Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has been selected to build India’s first sovereign large language model (LLM). The company has been selected by the Government of India under the IndiaAI Mission. Under the unique initiative, Sarvam will get the compute resources needed to build an indigenous foundational model.
The model that will be built from scratch will be capable of reasoning, designed for voice, with fluency in various Indian languages. According to the company, the model will be ready for secure and large-scale deployment.
“We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country. This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds,” Dr Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam, said.
According to Raghavan, for citizens , interacting with AI would feel familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this would mean unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders.
The indigenous model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India with the help of local infrastructure. Most importantly, it will be developed by a new generation of Indian talent. The IndiaAI Mission aims to prompt strategic autonomy and enhance domestic innovation to secure India’s leadership in AI for the coming years.
“Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country. As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks,” said Dr Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam.
Kumar added that the company is collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models. “Driving this effort is a best-in-class team at Sarvam that understands the depth and complexity of AI development like few others.”
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The AI company has already demonstrated its capability in developing foundational models that are proficient in Indian languages. From a research lab to now the Sovereign AI platform that backs governments, nonprofits and enterprises, the company has come a long way. Models developed by the startup are designed to be cost-effective and scalable for Indian use cases.
“We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models,” said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting.
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