With a collaborative push from the Centre and four generative AI startups — Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani.AI, and Gan.AI — India is not far from launching its frontier AI models.

Until last year, India’s tech community had been debating whether the country should develop its very own foundational large language models (LLMs).

From technocrat Nandan Nilekani to tech startup founders, including CRED’s Kunal Shah, and many VCs, have often questioned the viability of splurging on building desi foundational LLMs.

“Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it to create synthetic data, build small language models quickly, and train them using appropriate data…” Nilekani said last year.

However, the emergence of DeepSeek-R1, a foundational model developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek for under $6 Mn, challenged this notion in January this year.

With costs no longer a stumbling block, at least what the DeepSeek showed to this world, industry experts changed their pitch, now calling it a pressing requirement.

The Centre, too, saw an opportunity and decided to be pound-wise, finally waking up to the idea of building Sovereign AI models to maintain data sovereignty, cater to the diverse language and culture of the country, and make India part of the global AI revolution.

It announced plans to build the country’s own LLM as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission towards the end of January. More recently, it shortlisted Soket AI, Gnani.ai, and Gan.AI to build India-specific foundational LLMs.

Even as the country has selected its AI cavalry, questions that may come to mind are — what are we developing and how far have we come to live our Indic LLM dream? This is precisely what we will try to comprehend today.

So, What’s Being Served At India’s Big AI Feast?

While Soket AI is building a 120 Bn parameter open-source text model (the first iteration expected to be ready in 12 months, after it launches a 7 Bn parameter model in six months), Gnani.ai is working on a 16 Bn parameter Voice AI foundational model (expected to be ready in six to eight months).

Similarly, Gan.AI is creating a 70 Bn parameter multilingual foundation model targeting ‘Superhuman TTS (text-to-speech)’.

Sarvam AI, which was the first startup to get selected by the India AI mission in April, has launched Sarvam-1, a 2 Bn parameter model, and Sarvam-M, a 24 Bn parameter model. Sarvam-M is........

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