Startups take to LLMs to bring GenAI smarts to Indian languages
AI in Indian languages with launches lined up in the coming months, but experts said it may take 3-5 years for India to have its own ChatGPT equivalent.
Gurgaon-headquartered startup Soket Labs is eyeing the release of its foundation multilingual large language model (LLM) ‘Pragna’ by Q2 next year, founder and CEO Abhishek Upperwal told ET. A 7 billion parameter version of Pragna, trained on India’s 23 scheduled languages and English, will be released open source, followed by a 30 billion parameter model a few months thereafter, he said.
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Conversational AI platform Corover AI’s LLM project, BharatGPT, supporting 14 Indian languages, to be offered for enterprise-specific use, is set for an official launch in the coming weeks, said people in the know. The company has an order pipeline worth Rs 91 crore for the next 12 months – mainly from BFSI, utilities, government entities and ecommerce – and expects exponential growth in the coming year, they added.
The costs involved and competition with global biggies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and others means the path is not easy for such startups, according to experts.
“It (building LLMs) is a capital-intensive task and there’s no short route to profitability,” said Sachin Arora, partner and national head – Digital Lighthouse (Cloud, Data and AI) at KPMG India.
Soket Labs, which began work on Pragna in February, currently spends $4,000-$5,000 per month on compute infrastructure for training and
