Chandra Khatri joins Krutrim as AI head

Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal-led artificial intelligence (AI) initiative Krutrim has appointed Chandra Khatri as the head of AI. Khatri made this announcement through his LinkedIn profile on Thursday. 

In his last stint, Khatri has been a co-founder of generative AI-based chatbot maker Got It AI which he founded in September 2020. As per his professional portfolio website, Khatri has worked and led AI teams at Amazon, Uber, and eBay. He also claims to have led efforts at Amazon to develop the first consumer-facing, large-scale, open-domain conversational AI. He graduated from Georgia Tech University in 2015 with a specialisation in deep learning and holds an undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani, India.

Last week, Aggarwal launched Krutrim, an AI base model focusing on Indic languages, cultural scenarios, and settings. Touting it to be the first of its kind, Aggarwal said that Krutrim could understand India’s ‘uniqueness and right cultural context’. Krutrim is trained on 2 trillion tokens. It can understand queries in 20 languages and generate responses in 10 of them including Marathi Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Odia. 

The team has yet to release details on the technical specifications or the financial cost incurred in building such a massive model. To set the context, ChatGPT-builder OpenAI spent an estimated $100 million and used more than 30,000 GPUs to build generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model.

Further,  Sarvam AI, the startup that emerged from stealth recently and secured funding of $41 million, launched OpenHathi, a Hindi-based LLM. Unlike Krutrim which is a base model, OpenHathi has been fine-tuned on Meta’s Llama 2 model.

Further, Indian IT major Tech Mahindra has announced that it has already deployed its generative AI project Indus within the company. Project Indus currently has a Hindi LLM with 539 million parameters and 10 billion tokens.