SoftBank CEO Prepares for Major Investment in AI

Imagining the future of AI technology and its impact on various industries.

News Summary

SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son plans to borrow $16 billion to invest in artificial intelligence, signaling a significant push into the evolving AI sector. Meanwhile, Indian startup Krutrim, backed by Ola’s founder, aims to revolutionize AI with a focus on Indian languages and plans to develop the country’s largest supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. As competition in the AI realm escalates, Krutrim’s advancements, including the rollout of the Krutrim-2 language model, position it as a key player in shaping the future of AI in India.

SoftBank’s CEO Gets Ready to Dive Deep into AI

In an exciting move for the tech landscape, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son is gearing up to borrow a whopping $16 billion for a major push into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). This ambitious plan has recently been shared with various banks, signaling SoftBank’s eagerness to fuel its investments in the rapidly evolving AI sector. As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries across the globe, SoftBank is setting its sights high.

A Big Investment in AI

The news has sparked interest, especially with other key players stepping into the ring. For instance, Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of India’s renowned Ola, is making headlines for investing $230 million into an innovative AI startup named Krutrim. This investment is primarily funded through Aggarwal’s family office, highlighting the growing trend of personal and family investments driving technological advancements.

Krutrim’s Ambitious Goals

Krutrim is not your average AI startup. This company focuses on creating large language models specifically designed for Indian languages. The startup has big plans, aiming to attract a total investment of about $1.15 billion by the next year to support its groundbreaking initiatives. Part of their strategy includes making their AI models open source, a move that fosters collaboration and innovation within the Indian AI community.

Building India’s Tech Future

As part of its mission, Krutrim is teaming up with Nvidia to build what they hope will become India’s largest supercomputer. This is an ambitious partnership that’s set to launch in March and expand throughout the year. Recent developments have already seen the company unveil Krutrim-2, an impressive 12-billion-parameter language model. With a remarkable performance in processing Indian languages, Krutrim-2 has achieved a stellar score of 0.95 in sentiment analysis, surpassing many competing models.

Stats That Speak Volumes

When it comes to practical applications, Krutrim-2 has shown an 80% success rate in code generation tasks, proving its capabilities. It’s also worth mentioning that Krutrim-2 has excelled in grammar correction, achieving a near-perfect score of 0.98, and has shown great promise in handling multi-turn conversations with a 0.91 score. This shows just how advanced their models are becoming.

Competition and Collaboration

In a competitive landscape, India aims to solidify its position in the AI realm, currently dominated by heavyweight players from the U.S. and China. The commitment to advancing AI technology is further evident with the recent release of the DeepSeek’s R1 model, which received positive feedback and is set to be hosted on domestic servers to retain data within India’s borders. In addition, Krutrim is also making DeepSeek’s capabilities available on its own Indian servers.

The Future of Krutrim

Krutrim is taking its dedication to the next level by developing BharatBench, an evaluation framework designed to assess AI models’ proficiency in Indian languages. Their systems also come equipped with a 128,000-token context window, a feature that allows for better management of complex conversations—an essential aspect in today’s AI landscape.

With plans to expand further and strengthen the presence of Indian AI on a global scale, Krutrim is certainly one to watch as it continues to evolve. The partnership with Nvidia to empower their supercomputer project points to a bright future not only for Krutrim but also for India’s place in the cutting-edge world of artificial intelligence.