“Picture abhi baaki hai”: Sarvam AI Co-founder Vivek Raghavan responds to Jiostar-OpenAI partnership

New Delhi: At the AI Impact Summit in the capital, BestMediaInfo.com caught up with Dr Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam AI, moments after his keynote address. sked about JioStar’s collaboration with OpenAI instead of an Indian player like Sarvam, Raghavan chose restraint over rhetoric.

“That’s a question you have to ask Jio,” he said, adding that the larger issue is not about one partnership but about India’s long-term technological sovereignty. “If foundational technologies are controlled by foreign countries, there will come a time when we won’t be able to do these things ourselves. Now is the time to invest in Indian companies,” he added. 

In a pointed remark directed at brands that continue to prefer global AI giants, Raghavan said India has historically been a user of technology, not its creator. “Today, India is a different country. We have more confidence. These young kids are building world-class models. We can do this.”

When asked how soon India could see a full-fledged AI campaign powered entirely by Sarvam, he smiled and said, “Stay tuned. Abhi picture baaki hai.”

Raghavan also addressed the possibility of Indian AI platforms evolving into advertising-led models. Referring to global experiments where conversational AI systems are testing ads, he said Sarvam has not taken a call yet but acknowledged the economic reality.

“GPU inference costs money. We have to figure out how to pay for it,” he said candidly. While reiterating that Sarvam’s priority is building for the country and ensuring access for the last user, he admitted that advertising remains the “easiest way” to monetise digital platforms. However, he stopped short of confirming whether Sarvam would actively pursue an ad-supported AI model.

Responding to a question on culturally relevant reasoning beyond translation, Raghavan said that models reflect the data they are trained on. While global models may contain a minuscule percentage of Indian-language data, Sarvam ensures that 10–20% of its training tokens are Indian in origin. “That more naturally makes the models focus on Indian thought,” he explained.

In his address, Raghavan made it clear that building AI in India is not a matter of choice but necessity. “AI is a core technology that will impact every aspect of human life. A country like India must understand and build it from the foundational level,” he said, warning that failure to do so could reduce India to a “digital colony.”

India’s diversity, he argued, is not a challenge but a competitive advantage. With 22 official languages and dialects that change every few kilometres, India offers one of the richest linguistic datasets in the world. “If we build AI from India, it must acknowledge this diversity and capture the voice of the people,”he added. 

He also pointed to India’s scale and cost consciousness. Like UPI transformed digital payments, AI built efficiently and delivered at scale can ensure citizen services that are “the best and the cheapest.”

Sarvam positions itself as a full-stack sovereign AI platform built from scratch. Raghavan outlined three core layers: models, applications, and infrastructure.

At the model level, he stressed sovereignty. “They are built from scratch. There is no data dependency on anyone else.” The focus is on state-of-the-art performance while remaining efficient and India-centric.

If there was one message Raghavan repeated, it was urgency. India must build, invest and believe in its own AI capabilities. The story, he insisted, is only beginning. As he told BestMediaInfo with a grin, “Abhi picture baaki hai.”