Govt picks Sarvam to lead India's LLM development effort

The Union government has selected Sarvam AI to develop the country's first "sovereign large language model (LLM)" under the IndiaAI Mission, Union minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on Saturday.

- HT Correspondent

NEW DELHI:

The government will allocate 400 graphics processing units (GPUs) to Sarvam for six months for the development of India's own large language models with 70 billion parameters.

"We are confident that Sarvam's models will be competitive with global models," Vaishnaw said at an event for the launch of Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS).

The minister asked for a timeline for developing the platform from Sarvam founders who committed that it would be done in six months.

For the initiative, the government evaluated 67 proposals "with rigorous scrutiny and many more startups will soon follow", Meity said in a post on X.

As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, the Bengaluru-based firm will develop three model variants, Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar said in a release.