BharatGPT to Bhashini: India’s top AI platforms

Building on the momentum of generative technology innovation and its use case versatility after Open AI made Large Language Models or GenAI accessible to all, India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is also taking a leap in integrating these advancements.

Here's a look at India's AI foray in 2023:

1.BHASHINI

Source: Bhashini website

Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used BHASHINI, a Digital India initiative for easy access to digital services in Indian languages, during a speech in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, to provide a translated version in real time.

The DPI has been developed by the government through a network of people akin to Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) for MSMEs - and adds data from their native languages to create open source language datasets. The benefit of such innovations is that others can build tools upon the data set.

Notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Indian companies cannot compete with their Silicon Valley counterparts on artificial intelligence (AI) advancements. 

2. Sarvam AI

Source: LinkedIn

Defying Western norms, Sarvam AI, a generative AI start-up for India’s unique needs, raised $41 million (Rs 341 crore) in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures. 

Other notable investors include Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, marking the largest early-stage fundraise for an Indian AI start-up in a slew of small and big startups and companies working in this space.

3. Krutim

Source: Ola YouTube

Ola’s Bhavish Agarwal announced the beta version of Krutrim for January 2024, touted as India's response to ChatGPT, Google Bard-Gemini, Copilot, and others.

Sharing the update on Ola Electric’s, the CEO positioned Krutrim as a key player in India's journey towards becoming an AI-first economy.

The company aspires to develop AI-centred cloud infrastructure and silicon chips, and the base LLM of Krutrim is trained on 2 trillion tokens, the largest dataset of Indian data used in training to date.

Krutrim can understand and process up to 22 Indic languages with the ability to write and speak in 10 languages, as per Aggarwal.

4. BharatGPT

Source: BharatGPT

BharatGPT, projected as India’s first LLM was launched this month by the iHub Anubhuti foundation of centrally-funded Indian Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IITD) and AI startup CoRover.ai.

Powered by CoRover's conversational AI platform, BharatGPT utilises computing resources through a multi-layered NLP approach encompassing supervised learning, artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as context-based autosuggestion for diverse user query handling.
 

Building on AI's momentum in India, Google has of late doubled down on its language support for Indian dialects even as AI LLMs powering chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are based on English language by default.

Meanwhile, various corporates as well as startups have also invested in and developed chatbots for automated responses, like Zomato’s Zia.