How Databricks is Shaping Ola Krutrim&#8217;s AI Dreams in India
Ola’s Krutrim is brimming with mysterious energy as it prepares to announce a new product tomorrow. It could be a mobile application, the much-anticipated Krutrim Pro, or an enterprise line of products, or the announcement could be about something even more exciting. While the source of excitement remains unknown, the credit most certainly goes to Databricks and the talented folks at Krutrim. A few days ago, Krutrim announced its partnership with Databricks to improve its foundational language model, particularly for Indian languages, aiming to enhance AI solutions in India. “The Krutrim model was launched using our platform,” said Naveen Rao, VP of generative AI at Databricks, during an exclusive interview with AIM ahead of the release of the world’s most powerful open-source model, DBRX. Further, he said the team custom-trained it on their own mixed Indian language dataset. “We have been working closely with the Databricks team to pre-train and fine-tune our foundational LLM,” said Ravi Jain, Krutrim VP. Is Ola Krutrim Built on Existing Fine-tuned Models? Let’s clear the air once and for all. Ola Krutrim has been quite obsessed with developing its own foundational model from scratch, despite rumours that it is being built on fine-tuned models such as Llama-2, Mistral, Claude-3 or even the most recent, DBRX. Source: X While that still remains a mystery, Rao said, “The Krutrim model was built on the dense model. It was not an MoE (mixture of experts); it was built off their data with our tooling and our model definition,” hinting that they are likely to use DBRX soon. “This is actually a shortcut way as well,” said Rao. He said that tools and components (chips) are often too expensive due to currency differences. DBRX offers a solid base, allowing developers to build something capable with little data and cost. “It’s a great way to get going,” said Rao, when asked how it could benefit the Indian developer ecosystem. Some of the early adopters of DBRX include Perplexity AI, You.com, Accenture and NVIDIA among others. Foundational Models Struggle Rao thinks that the vast majority of foundational model companies will fail. He says you cannot beat OpenAI without a differentiated use case. He told AIM that OpenAI’s investments were ahead of demand and investing heavily without clear market demand is risky. “OpenAI might struggle with justifying investments without a demand. Companies copying them face even bigger challenges,” he added, citing Anthropic, which found a moat in building custom enterprise models. “You’ve got to do something better than they do. And, if you don’t, and it’s cheap enough to move, then why would you use somebody else’s model? So it doesn’t make sense to me just to try to be ahead unless you can beat them,” he added. Further, he said you must beat them in some other dimension if you can not beat them at the consumer use case. “We believe, value doesn’t reside in the model itself. That’s ephemeral. It’s the process of building and customising models,” added Rao. Rao said that everyone has to have their take, but a vast majority of them just build models and call it a victory. “Woohoo! You built a model. Great,” he quipped. But he said that it will not work without differentiation or problem-solving. “Just building a piece of technology because you said you can do it doesn’t really prove that you can solve a problem,” said Rao. What about Krutrim? Rao seems optimistic about Krutrim despite its recent mishaps and criticism. “This issue wasn’t exactly wrong, but rather incomplete,” said Rao. He said that there is substantial data engineering work. “We provide the tools, but ultimately, it is how our clients use them. Post-training, a lot of effort goes into ensuring the responses are accurate,” said Rao. He said that Krutrim took a risk to be one of the first with a native model, but more work is needed for refinement, such as supervised fine-tuning. Solving AI for India is a complex problem. “A single setback doesn’t negate the entire effort,” said Rao. He said India is unique, with Hindi and English as overlay languages, alongside local languages; understanding and interacting in this rich linguistic environment is a significant challenge. He believes that Krutrim is positioned better to address these challenges than any other player in the market. That also explains why the company won the GenAI Innovation Award for ‘using generative AI to transform their products, processes, and tools’, at the Data Intelligence Day held in Bengaluru. At the event’s sideline, it was also revealed that both companies plan to create AI-powered products such as conversational assistants, content generation tools, and customised offerings across industries. [Update] April 1, 2024, 14:08 | The headline has been updated to reflect the partnership and synergy between the two companies to improve Krutrim as a product to enhance India’s native use cases.
“Krutrim took a risk to be one of the first with a native model, but more work is needed…,” says Databricks generative AI head.
“Krutrim took a risk to be one of the first with a native model, but more work is needed...,” says Databricks generative AI head.
["Databricks", "Ola Krutrim"]
["Anthropic", "Go", "GenAI", "OpenAI", "AI", "Aim", "data engineering", "generative AI", "Ola Krutrim", "R", "Databricks"]
["AI", "generative AI", "GenAI", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Aim", "Databricks", "R", "Go", "data engineering"]
Shyam is a tech journalist with expertise in policy and politics, and exhibits a fervent interest in scrutinising the convergence of AI and analytics in society. In his leisure time, he indulges in anime binges and mountain hikes.