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 world gamers together with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The launch comes as India has turn into a key battleground for generative AI adoption. Just lately, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated ChatGPT has greater than 100 million weekly energetic customers in India, whereas Anthropic stated India accounts for 5.8% of total Claude usage, 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 giant language mannequin. The app’s launch comes two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvam unveiled its 105B and 30B fashions on the India AI Impression 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 convey AI to Nokia function telephones and Bosch for AI-enabled automotive purposes.

At the moment obtainable in beta on iOS, Android, and the web, the Indus app permits customers to sort or converse queries and obtain responses in textual content and audio. Customers can sign up utilizing their cellphone quantity, Google or Microsoft 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 not delete their chat historical past with out deleting their account, and there’s no choice to show off the app’s reasoning function, which may generally sluggish response occasions. Sarvam has additionally warned that entry could also be restricted because it steadily expands its compute capability.

“We’re steadily rolling out Indus on a restricted compute capability, so you could 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 giant language fashions tailor-made for India.

Sarvam is considered one of a small however rising group of Indian startups trying to construct home alternate options to world synthetic intelligence platforms as India seeks better management over its AI infrastructure.