The AI race is heating up, and now an Indian startup called Sarvam is throwing its hat in the ring with the Indus chat app. It's designed for both web and mobile users and aims to compete with giants like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic, and Google. What's interesting is that India is turning into a key area for AI adoption, and these companies are seeing a lot of activity there.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, even mentioned that ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly active users in India. Anthropic also reported that India accounts for a significant portion of Claude's usage, second only to the United States.

What's Indus All About?

Indus is essentially a way to interact with Sarvam's brand new Sarvam 105B model, which is a large language model with a whopping 105 billion parameters. Sarvam unveiled its 105B and 30B models recently, also outlining plans for enterprise solutions, hardware, and partnerships with companies like HMD (Nokia phones) and Bosch for AI in cars.

As of right now, you can try out the Indus app on iOS, Android, and the web. It lets you type or speak your questions and get answers back in text and audio. When you sign up, you can use your phone number, Google account, Microsoft account, or Apple ID. However, for now, it looks like the service is only available in India. I think this is a smart move. If you want to compete, you have to be closer to your target audience.

Of course, it's still in beta, so there are a few things to keep in mind. For example, you can't delete your chat history unless you delete your entire account, and you can't turn off the app's reasoning feature, which can sometimes make responses slower. Also, Sarvam has said that access might be limited at first as they expand their computing capacity. "We’re gradually rolling out Indus on a limited compute capacity, so you may hit a waitlist at first. We will expand access over time," Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar wrote on X, adding that the company is seeking feedback from users.

I think that those limitations are normal, it's great that they are being upfront about the limitations and working to improve the app as quickly as possible.

Sarvam was founded in 2023 and has raised $41 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures to build these language models specifically for the Indian market.

Sarvam is one of a growing number of Indian startups trying to create local alternatives to global AI platforms, which makes sense as India wants more control over its AI infrastructure. It's going to be interesting to see how Indus stacks up against the big players.