Ola's Krutrim Launches AI Lab and Open-Source Models, Invests Heavily in India's AI Ecosystem

Ola Krutrim Launches AI Lab To Mixed Reactions

Disclaimer: This content generated by AI & may have errors or hallucinations. Edit before use. Read our Terms of use Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Tuesday announced a slew of launches in its AI portfolio. The biggest of all was a Rs 2,000 crore ($230 million) investment into his AI startup Ola Krutrim to start an AI lab. The lab seeks to help in building an open-source AI ecosystem by fostering research, its website says. Apart from this, the company also launched the following: Apart from these models, the company has also come up with its own benchmark -- BharatBench -- to score the performance of its AI models. It said this was because the existing benchmarks "might miss the nuances of Indian languages and cultural contexts," with most models being primarily in English, Chinese or European languages. Additionally, the announcement the partnership between Krutrim and Nvidia to deploy the latter's Blackwell-based GB200 GPU and promised to turn it into a supercomputer. The model, like its predecessor, is receiving mixed reactions. Some highlighted how well the model was able to understand as well as respond in regional languages like Hindi. Elsewhere it is being flagged for having some very basic problems. One of the users took to X where the model was not able to solve basic logical reasoning queries. Some others pointed out the announcements held a level of opaqueness to them as the company had not released all the research papers or documentation to back up its claims. Moreover, one of the users hinted that the model has censorship tendencies similar to those for which DeepSeek has been criticized, a model that Krutrim seems to have imitated in its step to open-source its models. "The motivation behind this model is to ensure that datasets are 'for our country, of our country, and for our citizens,' fostering inclusivity and equitable AI advancements," Krutrim says about its model Chitrarth. This is a line of thought all too familiar to anyone who has been following Ola or Krutrim's past announcements or Aggarwal's comments. The company has repeatedly positioned itself as the bastion of India's efforts to achieve dominance in the AI industry. Within this positioning, its argument of leveraging the integration of "cultural context" and accurate representation in Indic AI models has been the most recurring one. At MediaNama's PrivacyNama discussion in 2024, Senior Director for Foundational LLM Models at Ola Krutrim, Rajkiran Panuganti, had noted: "We always complain that the Indian perspectives are not represented accurately. So, when we say that, it also means that we are not providing the data in an accurate manner and we are allowing stereotypes to be there. So sovereignty should not be seen just as protecting yourself for your economic benefit, but also you want to enable foreign players also to represent you in a way that we want to." You can read more of his comments here.

Ola Launches Krutrim AI Lab, Unveils New AI Models, Announces Rs 10,000 Crore Investment

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal announced on Tuesday, February 4, an investment of Rs 2,000 crore in his artificial intelligence (AI) venture, Krutrim, with a commitment of Rs 10,000 crore by next year. He also announced the launch of Krutrim AI Lab, a frontier AI research lab, along with multiple AI models and the investment aimed at boosting India's AI ecosystem. Also Read: Tata Communications and CoRover.ai Partner to Offer Sovereign AI Solutions in India "While we've been working on AI for a year, today we're releasing our work to the open-source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports. Our focus is on developing AI for India -- to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context, etc," Aggarwal said in a post on the X platform. He also announced the deployment of India's first GB200 in partnership with Nvidia, which is expected to go live by March 2025. "We will make it the largest supercomputer in India by end of year," he said. This announcement comes just days after Aggarwal revealed that Krutrim has deployed DeepSeek AI models on Indian services. "India can't be left behind in AI. Krutrim has accelerated efforts to develop world class AI. As first step, our cloud now has DeepSeek models live, hosted on Indian servers. Pricing lowest in the world," Aggarwal said in a post on the X on January 31, 2025. Also Read: India Leads in AI Adoption, Outpacing Global Average, Says BCG Report The company has open-sourced its AI models and research to accelerate collaboration within India's AI community. According to the post, these resources are available on GitHub and Hugging Face. Aggarwal also announced the release of multiple AI models: Also Read: SoftBank and OpenAI Announce Partnership to Develop and Market Cristal Intelligence Additionally, Aggarwal introduced BharatBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI performance on Indic languages. "In addition, since there was no global benchmark for Indic performance, we've developed 'BharatBench'," he said, sharing the technical report. "We're nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in 1 year. And by open sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem. We're still learning to walk before we can run, hopefully within this year!" Aggarwal added.

Ola Announces Krutrim AI Lab for Frontier AI Research with ₹2,000 Crore Investment

In partnership with NVIDIA, the lab is set to deploy India's first GB200 supercomputer by March. Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal has announced Krutrim AI Lab and the launch of several open source AI models tailored to India's unique linguistic and cultural landscape. This includes the launch of Krutrim 2, the startup's second LLM consisting of 8 billion parameters. "While we've been working on AI for a year, today we're releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports," announced Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola and Krutrim. Furthermore, the Krutrim AI Lab includes: Chitrarth 1: A Vision Language Model capable of interpreting images and documents. Dhwani 1: A Speech Language Model designed for tasks such as speech translation. Vyakhyarth 1: An Indic Embedding model optimised for applications like search and retrieval-augmented generation. Krutrim Translate 1: A text-to-text translation model facilitating seamless translation between languages. Recognising the absence of a global benchmark for Indic language performance, Krutrim AI Lab has also developed "BharatBench," a comprehensive evaluation framework. The lab has also published several technical reports and papers to further the research community's understanding of these models. In partnership with NVIDIA, the lab is set to deploy India's first GB200 supercomputer by March, with plans to scale it into the nation's largest supercomputer by the end of the year. This infrastructure will support the training and deployment of AI models, addressing challenges related to data scarcity and cultural context. The lab has committed an investment of ₹2,000 crore into Krutrim, with a pledge to increase this to ₹10,000 crore by next year. By open sourcing the models, Aggarwal said that he aims to foster collaboration within India's AI community, accelerating the development of a world-class AI ecosystem. Last week, Krutrim also brought China's DeepSeek models to its cloud infrastructure. This announcement aligns with India's broader AI ambitions. The IndiaAI Mission seeks to build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation by democratising computing access, enhancing data quality, and developing indigenous AI capabilities. A key component of this mission is the establishment of a common computing facility powered by approximately 18,693 GPUs, including high-end models like the NVIDIA H100 and H200. This facility aims to provide accessible computing power to startups, researchers, and academia at a fraction of global cost benchmarks. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has emphasised the importance of accessible computing power, stating that it is 'the most important part of the mission.' He also announced plans to develop 6-8 large language models by the Indian tech ecosystem, supported by this robust computing infrastructure. Safety and ethical deployment of AI models remain top priorities for the government. To this end, an AI Safety Institute is being established, adopting a techno-legal approach to ensure responsible AI development.

Ola Announces Krutrim AI Lab for Frontier Research with ₹2,000 Crore Investment

In partnership with NVIDIA, the lab is set to deploy India's first GB200 supercomputer by March. Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal has announced Krutrim AI Lab and the launch of several open source AI models tailored to India's unique linguistic and cultural landscape. This includes the launch of Krutrim 2, the startup's second LLM consisting of 8 billion parameters. "While we've been working on AI for a year, today we're releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports," announced Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola and Krutrim. Furthermore, the Krutrim AI Lab includes: Chitrarth 1: A Vision Language Model capable of interpreting images and documents. Dhwani 1: A Speech Language Model designed for tasks such as speech translation. Vyakhyarth 1: An Indic Embedding model optimised for applications like search and retrieval-augmented generation. Krutrim Translate 1: A text-to-text translation model facilitating seamless translation between languages. Recognising the absence of a global benchmark for Indic language performance, Krutrim AI Lab has also developed "BharatBench," a comprehensive evaluation framework. The lab has also published several technical reports and papers to further the research community's understanding of these models. In partnership with NVIDIA, the lab is set to deploy India's first GB200 supercomputer by March, with plans to scale it into the nation's largest supercomputer by the end of the year. This infrastructure will support the training and deployment of AI models, addressing challenges related to data scarcity and cultural context. The lab has committed an investment of ₹2,000 crore into Krutrim, with a pledge to increase this to ₹10,000 crore by next year. By open sourcing the models, Aggarwal said that he aims to foster collaboration within India's AI community, accelerating the development of a world-class AI ecosystem. Last week, Krutrim also brought China's DeepSeek models to its cloud infrastructure. This announcement aligns with India's broader AI ambitions. The IndiaAI Mission seeks to build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation by democratising computing access, enhancing data quality, and developing indigenous AI capabilities. A key component of this mission is the establishment of a common computing facility powered by approximately 18,693 GPUs, including high-end models like the NVIDIA H100 and H200. This facility aims to provide accessible computing power to startups, researchers, and academia at a fraction of global cost benchmarks. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has emphasised the importance of accessible computing power, stating that it is 'the most important part of the mission.' He also announced plans to develop 6-8 large language models by the Indian tech ecosystem, supported by this robust computing infrastructure. Safety and ethical deployment of AI models remain top priorities for the government. To this end, an AI Safety Institute is being established, adopting a techno-legal approach to ensure responsible AI development.

Bhavish Aggarwal Announces Krutrim AI Lab and Multiple Open-Source Models

Krutrim has also developed a benchmark for indic performance Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal announced the Krutrim AI lab on Tuesday. The AI-focused research lab will be the central hub for all the future model releases of Ola Krutrim (commonly referred to as Krutrim). Alongside, several new India-focused open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models were also released, with the main highlight being the Krutrim-2 AI model. Aggarwal also announced an investment of Rs. 2,000 crores in Krutrim and committed an investment of Rs. 10,000 crores by the next year. In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Aggarwal highlighted that his AI firm has been working on developing new AI innovations since the formation of the company. Showcasing Krutrim's achievements in the last year, the Ola chairman also released several new open-source AI models. "Our focus is on developing AI for India - to make AI better in Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc.," he added. Among the models released, the biggest highlight is the Krutrim-2, a 12-billion-parameter model which comes as the successor to the Krutrim-1 AI model. It is a dense transformer model, built on the Mistral-NeMo-12B-Instruct architecture. The natively multilingual model can generate responses in English and 22 Indian regional languages and supports a context window of 1,28,000 tokens. The model is currently available via a Hugging Face listing with the Krutrim Community License for academic and research-oriented usage. Krutrim also announced the release of Chitrarth-1, a multilingual Vision Language Model (VLM) built on Krutrim-7B. It uses a SIGLIP vision encoder to extract and process visual information. The company stated that the AI model is trained on multilingual image and text data and can work across nine Indian regional languages, including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu. It also understands English. For AI-based speech translation, the company released the Dhwani-1 automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. It supports translation between Indic Languages and English. The supported languages are English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. It is accompanied by the Krutrim Translate text translation model. Aggarwal also announced the release of Vyakyarth-1-Indic-Embedding, a multilingual sentence-transformer model designed for semantic textual similarity, search, clustering, and classification across 100 languages. He added that this model can be useful for cross-lingual natural language processing (NLP) applications. In addition, Aggarwal highlighted that the company had also developed a new benchmark dubbed BharatBench that measures the performance of an AI model on indic languages. He claimed that the benchmark captures the unique linguistic and cultural nuances of India, which is not seen in other tests. "We're nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in 1 year. And by open-sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem," Aggarwal said. Krutrim is also partnering with Nvidia to deploy the tech giant's Blackwell-based GB200 GPU for AI-enabled workloads. The infrastructure will be launched by March.

Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal To Infuse INR 2K Cr Into Krutrim, Rolls Out AI Lab

Krutrim AI Lab has released a host of models that aims to redefine the AI ecosystem in India including Krutrim 2 and Krutrim 1 LLMs, Chitrarth, Dhwani , Vyakhyarth 1 and Krutrim Translate 1 Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal today (February 4) announced an investment of INR 2,000 Cr into its AI unicorn Krutrim, with a commitment of INR 10,000 Cr by next year. Aggarwal also announced the roll out of a frontier artificial intelligence research lab, Krutrim AI lab, just days after Krutrim announced it is hosting open source AI models of Chinese GenAI company DeepSeek on its cloud platform. "While we've been working on AI for a year, today we're releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports. Our focus is on developing AI for India - to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc," Aggarwal said in an X post. He further added that this strategic investment underscores our dedication to advancing AI innovation and strengthening India's position in the global AI landscape. Krutrim AI Lab has released a host of models that aims to redefine the AI ecosystem in India including Krutrim 2 and Krutrim 1 LLMs, Chitrarth, Dhwani , Vyakhyarth 1 and Krutrim Translate 1. It also introduced BharatBench, a tool designed to assess AI models' effectiveness in Indian contexts. Founded in 2010, headquartered in Bengaluru, Ola is a travel tech platform. The company offers transport on-demand services for ride-hailing, intercity travel and rental, according to the distance and duration.

SoftBank-backed billionaire to invest $230M in Indian AI startup Krutrim | TechCrunch

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is investing $230 million into an AI startup he founded as the country pushes to establish itself in a field dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms. Aggarwal is financing the investment in Krutrim largely through his family office, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. In a post on X Tuesday, Aggarwal said Krutrim seeks to attract an investment of $1.15 billion by next year. He will seek to raise the remainder of the capital from outside investors, the source said. The funding announcement coincides with unicorn startup Krutrim making its AI models open source and unveiling plans to build what it claims will be India's largest supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. The lab released Krutrim-2, a 12-billion parameter language model that has shown strong performance in processing Indian languages. In sentiment analysis tests Krutrim shared Tuesday, it scored 0.95 compared with 0.70 for competing models, while achieving an 80% success rate in code generation tasks. The lab has open sourced several specialized models, including systems for processing images, speech translation and text search, all optimized for Indian languages. "We're nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year," wrote Aggarwal, whose other ventures have been backed by SoftBank, on X. "By open sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem." The initiative comes as India seeks to establish itself in an artificial intelligence landscape dominated by US and Chinese companies. The recent release of DeepSeek's R1 "reasoning" model, built on a purportedly modest budget, has sent shock waves through the tech industry. India last week praised DeepSeek's progress and said the country will host the Chinese AI lab's large language models on domestic servers. Krutrim's cloud arm began offering DeepSeek on Indian servers last week. Krutrim has also developed its own evaluation framework, BharatBench, to assess AI models' proficiency in Indian languages, addressing a gap in existing benchmarks that primarily focus on English and Chinese. The lab's technical approach includes using a 128,000-token context window, allowing its systems to handle longer texts and more complex conversations. Performance metrics published by the startup showed Krutrim-2 achieving high scores in grammar correction (0.98) and multi-turn conversations (0.91). The investment follows January's launch of Krutrim-1, a 7-billion parameter system that served as India's first large language model. The supercomputer deployment with Nvidia is scheduled to go live in March, with expansion planned throughout the year.