Ola Krutrim AI Chatbot Public Beta Opens, CEO Warns of “Hallucinations”

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has announced that his startup AI research startup Krutrim will make its first language model, Krutrim AI, available for all Indians to try in a public beta phase. Krutrim AI, which was announced in mid-December 2023, is said to be trained on over two trillion tokens, or units of data, with a significant amount of them being based on Indic languages. According to the company, Krutrim AI will allow anyone to create voice-powered generative AI apps and services. English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and even Hinglish are currently supported, but the company promises that all 22 scheduled Indian languages will be integrated within the first quarter of 2024.

Aggarwal’s tweet announcing the open beta clearly states that its current phase is just a start for the company, and solicits feedback from users. He also warns of “some hallucinations”, referring to the possibility that the AI model will likely misunderstand context and generate illogical or unexpected results. However, Aggarwal notes that Indian users are still likely to find the chatbot more useful than current major global players’ offerings, because of its localised training data. 

The open beta phase will help Krutrim gather data from millions of real-world interactions. Aggarwal also stated that the company will be “working overtime” to find and fix errors. 

Krutrim AI's open beta is available to anyone with an Indian mobile phone number. Users can ask it for answers to questions, recipes and other instructions, and even essay-like paragraphs of text about any topic. However on signing in, a disclaimer is displayed, instructing users to double-check facts independently, as information it generates might be biased or harmful. It also states that people should not rely on Krutrim for advice on sensitive topics.  

Krutrim aims to create an AI model that is specifically tuned for Indian use cases, incorporating elements of Indian culture and history, as well as Indian ethos and sensibilities, which global players have not yet begun to concentrate on. Apps and services that leverage this model could help people overcome regional language barriers, and allow millions of people who have not yet been able to take advantage of the Internet due to access and language to do so. 

The startup says it plans to empower 1.4 billion+ Indian consumers, developers and businesses with AI models, cloud infrastructure and even in-house silicon.