Latest news with #PratyushKumar
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Business Standard
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
From comics to chatbots, startups adopt Google AI for local impact
Eight Indian startups demonstrated applications built on Google's AI platforms at the Google I/O Connect India 2025 conference, showcasing how local companies are leveraging the tech giant's cloud infrastructure to tackle challenges across education, governance, commerce and media. The demonstrations highlighted how India's entrepreneurial ecosystem has embraced Google's AI Studio, Cloud and Vertex AI services to build scalable solutions tailored to the country's diverse market needs. One such startup, Sarvam—selected for the INDIAai Mission—is building AI tools tailored to India's cultural and linguistic diversity. Its open-source Sarvam-Translate model, built on Google's Gemma 3, delivers accurate, context-rich translations across all 22 official Indian languages. Gemma 3's multilingual efficiency helped cut training and inference costs, enabling Sarvam to scale the model, which now handles over 100,000 translation requests weekly. The API also powers Samvaad, Sarvam's conversational AI platform, which has processed more than 10 million conversation turns in Indian languages. 'Gemma breaks down Indian language text into fewer tokens on average, which directly improves the model's ability to represent and learn from these languages efficiently,' said Pratyush Kumar, founder, Sarvam. In the entertainment sector, Dashverse is using Google's Veo 3, Lyria 2 on Vertex AI, and Gemini to build Dashtoon Studio and Frameo—AI-native platforms that turn text prompts into comics and cinematic videos. These tools support its consumer apps, Dashtoon and Dashreels, which now serve over 2 million users. The company has also produced a 90-minute AI-generated Indian mythology epic using Veo 3, and is using Lyria 2 to help users create soundtracks that adapt in real time to narrative pacing on platforms like Dashreels. Similarly, Toonsutra is using Google's Lyria 2 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on Vertex AI to add dynamic music and lifelike character speech to its Indian-language webcomics. Images are animated with Veo 3's image-to-video feature, creating a more immersive and interactive storytelling experience. By combining advanced AI with culturally rooted narratives, Toonsutra is pushing the boundaries of vernacular digital entertainment. On the enterprise side, AI startup CoRover is using Google's Gemini to power customisable, multilingual chatbots for businesses, enabling communication in over 100 languages with near 99 per cent accuracy. Its solutions, including BharatGPT, have supported more than 1 billion users and facilitated over 20 billion interactions across 25,000 enterprises and developers.
Korea Herald
14-07-2025
- Business
- Korea Herald
Zilliz Cloud Expands Global Footprint with New Azure Region in Central India
New region empowers customers to meet data sovereignty, regulatory, low-latency, and cost-efficiency goals when building AI applications. REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., July 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Zilliz, the company behind the most popular open-source vector database Milvus, today announced the availability of a new Zilliz Cloud region in Azure Central India, further expanding its global infrastructure. This new region enables customers—from fast-moving startups to global enterprises—to build and scale AI applications while ensuring data locality, regulatory compliance, low-latency performance, and lower cloud costs. With data residency becoming a critical requirement for many businesses operating in India and nearby markets, the new Azure Central India region provides developers with greater control over where their data lives, without compromising on performance or budget. "Developers rely on Zilliz Cloud every day to build and scale AI applications more quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively," said Charles Xie, CEO at Zilliz. "By adding a new region in India, we're helping customers reduce cross-border data transfer costs and latency, while also simplifying compliance with local regulations. It's a win-win for both innovation and infrastructure spend." Global Infrastructure with Local Performance Zilliz Cloud now operates across 26 cloud regions globally, making it one of the most geographically distributed vector database platforms available. The Central India region joins key international deployments across AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Key international regions include: This expansion makes it simple for organizations to optimize for latency, locality, and cost, all while scaling to support billions of vector embeddings and the most demanding GenAI workloads. With auto-scaling, usage-based pricing, and deployment flexibility across providers, Zilliz Cloud helps teams reduce operational overhead and focus on building AI features that deliver value. Companies like Sarvam, a leading AI startup building multilingual models in India, exemplify the demanding performance requirements driving this expansion."We needed a system that could handle real-time retrieval over millions of knowledge vectors without breaking under load," said Dr. Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam. "Zilliz gave us that. It freed up engineering cycles and let us focus on improving reasoning on the model side, not managing infrastructure." Now Available to All The Azure Central India region is now live and available to all Zilliz Cloud customers. Organizations can immediately begin deploying clusters in the new region through the Zilliz Cloud console. For more information about this new region, check out this launch blog or connect with our technical team for help. About Zilliz Zilliz builds next-generation database technologies that help organizations unlock the value of unstructured data and rapidly develop AI and machine learning applications. By simplifying complex data infrastructure, Zilliz brings the power of AI within reach for enterprises, teams, and individual developers alike. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Zilliz is backed by leading investors including Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures, Temasek's Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, Yunqi Partners, Trustbridge Partners, and others.
Time of India
01-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Under fire, Sarvam AI co-founder says worries about Indic GenAI model premature
Chennai/Bengaluru: India's latest home-grown generative AI language model, Sarvam-M, has drawn fire from sections of the developer community for what they describe as "under-whelming" performance. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now But Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam AI, insists the scepticism is premature and betrays a misunderstanding of how AI frontier models mature. "The ecosystem is early and people are worried too early," he tells TOI. "We are scrambling amongst ourselves when the world moves fast. We want to create an AI ecosystem where more people can positively collaborate." Released this month, the relatively small 24-billion-parameter Sarvam-M model was trained to reason across ten Indian languages while tackling maths and coding tasks. Kumar says benchmarks on Hugging Face (a platform and open-source library primarily used for leveraging machine learning models) show the model matching or outscoring popular open-source rivals (like Meta's Llama, Mistral Small and Gemma 3) in mathematics, programming and Indic-language comprehension. "With this we want to show that we cracked post-training (process of refining and optimising a machine learning model after its initial training phase) problems and our methodology is comparable with other models," he explains. "We open-sourced this because we want to show that such a model can be built and encourage other people to do it." Much of the social-media push-back has centred on relatively modest early-stage download numbers and the perception that Sarvam-M offers few breakthrough capabilities. Kumar counters that India's sovereign-AI ambitions demand more than one blockbuster release. "These things involve both scientific explorations and resource consumption," he says. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "I think we are on the path to building state-of-the-art models. " Sarvam AI is the first startup chosen to build a frontier model under the government's IndiaAI Mission, which is funding compute, data and research partnerships to reduce reliance on overseas platforms. Although the latest model is a private effort separate from the IndiaAI Mission, Kumar says the initiative will benefit everyone. He declines to give a timeline for the AI Mission-backed foundation model, noting that the company has yet to receive graphics-processing units (GPUs) from government suppliers. "We will open-source the foundational model," he says, but warns that schedules depend on hardware access and collaborative research cycles. Industry weighs in Seasoned AI practitioners say early criticism overlooks the scale of what Sarvam is attempting. "Building a 24-billion-parameter model in India is not easy, especially when deep research isn't encouraged in most universities or companies," says Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder of consultancy AI&Beyond. "Sarvam-M demonstrates robust multilingual reasoning by supporting ten Indian languages – no other model in the world has such a strong Indic component. " Sourabh Deorah, CEO & co-founder of an AI-powered employee engagement and rewards platform, says that as someone deeply involved in machine learning, he understands how challenging it is to create a 24-bn parameter model that not only handles reasoning tasks like math and programming but also delivers high-quality performance across multiple Indian languages – many of which have long been underserved in the AI space. Piyush Goel, CEO & founder of IT consulting company Beyond Key, says that the new model's potential to drive agentic AI in education, healthcare, and automation is exciting. Agentic AI is a type of AI that makes decisions and takes actions based on context and objectives without constant human intervention. Karthikeyan G, senior director of engineering architecture at software company Ascendion, says Sarvam-M's architecture will enable AI agents to interact among themselves (to take complex decisions) thanks to the standardised protocols being used. This will be crucial for the next stage of the AI wave.
Time of India
16-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI receives 506 foundation AI model proposals
Live Events The country's push to build artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities is getting an overwhelming response, with IndiaAI Mission on Friday revealing it has received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational selections will be announced shortly, IndiaAI model will have 70 billion multi-modal, multi-scale Indian foundation models will open up a "universe of applications" for citizens and enterprises, Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan had said on April 26. The model will be completed in six months, he had of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, Sarvam's model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, the startup had said in a to cofounder Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is developing three model variants. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model, people in the know had said.'We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models,' Kumar had said.
Time of India
06-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI-academia tango: The global leaders
For instance, IIT Madras researchers-turned-startup founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI were recently selected to build Indian language foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads While the research to product path is less trodden in India, shifts are underway. With starting up becoming increasingly popular and young people having a growing appetite for both research, innovation and risk, things may be changing. For instance, IIT Madras researchers-turned-startup founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI were recently selected to build Indian language foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission. ET looks at AI researchers from top universities around the world who went from lab to launch, starting and supporting AI businesses
