AI startup Sarvam AI unveils mix of open source, enterprise products (2024)

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Sarvam AI on Tuesday launched a slate of products, both for enterprise usage and open source, as part of its full-stack Generative AI (GenAI) platform.

The firm, backed by investors such as Lightspeed and Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), said its products will be able to perform various tasks and be voice-enabled, supporting 10 Indian languages, namely Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada and Bengali.

Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan told ET on Monday that the company had collaborated with leading technology and industry partners to develop and deploy this full-stack GenAI platform. These products includeSarvam Agents, Sarvam 2B, Shuka 1.0, Sarvam Models, and A1.

The first product, SarvamAgents, will offer multilingual voice-enabled ‘agents’ that will be able to talk to customers over phone call, WhatsApp or in-app chat. They will also be able to take actions and make decisions based on the inputs provided by customers. The voice agents will be available, starting at Rs 1 per minute, for enterprises across sectors like financial services, legal services, consumer goods, and technology, media and telecom.

Infosys non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani said, "There was a big buzz about whether India can build models. But Sarvam has shown that it is possible to build models of two billion parameters. India is going to be the AI use case capital of the world. We will be unlikely to run on large frontier models, but we will be using much smaller targeted data models. For India, it is all about applying AI technologies in everyday use cases."

"India is not in the arms race to build LLMs and will focus on building AI use cases that will reach every citizen. Model building will ultimately get commoditised, and it's important to build it in a way that the engineering and capability can be used to deliver high-performance applications," he said.

The second product, called Sarvam 2B, will be an open source large language model (LLM). Sarvam says the LLM has been trained on an internal dataset of 4 trillion tokens that will be able to perform specific tasks in 10 Indian languages with great efficiency.

The third product, Shuka 1.0, will be an audio extension on tech major Meta’s open source Llama 8B language model to support Indian language usage. This will also be an open-source product.

The Indic language models used to build Sarvam Agents will also be available as a product, called ‘Sarvam Models’. These models will now be available as application programming interfaces (APIs). These will include models for translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and document parsing, and will be available as part of Sarvam’s own API platform for developers.

The fifth product, called ‘A1’, is a generative AI workbench designed for lawyers to enhance their capabilities with features such as regulatory chat, document drafting, redaction and data extraction.

Raghavan told ET in an interview on Monday that while Sarvam Agents, Sarvam models, and A1 are revenue generating products, Sarvam 2B and Shuka 1.0 will be open-sourced.

Sarvam will partner with the likes of Yotta, Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Exotel for these services and products. Nvidia’s DGX infrastructure will power the Sarvam stack, said Vishal Dhupar, the managing director of South Asia for Nvidia, at the event on Tuesday. Later Dhupar told ET on the sidelines that Sarvam stack is powered by Nvidia's H100 chips. While Azure, GCP, and Yotta will act as the company’s cloud partners, Exotel will power Sarvam’s chatbot for its customer conversations.

Sunil Gupta, chief executive of Yotta Data Services, told ET on the sidelines that Sarvam was one of the AI startups who had access to its H100 processors that it had procured from Nvidia.

Raghavan on Tuesday also announced that Sarvam will be partnering with Beckn Foundation and fintech firm Pine Labs. The Beckn Protocol powers e-commerce networks like the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

Sarvam’s launch comes just months after its Matrix-backed competitor Krutrim AI announced a slew of services, including offering its graphics processing units (GPU)-as-a-service and access to its large language models and other open source models hosted on its cloud. Krutrim, part of the Ola group headed by Bhavish Aggarwal, also launched standalone mobile apps for the Krutrim AI assistant to be used by end consumers, in May.