumer usage as well as priced enterprise usage. In the future, the model will be available for both wide-scale consumer usage as well as priced enterprise usage.

Aggarwal clarified that Krutrim would be a separate entity and not a subsidiary of Ola Cabs or Ola Electric, though the three companies could collaborate in terms of data sharing and usage.

Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023. It was setup by Aggarwal with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, who is one of the board members of ANI Technologies Ltd, which owns Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.