The claim of Sam Altman in 2023 was that competing with OpenAI in training foundation models was “totally hopeless” and he definitely seemed to dismiss the possibility of innovation from startups with limited resources. The open-source model of DeepSeek is R1 and it was built at a fraction of the cost compared to Western AI models.
The Indian AI space is rapidly evolving equipped with several startups which are making strides in developing large language models (LLMs) tailored to the linguistic diversity. Companies like Sarvam AI, Tech Mahindra and AI4Bharat are leading the charge with models designed to support multiple Indian languages. Sarvam 2B is an open-source model that is trained on 4 trillion tokens and supports 10 languages including Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The IndicTrans2 of AI4Bharat is working to improve machine translation for all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
Startups like Yellow.ai, Uniphore and CoRover.ai are using AI for automation in customer service and conversational AI. Yellow.ai’s YellowG model provides human-like chatbot interactions and Uniphore specializes in AI-driven speech recognition to improve call center efficiency. The BharatGPT of CoRover.ai is designed to support non-English speakers by enabling multilingual interactions across government services, banking and e-commerce.
Some Indian AI models are focusing on niche applications and proving that innovation does not always require massive infrastructure. The Dhenu 1.0 of KissanAI is helping farmers in diagnosing crop diseases through AI-powered conversations. Abhinand Balachandran’s Tamil-LLAMA is a language model that is built specifically for Tamil language processing. Similarly, Telugu LLM Labs’ Navarasa 2.0 supports 16 languages and is designed for content generation and education.
Even Ola has entered the AI race with Krutrim, which is a homegrown LLM built to handle Indian languages and integrated into its services.
The advancements challenge the belief that AI dominance is limited to a few Western companies with vast resources.