India’s Sarvam launches Indus AI chat app as competitors heats up

Sarvam, an Indian AI startup centered on constructing fashions for native languages and customers, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for net and cell customers, coming into a fast-growing market dominated by international gamers together with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The launch comes as India has change into a key battleground for generative AI adoption. Not too long ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned ChatGPT has greater than 100 million weekly energetic customers in India, whereas Anthropic mentioned India accounts for five.8% of complete Claude utilization, second solely to the U.S.

Indus serves as a chat interface for its newly introduced Sarvam 105B mannequin, the corporate’s 105-billion-parameter massive language mannequin. The app’s launch comes two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvam unveiled its 105B and 30B fashions on the India AI Influence Summit in New Delhi earlier this week. On the summit, the startup additionally outlined enterprise initiatives and {hardware} plans and introduced partnerships with corporations together with HMD to deliver AI to Nokia function telephones and Bosch for AI-enabled automotive purposes.

Presently obtainable in beta on iOS, Android, and the online, the Indus app permits customers to kind or communicate queries and obtain responses in textual content and audio. Customers can check in utilizing their telephone quantity, Google account, or Apple ID, although the service seems to be restricted to India for now.

The app at the moment comes with some limitations. Customers can’t delete their chat historical past with out deleting their account, and there’s no possibility to show off the app’s reasoning function, which may typically gradual response instances. Sarvam has additionally warned that entry could also be restricted because it regularly expands its compute capability.

“We’re regularly rolling out Indus on a restricted compute capability, so chances are you’ll hit a waitlist at first. We’ll develop entry over time,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar wrote on X, including that the corporate is looking for suggestions from customers.

Based in 2023, Sarvam has raised $41 million thus far from buyers, together with Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, Peak XV Companions, and Khosla Ventures because it builds massive language fashions tailor-made for India.

Sarvam is one in all a small however rising group of Indian startups making an attempt to construct home alternate options to international synthetic intelligence platforms as India seeks higher management over its AI infrastructure.