The discussions around the use of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model continues & Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has emphasized the potential of leveraging its open-source counterpart to accelerate India’s AI growth.

Krutrim—Ola’s AI platform designed to cater to Indian consumers—has integrated DeepSeek’s latest foundation model, R1 671B, on Nvidia’s H100s graphics processing units in India, Aggarwal revealed on Tuesday.

“While we in India should be cautious with the DeepSeek app, we can totally make use of the open-source model namesake, if securely deployed on Indian servers, to leapfrog our own AI progress,” Aggarwal stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

To encourage Indian developers to explore this technology, Krutrim has priced access to the foundation model at just one rupee per million tokens for the month of February. In comparison, Krutrim offers developers access to Llama-3-8B-Instruct at approximately ₹16.60 per million tokens, Google’s Gemma-27B at ₹66.40 per million tokens, and Hugging Face’s M4/idefics2-8B at around ₹16.60 per million tokens.Earlier this month, Aggarwal announced that Krutrim would be open-sourcing its AI advancements from 2024. “Our focus is on developing AI for India, to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, (in) cultural context,” the Ola founder had stated.

Additionally, he shared that Krutrim is set to deploy Nvidia’s GB200 GPUs by March, with ambitions to establish “the largest supercomputer in India by end of year.”

Despite acknowledging that India’s AI development is still trailing global benchmarks, Aggarwal remains optimistic. “We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year. And by open-sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem,” he stated on X.