Mint Explainer: The mercurial rise of India-focused LLMs
Tech Mahindra’s Indus project; AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras; Project Vaani–part of the Bhasha AI project of ARTPARK and the Indian Institute of Science’s pan-India language initiatives; Sarvam AI’s OpenHathi series; and CoRover.ai’s BharatGPT. Generative AI, or GenAI, refers to the ability of LLM-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos (hence the term, multimodal).
GenAI systems fall under the broad category of machine learning, but unlike traditional ML that can analyse data patterns to make predictions, these systems create entirely new content with the help of ‘prompts’. That said, can Ola’s Aggarwal do a Google Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT-4? And why is the parent of electric cars and scooters, Ola Electric, and ride-sharing startup, Ola Cabs, dabbling with foundational models, data centres, and silicon chips that require a lot of investment? Aggarwal’s Krutrim announcement comes at a time when the government is set to unveil its AI policy under the India AI programme on 10 January, which will include a policy framework for public-private partnership models on development of AI databases in Indic languages, as well as indigenous compute capacities, according to Union minister of state for IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
But the release of Krutrim’s base foundation model also comes at a time when Ola Electric is gearing up to file for an IPO. Backed by SoftBank, Ola Electric is targeting a valuation of $7-8 billion by early 2024.
While that figure’s much higher than the company’s current estimated worth of about $3.6 billion, it’s closer to Ola Electric’s estimated valuation of $7.3 billion as at the end of 2021. Ola Electric plans to use the funds raised
. Read more on livemint.com
