Ola Launches Krutrim AI Lab and New Models
Ola’s founder and chairman, Bhavish Aggarwal, made a significant announcement on Tuesday regarding the establishment of the Krutrim AI lab. This new research facility will serve as the central hub for all future releases of Ola’s AI models, collectively known as Krutrim. Alongside this announcement, Aggarwal unveiled several new open-source artificial intelligence models, with the standout being the Krutrim-2 AI model. To support these initiatives, he also revealed a substantial investment plan, committing Rs. 2,000 crores to Krutrim and an additional Rs. 10,000 crores by next year. This move marks a pivotal moment for Ola as it aims to enhance AI capabilities tailored specifically for India.
Krutrim AI Lab and New Models Released
The Krutrim AI lab is set to be a cornerstone for Ola’s future AI developments. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Aggarwal emphasized the company’s ongoing commitment to creating innovative AI solutions since its inception. He highlighted the achievements of Krutrim over the past year and introduced several new open-source AI models aimed at addressing the unique needs of the Indian market. “Our focus is on developing AI for India – to make AI better in Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context, etc.,” he stated.
The most notable release is the Krutrim-2 model, which boasts 12 billion parameters and serves as the successor to the original Krutrim-1. This dense transformer model is built on the Mistral-NeMo-12B-Instruct architecture. It is designed to be multilingual, capable of generating responses in English and 22 Indian regional languages. Additionally, it supports a context window of 128,000 tokens, making it a powerful tool for various applications. Currently, Krutrim-2 is available on Hugging Face under the Krutrim Community License, aimed at academic and research-oriented usage.
Another exciting release is Chitrarth-1, a multilingual Vision Language Model (VLM) based on Krutrim-7B. This model utilizes a SIGLIP vision encoder to process visual information effectively. It has been trained on a diverse dataset that includes both images and text in nine Indian languages, such as Assamese, Bengali, and Tamil, along with English. This capability allows it to bridge the gap between visual and textual data, making it a versatile tool for developers.
Innovative Speech and Text Models
In addition to the new models, Aggarwal introduced the Dhwani-1 automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. This model is designed for AI-based speech translation and supports multiple Indic languages alongside English. The languages included are Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. This functionality is complemented by the Krutrim Translate text translation model, which aims to facilitate seamless communication across language barriers.
Another noteworthy release is the Vyakyarth-1-Indic-Embedding model. This multilingual sentence-transformer model is tailored for tasks such as semantic textual similarity, search, clustering, and classification across 100 languages. Aggarwal noted that this model could significantly benefit cross-lingual natural language processing (NLP) applications, further enhancing the capabilities of AI in understanding and processing diverse languages.
Moreover, Aggarwal announced the development of BharatBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of AI models specifically on Indic languages. He explained that this benchmark captures the unique linguistic and cultural nuances of India, which are often overlooked in global tests. “We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year. By open-sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem,” he remarked.
Partnerships and Future Plans
To further enhance its AI capabilities, Krutrim is partnering with Nvidia to utilize the tech giant’s Blackwell-based GB200 GPU for AI-enabled workloads. This partnership is expected to provide the necessary infrastructure to support the ambitious goals of the Krutrim AI lab. The infrastructure is set to launch by March, marking another step forward in Ola’s commitment to advancing AI technology in India.
With these developments, Ola is positioning itself as a leader in the Indian AI landscape. The establishment of the Krutrim AI lab and the introduction of innovative models demonstrate the company’s dedication to creating AI solutions that cater specifically to the needs of the Indian population. As Aggarwal stated, the focus is on making AI more accessible and effective for users across the country. The future looks promising for Ola and its Krutrim initiative as it aims to foster collaboration within the Indian AI community and drive technological advancements.
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