SaaS unicorn Zoho Corporation is set to launch its foundational AI models by the year’s end, according to the company’s newly appointed CEO, Shailesh Kumar Davey.
This announcement arrives amid DeepSeek’s challenge to OpenAI, raising concerns about India’s capacity to create its own AI model. In his first media appearance since assuming the role, Davey revealed that the Zoho is working on two AI models, each with parameters ranging from 7 billion to 13 billion, as part of its broader AI strategy.
He noted that developing a large language model (LLM) involves navigating experimental techniques and limitations, with DeepSeek, OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic all facing similar hurdles.
“We have been training a 3-13 billion parameter model and have been working on it over the last eight months… Whatever DeepSeek did was experimental. There was a similar set of experiments conducted by OpenAI, Gemini, or Anthropic… and DeepSeek had done a certain other set of experiments, because the constraints in which they were working were very different,” said Zoho CEO Davey, at a press conference in Mumbai.
“From an intellectual challenge perspective, I would consider all of them to be almost equal. The space in which all of these are working are just almost similar. Just that the constraints that some would prioritise is what would differ,” he added.
Zoho Corp plans to launch its own LLM by the year’s end, but it hasn’t provided a specific schedule for the Indic LLM. By 2024, the company had already invested more than $20 million in NVIDIA for AI infrastructure and established collaborations with AMD and Intel to enhance the training of their AI models.
“We want to ensure that we know what technology is there today and how we can bring value to the customer… as well as when it is evolving, be the leader there. The whole AI space would have a newer set of training and inference, and when it comes, we want to be in the forefront of it. So we are investing a lot now, understanding and having the engineers work around the muck,” Davey said.
Chennai’s Zoho Corp is now valued at Rs 1,03,760 crore, reflecting a 58% increase from its earlier valuation of Rs 65,700 crore, as reported in the 2024 Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 report.
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