After Sam Altman's 'hopeless' comment, India's Zoho announces building ChatGPT like AI language model

In an effort to take on OpenAI and Google, India's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) major Zoho is building its own large language model that is similar to OpenAI's GPT and Google's PaLM 2 models. Zoho's founder Sridhar Vembu is overlooking the project.

Zoho's Research and Development team is working on the AI language model. Meanwhile, Zoho's vice president of marketing and customer experience Praval Singh has said that the company had been working on AI for the past 10 years. He further added that Zoho provided 13 of its apps with ChatGPT integration.

"We have been working on artificial intelligence for a decade now. When customers needed ChatGPT integration, we gave them that by integration with 13 of our apps as we announced recently," Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience, Zoho said in Delhi on June 14.

"In the short term, we have built the integration with ChatGPT... But we are also building proprietary large language models that will be capable of summarising, paraphrasing and adapting to new tasks. However, we have not set a specific timeline for it," he added.

This comes, days after OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman stirred controversy when he said that it would be "hopeless" for an Indian startup with $10 million in funding to work on a foundational LLM. Later, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had replied that OpenAI chief Sam Altman is not the final word on India's AI aspirations.