Sarvam to launch ChatGPT-like app with limited access soon

This application, Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan told Mint in an interview, is part of the company’s long-term monetization efforts as it looks to start generating revenue. However, the approach, Raghavan claimed, is not quite in line with what its Big Tech counterparts have done—be it with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s AI integrations into WhatsApp, or Anthropic’s Claude.

"We are building an app based on our own foundational models, which we will be launching very soon. But this will not be quite at the same scale as ChatGPT or Gemini. The big apps all offer their services for free to unlimited users, which requires a lot of capital. We can’t quite keep up with that scale of capital, so we’ll have to find a way to work around it—be it in a limited-access way, or some other method," Raghavan said.

On Wednesday, Sarvam launched three foundational models of varying sizes—3 billion, 30 billion, and 105 billion data parameters. Foundational models are artificially intelligent algorithms built from scratch that are trained on vast troves of data to comprehend speech in English and generate results accordingly.

Generative AI burst onto the scene and changed the global tech world after OpenAI launched ChatGPT for public access in October 2022. Since then, established tech companies have been disrupted, while OpenAI has grown from a nonprofit research lab to a $850 billion valuation.

Govt support, well-funded

Sarvam, on this note, is one of India’s best-funded AI startups, having raised $45 million from investors such as Peak XV Partners and Vinod Khosla.

"We need the app because we want to find a way to showcase what exactly our technology is to many consumers. But we don’t quite know if trying to build a consumer business will work because it is very, very expensive. We will raise capital because we must when it comes to building further models, but we won’t really be trying to pursue what Big Tech firms have done in terms of raising massive funding," Raghavan said.

Sarvam has been backed by the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity)’s India AI Mission, which incentivized it with graphics processing units (GPUs) and funds worth $27 million in April. Since then, the startup has been building its models with a focus on public services and now, in enterprise deployment.

Industry stakeholders have strongly backed Sarvam’s work. In an interview with Mint on Wednesday, Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at Meity, said that Sarvam’s models have strong backing and support from the ministry. “Their work, including implementing AI in voice, will be key—and we are excited to see how the AI models play out," Singh had said.

For the time being, Raghavan said the company will focus on enterprise and public-sector applications to bring its models to users on a commercial basis.

"We are, of course, a for-profit company, so that is how we will run the business. But we’re still trying to figure out how the business grows in India and how we can bring AI to as many people as we can. While we will continue to try to build new models, we could have even built a trillion-parameter AI model; the question is why and how we should go about it. That’s what we’ll be doing in the near future," the founder added.

Raghavan has specialised in public services throughout his career. Prior to building Sarvam with fellow founder and chief executive Pratyush Kumar, Raghavan was the chief product manager and biometric architect of Aadhaar at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

Once it launches its app, Sarvam will become the first AI app interface for consumers built in India, among the top-funded startups.

The statement, interestingly, came on the day when Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said in a roundtable that India was the second-largest market for the world’s biggest AI startup, with 100 million weekly active users in the country.