Zoho Is Making A New AI Model To Compete With OpenAI And Google. Sridhar Vembu Is In Charge Of The Project

Zoho, an Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, is making a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s PaLM 2. Sridhar Vembu is the company’s founder and CEO. He is in charge of the project, which is being worked on by the R&D team in India.

“We’ve been working on artificial intelligence for ten years now. When customers wanted ChatGPT integration, we gave it to them by integrating it with 13 of our apps, as we recently announced,” Praval Singh, Zoho’s vice president of marketing and customer experience, said in Delhi on June 14.

“In the short term, we’ve built the ChatGPT connection… But we are also making our own big language models that can summarise, paraphrase, and change to fit new jobs. We haven’t set an exact date for it, though,” he said.

A few days before Zoho said it would build LLMs, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman said something that caused a lot of debate. He said it would be “hopeless” for an Indian startup with $10 million in funds to work on a foundational LLM.

Altman later said that his quote had been taken out of context, but not before Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani said that he saw the OpenAI chief’s comment as a “challenge.”

In the meantime, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that OpenAI head Sam Altman is not the last word on India’s AI goals and that he will disagree with the creator of the very famous ChatGPT chatbot in many ways.