Sarvam AI plans trillion-parameter model, sets sights on competing with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

AI startup Sarvam AI has announced plans to build a trillion-parameter artificial intelligence model as it looks to compete with global frontier AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, according to a report by The Times of India.

Speaking at the company's developer conference in Bengaluru on Thursday, Sarvam AI co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the proposed model is being designed for advanced use cases including coding, cybersecurity, scientific research and simulations.

According to the TOI report, the company's existing 100-billion-parameter model is currently focused on voice AI, conversational systems, English speech recognition, dictation and simulation-based tasks. Kumar said the platform has processed over 325 million minutes of voice calls and, in one benchmark, performed within four to five percentage points of a significantly larger AI model.


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Kumar also said Sarvam's voice AI systems are four to five times cheaper than comparable global offerings, including for English speech recognition.

As part of its expansion strategy, the company is establishing a US office to recruit Indian-origin AI researchers working overseas.

"Our goal is to ensure India does not just consume AI but also manufactures intelligence," Kumar was quoted as saying by The Times of India. He added that relying on overseas AI providers could result in dependence not only in terms of costs but also data.

Co-founder Vivek Raghavan said the company aims to build what he described as a "real token factory in India", arguing that serving AI inference from within the country is an important step towards technological self-reliance, according to the report.

Kumar also said Indian AI products should compete globally rather than seek acceptance solely because they are domestically developed. "Sovereignty should not be a tax," he said.

As part of its research push, Sarvam AI has appointed AI researcher Devendra Chaplot, a founding member of Mistral AI and Thinking Machines Lab, as an advisor. Chaplot is based in California.

The company also unveiled several new products and platforms at the event, including an India-hosted inference platform, AI-powered smart glasses under its wearables brand Kaze, a Python SDK for model training, the Bulbul V4 multilingual text-to-speech model, Sarvam Vision 2.0 vision-language model, and Indus, an agentic AI platform integrating work, voice and coding capabilities.

According to the TOI report, Sarvam AI's strongest commercial traction currently comes from the banking and financial services (BFSI) sector. Kumar said financial institutions are deploying the company's AI stack for voice-based and agent-driven workflows, including an AI agent used by SBI Life's sales network. The company is also seeing demand from digital-native businesses, defence and intelligence organisations, and the public sector.

With inputs from TOI