Zoho's Sridhar Vembu Weighs In on Sarvam-M: 'Instant Success Is Neither Necessary'

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu came out in the support of homegrown artificial intelligence start-up, Sarvam AI. It’s new large language model (LLM), Sarvam-M, has come to the centre of a debate over whether it is truly a breakthrough or just repackaged hype. “I will point out that there is not product we have built that was ever an instant hit,” said Vembu in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“Even when we were the first mover in a new market and we had done a lot of technical work, we only got slow traction. Instant success is neither necessary nor sufficient to succeed long term,” he noted, while encouraging the Sarvam team to “keep fighting the good fight”.

The entrepreneur, who is known for his comments on AI, even argued that instant success was “neither necessary nor sufficient to succeed long term”.

Just to give some context, Sarvam-M is a homegrown alternative to Western AI models. It is based on Mistral-Small, an open-source model from French company Mistral, but heavily adapted to Indian linguistic and cultural contexts.

The aim is to bridge the gap in AI models that largely favor English and Western content. Sarvam-M has been trained to understand and respond in 10 Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi.

Despite having fewer parameters than Meta’s Llama 3.3 (70 billion) or Google’s Gemma 3 (27 billion), Sarvam-M delivers comparable or even better results in benchmarks, especially in multilingual tasks. However, with regard to English and general knowledge questions, it slightly trails behind, being about 1% less accurate than the original base model.

How the Debate Around Sarvam-M Started?

A tweet from Deedy Das, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, started this debate. He observed that Sarvam-M had been downloaded only 23 times within two days of its release, despite getting the media attention and the company's billion-dollar valuation.

To support his argument, he even highlighted the success of Dia, an open-source model by two Korean students, which had seen 200,000 downloads in just one month.

"India's biggest AI startup, $1B Sarvam, just launched its flagship LLM. It's a 24B Mistral small post trained on Indic data with a mere 23 downloads 2 days after launch. In contrast, 2 Korean college trained an open-source model that did ~200k last month," he said, while calling it "embarrassing".