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India’s homegrown AI, Sarvam AI, is making waves by outperforming global AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini in India-centric tasks. The Bengaluru-based startup demonstrates the potential of sovereign AI, aligning with India’s push for local infrastructure and innovation.
5 Key Points:
1️⃣ India’s AI Strategy Prioritizes Infrastructure:
The 2026 Union Budget announced a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign cloud service providers using Indian data centres. This ensures AI computing power stays on Indian soil, attracting global companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to invest billions in AI-focused data centres.
2️⃣ Sovereign AI in Action:
Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam AI is designed for Indian users. It focuses on Indic languages, regional accents, and voice-based applications, running on local infrastructure without relying entirely on foreign systems.
3️⃣ Outperforming Global Giants:
Sarvam AI’s OCR tool, Sarvam Vision, topped the olmOCR-Bench with 84.3% accuracy, beating ChatGPT, Gemini 3 Pro, and DeepSeek OCR v2. On OmniDocBench v1.5, it scored 93.28%, excelling with complex layouts, technical tables, and mathematical formulas.
4️⃣ Specialized Strengths vs. ChatGPT:
Sarvam AI shines in Indian languages, Hinglish, voice-to-text, text-to-speech, document reading, and regional customer support. However, ChatGPT remains stronger at deep reasoning, coding, multi-step problem solving, and visual/media processing. Sarvam AI is currently text-only.
5️⃣ Global Recognition:
Ex-Google employee Deedy Das praised Sarvam AI for having the best text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and OCR models for Indic languages. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw emphasized that India’s sovereign AI strategy is producing world-class results in healthcare, materials science, and cybersecurity.
