Sarvam AI's Indic LLM Launch Sparks Debate on India's AI Ambitions

'Downloads isn't Rooted in What Works in India, Sarvam Grew 10x in a Month,' Says Lightspeed Investor | AIM

Hemant Mohapatra said that Sarvam grew 10x last month from an already significant base and ran one of India's largest population-scale AI campaigns, reaching over 4% of the adult population. Following days of criticism and debate over Sarvam AI's newly launched Indic LLM, Sarvam-M, Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed India, an investor in Sarvam AI, has addressed the backlash, highlighting the company's scale, growth, and strategic direction. In a post on X, Mohapatra acknowledged the global attention Sarvam received in the past week, saying, "We appreciate the attention and also understand the responsibility." He noted that while criticism is expected, much of it stems from a misunderstanding of the startup's long-term goals. "Most folks really don't understand what strategy we are going for and what matters in that strategy," Mohapatra wrote. He emphasised that Sarvam AI's approach is deeply rooted in India-specific dynamics and long-term boardroom-level transformation projects. "There is absolutely a huge demand for what we are building but looking at it from the generic lens of downloads isn't rooted in what really works in India," he said. Sarvam, according to Mohapatra, grew 10x last month from an already significant base and ran one of India's largest population-scale AI campaigns, reaching over 4% of the adult population. Responding to online comments suggesting that Sarvam should build hype like other LLM players, Mohapatra dismissed the idea of clout-driven validation. "Most of X lives at the peak of the bell curve and clout mongering isn't a path to gain respect anyway," replied a user on X. The remarks follow days of social media criticism, sparked in part by investor Deedy Das, who compared the Sarvam-M model to one built by Korean college students. Read: Sarvam AI's Backlash Exposes the Sad State of Indian AI Das' comments prompted defense from Sarvam's team and supporters, including Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, who argued that instant success isn't essential for long-term impact. Sarvam-M currently has 1.2k downloads on Hugging Face. Earlier in this ongoing debate, Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar expressed optimism in a post on X. "Great to be receiving feedback on Sarvam-M. Please keep them coming. Will help strengthen our pipelines as we start to train our sovereign model," he said, confirming that Sarvam is on the path of building a foundational LLM under the IndiaAI Mission.

Sarvam AI unveils multilingual LLM; tepid response poses questions over India's AI chops

Sarvam AI launched Sarvam M, a 24-billion-parameter model, built on top of French AI company Mistral's model Small. The startup said the model is "built for versatility" and designed to support a wide range of applications, including conversational agents, translation and educational tools. It supports 10 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam.Indian artificial intelligence (AI) startup Sarvam AI, the first company picked by the government to build a sovereign foundational model under the India AI Mission, dropped its multilingual open-source large language model (LLM) Sarvam M last week. It claims the LLM has achieved benchmarks across mathematics, programming, and a range of Indian languages. But the launch has thrown up questions about the country's AI scene, with the model getting only a few hundred downloads in the first two days. Let's take a deep dive to understand why. About the model Sarvam M is a 24-billion-parameter model, built on top of French AI company Mistral's model Small. The startup said the model is "built for versatility" and designed to support a wide range of applications, including conversational agents, translation and educational tools. It supports 10 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam. "This is the first in a series of contributions as we help build out the Sovereign AI Ecosystem in India," the startup said in a post on X. Key features Hybrid thinking mode: This mode supports complex logical reasoning, solves mathematical problems and handles coding tasks. It also has a 'non-think' mode for general purpose conversation. Indic skills: It is post-trained in Indian languages along with English to better suit local needs. Reasoning capabilities: The company claims Sarvam M outperforms similarly sized models on coding and math benchmarks. No traction In the first two days after the launch, the model had just over 300 downloads. As of May 27, it had 1,200 downloads on Hugging Face, can be tested on Sarvam AI's playground, and accessed through its APIs. This sparked a debate on social media platforms about the standing of India's AI scene when compared with global rivals OpenAI and China's DeepSeek. Social media backlash In a scathing post, Deedy Das, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, hit out at "India's biggest AI startup $1B Sarvam" for a muted launch with only 23 downloads in 2 days. "In contrast, 2 Korean college trained an open-source model that did ~200K last month (sic)," his post on X read. Das added in another post that he had nothing against Sarvam or India trying to build AI, but was "disappointed at their direction". Many came to the defence of the model. "Before Sarvam M came out, people were complaining about the lack of IndicLLMs. After Sarvam M came out, people are still complaining," one user wrote. Another person said we must offer encouragement, not shame entrepreneurs. "Teams in India are trying and they are working to build the muscle and culture of what good or amazing looks like." Sridhar Vembu of Zoho also jumped to the defence of Sarvam, saying that there was no such thing as an "instant hit". "Even when we were the first mover in a new market and we had done a lot of technical work, we only got slow traction. Instant success is neither necessary nor sufficient to succeed long term," he said in a post on X, telling the Sarvam team to "fight the good fight". Sarvam's trajectory The Bengaluru-based startup was the first to be selected to build an indigenous foundational model under the Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission. It was provided access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the mission's common compute cluster to train its model. According to Tracxn, the company has so far raised $53.6 million in total and is valued at $111 million.