We must catch up in the AI race, says Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI

Kumar was talking at a fireside conversation, ‘AI: Made in India’, at Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 awards event. “We are the fourth largest country, in terms of economy, and we should definitely have these bets, right? That’s one thing I worry a lot about,” he said. He gave the example of Grok, the generative AI chatbot of Elon Musk, which has over 100,000 GPUs. Sarvam AI, on the other hand, has 4,000 GPUs with certain support from the government. “We are very behind, and these are small efforts for a large country with the economic might we have; we should be more ambitious in what we do in R&D,” he added.

The Co-founder of Sarvam AI also exhorted the gathered leaders of different companies to reinvest more of the earned money into R&D. “R&D is a dart out there. Sometimes it might fail, but what fraction of our companies are we putting in terms of profit back into R&D? That is abysmal,” he said.