Bhavish Aggarwal's Krutrim brings DeepSeek R1 to Indian developers

Policy shift has triggered a significant backlash from anti-corruption watchdogs

Even as the debate on the use of DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) model continues, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Tuesday said one can make use of the open source model of the company.

 

Krutrim — the AI platform developed by Ola to cater to the needs of Indian consumers — has deployed Chinese company DeepSeek’s latest foundation model R1 671B on Nvidia’s H100s graphics processing units in India, he said.

 

“While we in India should be cautious with the DeepSeek app, we can totally make use of the open source model namesake, if securely deployed on Indian servers, to leapfrog our own AI progress,” Aggarwal said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

 

The foundation model will be available for use to all India developers at the price of one rupee per million tokens for the month of February, he said. In comparison, Krutrim offers developers access to Llama-3-8B-Instruct for ~16.60 per million tokens, Google's Gemma-27B for ~66.40 per million tokens, and Hugging Faces M4/idefics2-8B for ~16.60 per million tokens.

 

Earlier this month, Aggarwal had announced that Krutrim would be open sourcing the work that his company had done over 2024.

 

“Our focus is on developing AI for India, to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, (in) cultural context,” the Ola founder had then said.

 

Aggarwal had then also announced that Krutrim would be deploying Nvidia’s GB200 GPUs by March and make it “the largest supercomputer in India by end of year”.

 

“We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in 1 year. And by open sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world class Indian AI ecosystem,” Aggarwal had then said in his post on X.

 

Launched in April 2023, Krutrim — a Sanskrit word that translates to “artificial” — had in January last year claimed that it had achieved unicorn status. Startups that are valued at $1 billion or above are called unicorns.

 

The company, launched by Aggarwal and Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, a board member of ANI Technologies that owns Ola and Ola Electric, has already announced two versions of its large language model Krutrim 1 and Krutrim 2.