Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal unveils multilingual AI chatbot `Krutrim’

Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Friday unveiled a multilingual AI chatbot model, called `Krutrim’, designed and manufactured by Krutrim Si Designs, his artificial intelligence venture.

With Krutrim, which means `artificial’, Aggarwal has taken an indigenous approach to AI modelling.

Krutrim, which is planned to be launched early next year, will come in two sizes - a base model with 2 trillion token authentications and unique datasets, and a larger, more complex model, Krutrim Pro, with advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

Krutrim’s functions are comparable to those of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. 

Unveiling the `Krutrim’ at an event, Aggarwal claimed that the chatbot can generate content in 10 Indian languages, including Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Odiya, besides proficiency in understanding 20 Indian languages.

According to Aggarwal, unlike its western counterparts, Krutrim is engineered to follow India's rich heritage. He also claimed that Krutrim can outperform GPT-4 in six Indian languages.

Krutrim is trained 20 times more on Indic tokens than any other model, processing over 2 trillion subwords used in conversations. This has ensured a deep understanding of Indian culture, values, and aspirations, says Aggarwal.

Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023 by Bhavish Aggarwal and Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, who is also a board member of ANI Technologies Ltd, which owns Ola Cabs and Ola Electrictrin. Krutrim’s team of engineers is based across India and the Bay Area in the US.

Krutrim’s entry follows the launch of OpenHathi, a Hindi large language model by startup Sarvam, which also recently succeeded in raising $41 million from local investors.

Tech giant Google also unveiled Gemini, the company's newest and the most advanced AI model earlier this month.