Software-as-a-service (SaaS) major Zoho on Wednesday said it is developing its own proprietary large language model (LLM), which will be similar to OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s PaLM 2 models.
“We are working on our LLM, but it is a long-term plan. These things take time. The short term is about integration, but tomorrow you will have an offering from Zoho also, depending on what you choose to plug into it,” Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience, said at a media briefing. “We have been working on artificial intelligence for a decade now. When customers needed ChatGPT integration, we gave them that by integration with 13 of our apps as we announced recently,” Singh added.
The LLM model will be capable of conversing, summarising, paraphrasing and adapting to new tasks with zero-shot learning techniques empowering seamless AI-driven communications and knowledge discovery.
Zoho’s announcement comes days after OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman’s comment that it would be hopeless for an Indian startup with $10 million in funding to work on a foundational LLM.
Reacting to the comment, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT, had then stated that Altman is not the final word on the country’s AI aspirations. Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani had also said that he took Altman remarks as a challenge.
However, on Wednesday, Chandrasekhar told FE that Altman has said that his comment was taken out of context and it wasn’t a commentary on India’s potential.
Zoho on Wednesday also announced investments across its entire portfolio to accelerate momentum in the mid-market and enterprise market – a segment it collectively refers to as upmarket. Singh said the company has logged a 65% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) within the mid-market and enterprise segment in the last three years. This segment now represents a third of the company’s entire business. Overall, Zoho now serves over 90 million users across more than 600,000 businesses.
Singh said that while there are economic shifts, chief information officers (CIOs) are looking to optimise on cost and value, and Zoho solutions are even more relevant in these times.
On hiring plans for FY24, he said the company is taking one month at a time and there is a hiring freeze definitely on the engineering side.
“We are making selective openings on customer-facing roles (sales and marketing, customer support) because you need that to be able to serve customers, but in general, there is a lot of thought going into large-scale hiring. We are not hiring people en masse because of how things are,” Singh said.
The company, he asserted, has been clear from the beginning that there will be no layoffs.
“We never went overboard in our marketing spends or hiring a lot of people. Right now, we are being a lot more prudent in keeping that in check. But there won’t be any layoffs,” Singh said. The company has 12,000 people on its rolls.
