Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Monday rolled out the beta version of made in India generative AI platform Krutrim for wider public use.The platform, which is in competition to Open AI ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini was launched by Aggarwal in December. Post the launch, Krutrim also became the first AI unicorn in the country after raising $50 million in funding last month.
Till now, the India-origin generative AI platform was accessible to limited people on sign ups. Now, the platform is open for use at chat.olakrutrim.com. “As promised, starting the Krutrim AI public beta roll out today. This is a start for us and our first generation product. Lots more to come and this will also improve significantly as we build on this base,” Aggarwal said in a post on X.
Similar to ChatGPT and Gemini, Krutrim has also flagged challenges on AI hallucinations and added a disclaimer that “Krutrim may give wrong information. Verify crucial details”. This is however, against the government’s advise to platforms that they must not rollout experimental models of generative AI platforms for public use, as they may cause user harm. “While some hallucinations will be there but much lower for Indian contexts than other global platforms. And we will be working overtime to find and fix,” Aggarwal said.
AI hallucination means incorrect or misleading results that AI models generate. These errors can be caused by a variety of factors, including insufficient training data, incorrect assumptions made by the model, or biases in the data used to train the model. Besides Krutrim, other India-origin generative AI platforms such as BharatGPT by CoRover.Ai, Reliance Industries-backed Hanooman, as well as Indian startup Sarvam are also in fray to launch the services in the country.
Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will come in two models — a base model and a Pro model. Just like ChatGPT, the current basic version of Krutrim is capable of answering people’s prompt or query. It can understand 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam. Krutrim Pro, which is a larger model for solving complex problems will be launched by the company by next month.
“Krutrim marks the dawn of a new era in the AI computing stack for our nation. We will aim to innovate alongside the world and define future paradigms,” Aggarwal said. Apart from foundational AI model for generative AI applications, Krutrim is also working on AI computing stack in-house, which means creating an AI cloud infrastructure, as well as in-house development & manufacturing of chips optimised for AI compute. The company has designed an architecture involving multiple chiplets, to power different AI infrastructure, models, and applications.
At the time of launch, Aggarwal said that Krutrim was trained on 2 trillion tokens or pieces of textual information, having the largest representation of Indian data. Ola is also planning to integrate Krutrim across its group companies by March 2024, leveraging the technology for sales, service, support, and other key processes.
Krutrim Si Designs was launched by Aggarwal in April 2023, with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti. Tenneti is one of the board members of ANI Technologies, which own Ola Cabs and Ola Electric. In October, the company secured $24 million in debt funding from Matrix Partners. In January, the company raised $50 million, led by Matrix partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal’s other ventures Ola Cabs and Ola Electric, led the funding round.
