Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal's Krutrim launches ChatGPT rival in beta mode - ET Auto

“This is a start for us and our first generation product. Lots more to come and this will also improve significantly as we build on this base. Do give us your feedback,” Aggarwal said.

Krutrim Si Designs, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Ola Cabs and Ola Electric founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Monday launched its first product, a chatbot assistant, in beta mode.

Called Krutrim Assistant, the chatbot website works as a personal generative artificial intelligence assistant that employsover 10 languages in its responses.

The product competes against the likes of ChatGPT by OpenAI, Llama by Meta and Gemini by Google – all built-from-scratch AI chatbots that have their own foundational large language models (LLM) powering each of the products.

“We take inspiration from all architectures that are open source, but there are a lot of modifications we did to make it efficient for multilingual contexts… plain vanilla architectures will not work. The entire pre-training, which is the more sophisticated part, is also a major way in which this is better,” Ravi Jain, strategy head, Krutrim, told ET.

The launched chatbot – which can be accessed by signing up on chat.olakrutrim.com – will have some hallucinations but much lower for Indian contexts than other global platforms, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal had tweeted.

Hallucinations, in the contest of AI, are responses generated by AI, which are false or misleading but presented as fact. LLMs are machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text.

“This is a start for us and our first generation product. Lots more to come and this will also improve significantly as we build on this base. Do give us your feedback,” Aggarwal added.

When prompted, the chatbot introduced itself as Krutrim, a product of Ola. “I’m a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I’m here to assist and provide information to the best of my ability,” it added.

Other made-in-India companies building large language models with vernacular use cases too have emerged in the recent past. Sarvam AI, an artificial intelligence startup, launched a Hindi-language model – OpenHathi – in December.

In January, conversational AI platform Corover AI’s LLM project, BharatGPT, was launched. BharatGPT integrates voice modality in more than 12 Indian languages and text modality in 22 languages in collaboration with the National Hub of Language Technology.

ET had earlier reported that the costs involved and competition with global biggies like OpenAI, Google and others meant the path is not easy for such startups, according to experts. It may take 3-5 years for India to have its own ChatGPT equivalent, they added.

Bengaluru-headquartered Krutrim was incorporated in April. It launched its LLM in December. “This is a product which is powered by that foundational model. We took some time to productise it in a way and test it,” Jain said.

A more sophisticated Krutrim Pro with vision, speech, and task execution capabilities will be available in the upcoming quarter, Jain added. Currently, the company employs 150 staffers, who are largely lateral and senior hires who have built systems at scale and foundational models in the past.