This Akash Ambani-Backed Startup is Building Multilingual LLMs for India
TWO, a startup backed by Reliance Jio, recently launched a family of models called SUTRA. These cost-efficient, multilingual generative AI models excel in 50+ languages, offering speech, search, and visual processing capabilities. The startup raised a $20M seed fund in February 2022 from Jio Platforms and South Korean internet conglomerate Naver. “Jio has been one of our key partners for a long time and has invested in us from the very beginning,” said Pranav Mistry, the founder of TWO, in an exclusive interaction with AIM. He added that Reliance Jio Infocomm chairman Akash Ambani takes a keen interest in the growth of the startup. “I meet with them often. Jio’s vision is to bring the power of AI through its services. Being a Jio partner gives us access to this market,” he said. Before founding TWO in 2021, Mistry served as Samsung Technology & Advanced Research Labs’ (STAR Labs) President and CEO. In 2009, Mistry developed SixthSense, a wearable gestural interface that integrates digital information with the physical world, enabling users to interact with data using natural hand gestures. This technology was introduced during his TEDIndia talk in 2009 and has since garnered widespread attention. TWO’s SUTRA Line of Products As of now, TWO offers four models on the SUTRA playground: Sutra Light, Sutra Pro, Sutra Turbo, and Sutra Online. “Some of our partners in Korea and India have already started evaluating our models and conducting pilots in their own products,” said Mistry. In terms of capabilities, Mistry said, “SUTRA models are 56 billion parameters,” adding that it is a very small model compared to larger models showcasing a trillion parameters like  OpenAI’s GPT-4o. “The power of small models is that they can run very efficiently and at a very low cost. In order to run this model, we require a single NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU” added Mistry. TWO is planning to launch ChatSUTRA this month, a platform where users can start using SUTRA’s multilingual models in 50+ languages for almost any task – to chat, question, learn, brainstorm, write, and more. TWO also has an AI-powered social media app called Zappy, which is quite popular in South Korea. “One of our apps, Zappy, which uses millions of AI-to-user conversations, is powered by SUTRA. Right now, it’s available in Korea, and we are planning to bring Zappy to India very soon this summer,” said Mistry. Another product from TWO is Geniya which can browse data from the internet using Google, rivalling Perplexity AI. Mistry said that Geniya is still in public beta and users can try it out, following the official launch expected sometime in June. SUTRA’s Architecture SUTRA is a model built from scratch, not fine-tuned or based on any other LLM. It combines the LLM with neural machine translation (NMT) to accurately handle idiomatic expressions and colloquial language. “Our specialised NMT models are significantly smaller in parameter size, requiring much less data for training”, Mistry said. This ensures that SUTRA  not only grasps the literal meaning of given inputs but also understands the cultural context, which is essential for effective communication. Mistry also highlighted that they have a dataset advantage, as they have trained Sutra on the millions of user-to-AI conversations happening on Zappy. “We can actually use the user to AI  conversation data in order to improve the quality of SUTRA,” said Mistry, adding that they have Korean data from over 20 million conversations that SUTRA was originally trained on in Korea. SUTRA’s Customers SUTRA models are currently available as APIs as well. Mistry said that he thinks that the Asia Pacific market is a huge opportunity for non-English AI models. “We have access to companies like Jio, as well as Naver and SK Telecom in Korea. We want to work  with these  telecom companies to bring the power of their cloud and edge networks to distribute the power of SUTRA,” said Mistry. SUTRA is not Alone The Indian AI startup ecosystem is currently booming. Sarvam AI launched the OpenHathi series last year and is currently working on Indic voice LLMs. Meanwhile, Tech Mahindra is working on ‘Project Indus’. This month, the Hanooman model was jointly released by SML India and 3AI Holding, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm. Bengaluru-based CoRover also introduced BharatGPT, earlier this year. In the meantime, Ola Cabs chief Bhavish Aggarwal is building Krutrim AI. Additionally, the Nilekani Center at AI4Bharat in IIT Madras released Airavata, an open-source LLM for Indian languages. “I am aware of Sarvam AI, Krutrim AI, as well as the work from Tech Mahindra and SML’s Hanooman,” said Mistry. However, Mistry believes that it’s not so much about the competition. “It’s  about more people working together towards the goal of bringing the power of AI to India and SUTRA  wants to be a part of this journey,” he concluded.
SUTRA is a model built from scratch, not fine-tuned or based on any other LLM.
TWO, a startup backed by Reliance Jio, recently launched a family of models called SUTRA
["Pranav Mistry", "Sutra", "TWO AI"]
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["AI", "ML", "generative AI", "GPT-4o", "OpenAI", "Aim", "R", "Go", "Git", "API"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.