Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim AI follows DeepSeek’s lead, open sources models to develop ‘AI for India’

Bhavish Aggarwal-led AI startup Krutrim has today launched an AI lab with the promise of releasing its work to the open source community. The announcement to open source Krutrim's AI models comes amid a sudden rise in the popularity of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which has made a name for itself with its cost-effective open-source models.

In a post on X, Aggarwal wrote, “While we’ve been working on AI for a year, today we’re releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports.”

"Our focus is on developing AI for India - to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc. Here’s a list of models we’re releasing." the entrepreneur added.

While Aggarwal acknowledged that Krutrim's AI models are currently 'nowhere close to global benchmarks', he claimed that the company has made progress in the last year. He noted that open sourcing the AI models would hopefully lead to the creation of a 'world-class Indian AI ecosystem'. The 39-year-old entrepreneur also pledged to invest ₹2,000 crore in Krutrim today fand ₹10,000 crore by next year.

What is DeepSeek and why is open source AI suddenly popular?

DeepSeek is an AI startup founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. The company shot to fame last month after various benchmarks showed that its V3 large language model (LLM) outperformed those of many popular US tech giants, while being developed at a much lower cost.

Until DeepSeek, only two of the top AI players - WhatsApp parent company Meta and French startup Mistral - had open-sourced their AI models. But with DeepSeek's recent surge in popularity around the world, more and more companies are taking notice and looking to open source their models.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the importance of open-sourcing models in a recent Reddit AMA session, saying the Microsoft-backed startup was on the "wrong side of history".

"Yes, we are discussing. I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy; not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority," Altman had wrote in reply to a Reddit post.