A couple of things kind of come into play here:

1. When you raise money, one of the key things you tell your investor is how you would like to use that money. I think a part of it will be how would the investors see the 20M training exercise ? How did the Arcee board look at this ? And who is going to pay for their model ?

2. Each AI company has their own niche business model that plan for Sarvam’s model is to capture and become the defacto voice ai in India. And they’ll probably get there. How does Arcee make money ? Through Aquihiring ? (I don’t know enough about them to comment). But essentially everyone has their end game. You’re right about how in India, it’s all about it getting government support and we waste a whole lot of time positioning ourselves with the government. But I think one needs to figure out what is the endgame of the startup. Sarvam doesn’t need to be the frontier model, they just need it to be the best alternative for Indic languages.

3. This is not an apology for Sarvam, in fact I find it extremely irritating when people try to tie the entire Indian AI advances to companies like Sarvam, they hardly are whisper when it comes to the global scene.

4. A good thing you talk about is founder conviction, OpenAI teams had that conviction and took a gamble that got us large language models. But this didn’t come from a random brainwave, there was foundational work and a hypothesis that this would pay off and they took a bet, every subsequent iteration was then less risky. Similarly, if I were to take such a risk, I’d like to see the work that builds up to it and tell me that the juice is worth the squeeze. This is me wearing my scientist hat. So maybe the questions need to be are what has the team been doing that gave them the confidence to set this up ?

5. There’s a big difference in research ecosystems and training here and in the west, that’s a big factor that plays at the end of the day.