Sarvam AI launches 30B and 105B open-source models

In a significant advancement for India's artificial intelligence landscape, Sarvam AI, a local startup, introduced two groundbreaking large language models, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, on February 18 at the India AI Impact Summit. This launch marks a pivotal moment as the nation intensifies its commitment to cultivating homegrown AI technologies. Both models are set to be released as open source, encouraging adoption across various sectors, including developers, enterprises, and government agencies. This initiative aims to provide alternatives to existing foreign AI systems, bolstering domestic capabilities. Pratyush Kumar, the founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, emphasized the uniqueness of their models, stating, "Everything that Sarvam has built is from scratch, with no data dependency." The Sarvam-30B model, the smaller of the two, boasts pre-training on an impressive 16 trillion tokens and accommodates a context length of 32,000 tokens. Designed for efficiency, it aims to deliver higher-quality responses while optimizing token usage. On the other hand, the Sarvam-105B model supports a broader context window of 128,000 tokens, making it adept at managing extensive documents and interactions. Sarvam AI claims that its models compete favorably with other leading systems of similar size, including both open-source and proprietary alternatives. This launch coincides with India’s broader strategy to establish a sovereign AI infrastructure and develop indigenous foundation models under the government-supported IndiaAI Mission, addressing concerns about data security and dependency on foreign technology. As part of a growing movement of domestic startups focused on creating large-scale models tailored to India's diverse languages and business needs, Sarvam AI showcased benchmark results that demonstrated Sarvam-30B outperforming several renowned AI systems. A notable demonstration featured a chatbot named “Vikram,” which engaged in conversations across multiple Indian languages, including Hindi and Punjabi, on a basic feature phone. The name pays tribute to Vikram Sarabhai, the revered physicist celebrated as the architect of India's space program.