- India's diversity makes it a tough benchmark for AI, says Sarvam AI CEO Kumar
- AI value loops now improve models in months through real-world feedback
- Sarvam AI leads in Indian language OCR accuracy, surpassing Gemini 3 Pro
India may be the world's toughest test case for artificial intelligence and that is exactly why Pratyush Kumar wants to build it here.
Speaking at the NDTV Ind.AI Summit, the CEO and co founder of Sarvam AI said India's scale, languages and diversity make it "a tremendously hard benchmark for what AI needs to get right to work for all of India."
Kumar argued that AI's value loops, where user feedback rapidly sharpens models, now compound in months instead of years. "To innovate, you need to put technology out there and use feedback to make the models better," he said, stressing the need for real world deployment at scale.
Sarvam is betting on Indian languages, optimizing them with a homegrown AI stack and pushing them to serve entire populations. "We are actually world class in this," Kumar said, citing internal benchmarks.
On olmOCR Bench, Sarvam's Vision model scored about 84.3 percent accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3 Pro at roughly 80.2 percent and a ChatGPT vision model at around 69 to 70 percent. On OmniDocBench v1.5, Sarvam Vision posted 93.28 percent accuracy, again leading competing OCR systems. In word accuracy tests, it recorded 87.36 percent, compared with 82.51 percent for Gemini 3 Pro.
The company also unveiled a wearable device this week, a pair of AI powered glasses set to hit the market in May. A viral image showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi trying the device at Sarvam's stall. Kumar said Modi stepped past a marked security line to examine the products and asked pointed questions about performance, including whether the system could speak Gujarati.
Sarvam demonstrated models that extract text from photos, recognize speech and synthesize responses, even through a basic feature phone call without expensive hardware.
India, Kumar insisted, cannot afford to sit out the AI race. As the world's third largest economy and an ancient civilization, "India should be building it." The real challenge, he said, is solving the capital intensity and research demands and doing it from home.
