Sarvam, an AI startup in Bengaluru, has been selected by the Government of India’s IndiaAI mission to construct India’s first independent LLM (large language model). This grants Sarvam AI access to crucial compute resources for building this foundational, home-grown model.

This AI company has rapidly grown from a research lab. It will now build a safe and ready to be used voice-based AI from scratch with the ability to reason and speak multiple Indian languages.

Dr Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam, said, “We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country. 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”.

Raghavan suggests that interacting with AI will feel natural and familiar to citizens, while businesses can leverage its intelligence without transferring their data internationally.

This indigenous AI model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India using local resources and developed by a new generation of Indian talent. The IndiaAI Mission aims to achieve strategic autonomy and enhance domestic innovation, securing India’s future leadership in AI.

Dr Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, said, “Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country. As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are 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”.

Kumar mentioned a collaboration with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leading Indian language AI research group, to develop these models.

Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting, said, “We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models”.

Source:

https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/sarvam-ai-to-build-indias-first-sovereign-llm-with-reasoning-and-voice-capabilities-9967108/