Ola Electric Mobility Ltd (NSE: OLAELEC) founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, has agreed to invest US$230 million into an Indian AI startup he launched in late 2023 to help solidify the nation’s stature as a leader in the field. These funds will be put into an “AI Lab” that will complete extensive research.
The billionaire also aims to secure over US$1 billion from additional investors for Krutrim — a developer of large language models tailored for Indian languages. The latest version of the software, Krutrim 2, just made its debut alongside a series of other models made for specific tasks.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Aggarwal also revealed that his unicorn AI startup was planning to build India’s largest supercomputer in partnership with tech giant NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) (ETR: NVD). He says it will be live by the end of next month.
“Our focus is on developing AI for India – to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc.”
At the end of December, the wealthy tech figure said that he would give students at the Indian Institutes of Technology free access to LLMs developed by Krutrim.
Keeping our founder @bhash’s promise, we’re now offering free कृत्रिम credits to all IIT students and faculty.
India is gearing up to lead the world in AI, and we’re proud to be a part of this journey! 🇮🇳 pic.twitter.com/8YUkLhGmpX
— कृत्रिम (@Krutrim) December 23, 2024
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Sam Altman thinks India could be an AI leader
The OpenAI CEO says the nation is now his company’s second-largest market in terms of the number of users.
Altman recently met with India’s IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to discuss the nation’s artificial intelligence ambitions.
The American tech leader is willing to collaborate with the Indian government to establish AI infrastructure in the country and says he has a favourable view of the nation’s potential in the field.
“It’s really quite amazing to see what the country has done and how it has embraced the technology,” Altman said. “I think India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution.”
He previously dismissed the nation’s capabilities in the AI sector about one year ago, but has since changed his mind.
India’s AI industry is estimated to be valued at about US$8 billion.
The country has the second-largest group of machine learning engineers in the world with approximately 446,000 professionals. The United States has the greatest number.
rowan@mugglehead.com
