Sarvam AI: Powering India's Made-in-India Artificial Intelligence Revolution

Sarvam AI is an Indian AI company co-founded by IIT-Madras alumni Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. It operates as a full-stack AI company: building its own foundational language models, speech models, and application layer products. Both models announced at the AI Impact Summit use Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture — a design that activates only a fraction of parameters per inference, enabling large model scale while remaining computationally efficient.

The IndiaAI Mission's Innovation Centre pillar funds the development of indigenous foundational AI models. Following a competitive selection process, MeitY shortlisted 12 teams from across academia, startups, and research institutions. Sarvam AI received ₹246.72 crore in government support — primarily computing credits on the IndiaAI compute pool (38,000+ GPUs across 14 cloud providers). This model of public compute as a subsidy for AI development mirrors France's AI Compute programme and the US NSF National AI Research Resource.

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a neural network trained on massive text datasets to perform natural language tasks. Foundation models are large, general-purpose models trained at scale that can be fine-tuned for specific applications (question-answering, translation, code generation, document analysis). The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, pioneered at scale by models like Mistral Mixtral and Google Gemini 1.5, uses a "router" to activate only a subset of specialised "expert" sub-networks for each input, dramatically reducing inference compute while retaining large model capacity.