Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder, Sarvam AI | "Sarvam means everybody- AI should be for everyone."| Ep. 24

we should build, um, AI for Indian languages, right? Because it was an interesting problem. India is so diverse, very rich culture, and it shows in our languages. So many different scripts, so many different unique ways of speaking, and we said it's a good, uh, challenge, uh, to build AI for Indian languages. You should have the ability to build it yourself, because that gives a very different stance to who we are as a country, right? Um, and I think this is very, very important for strategic, uh, technologies. Uh, and I think it is very true for AI. [upbeat music]

Hi, my name is Amrit. We've heard that IIT Madras is the best place to build. So we've come down to the Sudha and Shankar Innovation Hub. We want to meet some people. These are builders. We want to talk to them about their work, and also ask them, "What makes IIT Madras the best place to build?" Hi, and welcome to The Best Place To Build Podcast. This is Amritash. Today I'm sitting with Pratyush, the co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI. Hi, Pratyush.

Hi, Amritash.

Pratyush, you are, uh... you like to stay away from the limelight, for good reason, so if it's okay, I will run an introduction. Pratyush runs Sarvam, one of India's hottest AI startups. They solve for, uh, AI for India, so Indian languages, Indian use cases, uh, speech to text, text to speech translation, and of course, LLM. Uh, company has raised funding from Peak XV, formerly Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed. You should know that Khosla Ventures was an early investor in OpenAI also. Uh, recently, it was also announced that, uh, by the Honorable Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, that Sarvam has been selected by the government of India for- to build India's sovereign LLM, uh, under the India AI mission. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Um, the TLDR version is that Sarvam is one of India's hottest AI companies, uh, and is deeply linked to India's AI objectives, and Pratyush leads Sarvam. Uh, hi, Pratyush.

Hi, Amritash.

Um, that's a very heavy introduction, but I want to say that you were into AI long before this LLM craze began, right? So can you give us a sort of an introduction on how your journey has come to be?

Uh, certainly. Thanks. Thanks for the invite, and it's great to be sitting here in an Bajaj garage in IIT Madras. Uh, it's definitely a place to build, um, so, so glad to be on the podcast. Um, yeah, my background, um, uh, I studied electrical engineering, um, at, at, uh, IIT Bombay. Uh, I sort of, uh, do believe that electrical engineering is a broad topic that teaches you various things, right? From, you know, understanding linear algebra to, to writing code. Uh, and then went on to do a systems engineering PhD at ETH Zurich, and basically learned more about high-performance computing, uh, reliable computing, and so on. Uh, so not really AI at that point, but then I joined IBM Research. Uh, this was the early, uh, time of deep learning. AlexNet had happened, and so people were aware that you could just make these models larger and get more out of them. But interestingly, the area was taking a turn. Uh, it was going from one where, uh, the algorithms mattered a lot, especially algorithm for computer vision, image, uh, for video, for audio separately, uh, versus it becoming, uh, very compute-driven, where you had to build efficient systems on very large amounts of data, uh, and you did much better. So at IBM Research, I got to see a bit of that and started working in this area, and then decided, uh, that it's so- it's an important area, that it's worth doing fundamental research on. So I joined IIT Madras here, uh, as a faculty member, uh, in the computer science department. Uh, and I met a very willing, uh, colleague in Mitesh Khapra, and we decided to say, "Let's focus on, uh, building AI."