India Can Use DeepSeek Model to Leapfrog AI Progress: Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal

AI startup Krutrim founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Tuesday weighed in on the rising global interest in artificial intelligence, especially after the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model. While he urged caution in adopting the Chinese app in India, he highlighted the potential of leveraging the open-source model behind it.

“While we in India should be cautious with the DeepSeek app, we can totally make use of the open source model namesake, if securely deployed on Indian servers, to leapfrog our own AI progress,” the Ola CEO wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

He also announced the deployment of DeepSeek-R1 671B on H100s for the first time anywhere in the world. Krutrim has decided to offer the AI model at an affordable price of Rs 1 per million tokens for the month of February.

“@Krutrim has deployed DeepSeek-R1 671B on H100s - first time anywhere in the world. It’s the most powerful open-source model available and to enable all Indian developers to access it, we will price it at ₹1/million tokens for February,” he added.

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Bhavish Aggarwal's AI Initiatives

A few days ago, Aggarwal-led Krutrim also launched an AI lab with the assurance of releasing its work to the open source community. With a focus on developing “AI for India”, the entrepreneur said, “While we’ve been working on AI for a year, today we’re releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports.”

Founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, Krutrim is India’s first homegrown large language model, designed to rival global AI systems. It is trained on a vast dataset of Indian languages and contextual data, enabling accurate text generation and conversational AI.

Krutrim uses NLP to understand human language and help with tasks like writing emails, planning travel, and learning new skills. It is being integrated into Ola’s ecosystem, including mobility, financial services, and customer support, while also serving third-party businesses that require Indianised AI solutions.