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.
India’s AI Mission Continues
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.
