Open challenge to OpenAI, Google: Zoho working to build its own AI model

Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zoho is working to build its own large language model (LLM), much like OpenAI’s wildly popular ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM 2 models, Moneycontrol (MC) reported.

The project is being run under the leadership of Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu. The company’s R&D team is directly involved with the project, the report said.

Elaborating on the project details, vice-president of Marketing and customer experience at Zoho, Praval Singh was quoted in the report as saying, “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.”

Furthermore, Singh said that in the short term, we have built an arrangement to integrate with ChatGPT, however, we are also developing proprietary large language models with the ability to summarise, paraphrase, and adapt to new tasks, he added.

Zoho’s announcement to develop its own LLMs comes after OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman made news with his controversial comments. Altman had said that it would be “hopeless” for an Indian startup with $10 million in funding to build a foundational LLM, the MC report said.

However, as his comments stirred up a controversy, Altman clarified that his statement was taken out of context, but before he could do it, Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani said that he saw the OpenAI chief’s remark as a “challenge.”

On a related note, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that OpenAI boss Sam Altman is not the final word on India’s AI-related growth plans, the MC report said.