India Joins the AI Club

Last week, Krutrim, an Indian AI startup whose name translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, secured $50 million in funding from investors including Matrix Partner India. This funding has led Krutrim to become the first Indian AI startup with a billion-dollar valuation. Today, let’s talk about India’s AI strategy.

The 2023 G20 Summit, held in the absence of Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi, turned out to be a diplomatic win for Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister. The Economist published a commentary titled The G20 Summit will be a resounding success for India, “​​the presidency has helped boost India’s image in the world.”

In addition to meeting with various international leaders, Modi personally welcomed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the eve of the summit. Their meeting was particularly timely, aligning with the Indian government's active campaign to boost manufacturing. In hindsight, this encounter seems to have been quite fruitful.

After the meeting, GPU giant Nvidia announced their partnership with Reliance Industries to develop a large language model trained on India's diverse languages and to build an AI infrastructure. Though Reliance Industries has not yet launched any AI products, it's evident that Nvidia is the pillar Modi is relying on for the next phase of India's industrialization.

Modi's goal is clear – growing the semiconductor industry – especially when you look at his policies: encouraging major cloud-computing providers to establish more data centers in India, considering the purchase of GPUs worth $1.2 billion, and notably, the absence of AI regulation. 

All these moves reflect the aspirations of a country with 1.4 billion people, aiming to become independent of U.S. or Chinese technology and to build its own AI systems.

Under the shadow of large language models from OpenAI, Google, and others, most of India’s technology companies lack the motivation to train their own LLMs, not to mention the heavy capital costs. Instead, they're more focused on the application level. For example, the AdTech firm InMobi is using AI to enhance advertising technology, aiming to meet the demands of brands, agencies, and developers.

Or, some startups are fine-tuning Western models with local data. This month, the startup CoRover.ai launched BharatGPT, offering language translation services.

In this context, the mobility unicorn Ola unveiled the Krutrim LLM. Designed to support the Ola Group, this advanced model is capable of understanding 22 Indian languages and responding in 10. It's a significant aid for voice chats, sales calls, and customer support emails.

“India has to build its own AI,” Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola and Krutrim, said in the statement. “We are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.”

India is on the rise in the AI world. With a buzzing startup scene, millions of tech-savvy developers, and a government that's really into using AI to boost its digital setup, India's AI journey is just getting started and looks set to go a long way.

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Bonus

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The EU has scaled back its plans for stricter investment screening and controls on sensitive technology exports to countries such as China, aiming to avoid a 'turf war' with member states. (Andy Bounds / FT)

Fifteen U.S. companies, including semiconductors firms, have expressed interest in investing $8 billion in Vietnam in clean energy infrastructure, contingent on the country's progress on renewable energy rules. (Reuters)