Bala Parthasarathy

Director, People+AI; Chairman, Freo (MoneyTap); Founding partner Prime Ventures (Angelprime);Co-founder, Snapfish;

[Pratyush Kumar @pratykumar]

Drop 9/14: Today we are introducing Sarvam Studio, our product to help creators go multilingual. One piece of content, every corner of India.

With AI video dubbing, Studio generates high-fidelity dubs in 11 Indian languages. In an expert study, participants preferred Sarvam Studio for overall quality and production readiness.

With agentic document translation, Studio excels in contextually translating long-form content across genres. Our evaluations demonstrate that readers strongly preferred the output from Studio across different genres.

[Augadh @AugadhBhudeva]

India’s Sovereign Move - Sarvam Vision Cracks the Code across 22 Indian languages

Sarvam Vision is an AI model from Sarvam AI that excels in optical character recognition (OCR) for 22 Indian languages, outperforming global models like Gemini and GPT-4o on Indic benchmarks. This achievement supports India's push for sovereign AI by digitizing real-world documents and archives in local scripts.
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Sarvam Vision, a 3-billion-parameter model, handles "messy" scanned paperwork across languages like Hindi (95.91% accuracy), Bengali (92.61%), Tamil (93.42%), Marathi (93.13%), and even low-resource ones like Santali and Dogri (over 80%).
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It structures data natively without relying on English translation layers, enabling applications in cultural recovery and document intelligence.
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The model powers India's sovereign AI infrastructure under the IndiaAI Mission, where Sarvam was selected to build a national LLM.

This launch fits Sarvam's broader stack, including prior models like Sarvam-Translate (also for 22 languages) and audio models for code-mixed speech.

By focusing on Indic challenges ignored by Western AI, it unlocks centuries of knowledge in non-English archives.
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Recent demos, like digitizing historical texts, highlight its real-world impact beyond benchmarks.
Credit : AIM Network.

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

@WHOOP please fix your Indian service. You are charging global prices with such poor service

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

@OfficialHypeFly I have to return the Whoop 5.0 and get a replacement, due to a defect. I have messaged on Whatsapp. Is there a phone number to call? It is a REALLY frustating experience. This is my second Whoop and a gift and so even more painful to see such a bad service.

[Akash Vatsa  @akku92]

I was in the same damn flight 2 hours before it took off from AMD. I came in this from DEL-AMD. Noticed unusual things in the place.Made a video to tweet to @airindia i would want to give more details. Please contact me. @flyingbeast320 @aajtak @ndtv @Boeing_In #planecrash #AI171

[asif @theonlysif]

happening now! (@balap x @imDhananjay) 🎙️

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

@DylanoA4 Love it

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

Now that Google is finally starting to impress on their product, their distribution advantage will kick in shortly. A good reminder: when distribution is proprietary, distribution wins (Comcast vs Netflix), when distribution is commoditized, best product wins (chrome vs IE), when product is commoditized, best service wins (Amazon vs others), when service is commoditized, best network wins.

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

Amazing achievement, kudos to the team!

[Anuj Kacker @anujkacker]

We have been profitable for 4 months in a row! From Dec'23 to Mar'24. 🚀

Maintaining this pace of growth while turning profitable has been tough, challenging, frustrating ... but very rewarding.

@kunalvarma @hitarthsaini @balap

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

@TusharVashisht @OpenAI @healthifyme Brilliant!

[OpenAI Developers @OpenAIDevs]

The @healthifyme team built Snap using GPT-4 Turbo with Vision to give users nutrition insights through photo recognition of foods from around the world.

[Aakrit Vaish @aakrit]

Close to 10% of the world's population has interacted with a Haptik powered AI assistant.

Humbled by the impact, and grateful to all our customers, partners & Haptikans.

Here's to 100 billion! 🚀

@haptik @heyinterakt @reliancejio @SRajdev

https://t.co/q4CjOyzJ8n

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

Interview of Vimal @juspay @nammayatri by Sanjay Sarathy

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

Interview of @pramodkvarma about #ondc #becknprotocol, by Sanjay Sarathy
https://t.co/jPm9E7VqSm

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

Was great chatting with Nithin who is always thoughtful! @AntlerIndia

[People+ai @PeoplePlusAI]

🚨 Attention!

Our next episode of Intelligence Unscripted is coming soon!

We talked to Nitin Sharma, co-founder of Antler India, the world's largest venture builder about the future of AI and our role in it.

Stay tuned for more updates!
@nitinsharma1 @AntlerIndia

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

Awesome way to start the year @TusharVashisht @healthifyme !

[Tushar Vashisht @TusharVashisht]

We broke our all time #sales #record with US$300k on just #Day1 of #NewYear2024 ! This was more than the 2.12 Cr we did in revenues all of Jan '18. Thats a 31x #Growth
Doing 1 Cr by lunch was super fun - though I lost my bet by 2 mins :D

[Uday Kotak @udaykotak]

My year end musings. A Financial Sector Model for India’s dream: 9% annual growth, $30 trillion GDP by 2047.

India is transforming from a nation of savers to investors. The tussle between the saver/ borrower and issuer/ investor model is underway.

In the early 80s, the Indian saver had low confidence in financial assets versus gold and land. Slowly the saver moved some part to bank deposits, UTI and LIC.

Even in the 90s, investing in equities was considered “speculative”. Hence companies looking for capital went to the foreign institutional investor (FII). FIIs saw potential and bought into companies while the Indian saver stayed away. Companies raised capital through the less known Luxembourg stock exchange. India’s capital market was being exported.

Some of us highlighted this phenomenon to SEBI. That began the private placement market (QIP) in early 2000s. Hence FIIs could also buy on Indian markets. The Indian saver’s interest in markets improved after the global financial crisis.
That saver is now savouring the joys of investing. Mutual fund platforms, cash equities and derivatives markets, insurance funds, global private equity in India, other platforms like AIFs, lower tax regime for equity, have all converted a saver to an investor.

How do we create a sustained growth story hereon?

1.Many investors have joined post Covid. They have mainly seen upside. While the situation is not comparable at present, we need to keep Japan of the 80s at the back of our mind. Its Nikkei Index peak was 1989. 34 years later with near zero interest rates, the Nikkei is still below its 1989 peak. We must avoid bubbles through policy, regulation, education, and supply of quality paper. Companies should raise equity at lower cost of capital for productive use.
2.While we must avoid tax arbitrage in debt, unless debt markets grow it will be a one legged race. The current gap on highest marginal tax rate between debt and equity of 39% and 10% is perhaps too wide.
3.Double taxation on dividends needs relook. A shareholder is like a partner. There is no additional tax when money is moved from the partnership to the partners capital account. Same principle applies to shareholders.
4. Low cost leverage through derivatives can distort financial markets. This needs attention.
https://t.co/M1heYN2OvA savers become investors the banking sector faces challenges on its deposits and cost of funds. The large corporate sector has to meaningfully move to capital markets (debt and equity) and away from banks. Banks will become distributors of corporate debt rather than storage houses. They will need to penetrate mid sized corporates, MSMEs and consumers.
6. We should avoid a retrospective tax and regulatory regime. We will need to balance developmental and regulatory role.
7. Two areas which need urgent focus for India’s aspiration are acquisition financing and streamlining of the IBC/ NCLT process.

As India aspires, the financial sector will be the key engine for delivery. Impact of technology is a separate subject of discussion for a future date. The saver/ borrower and the issuer/ investor models will coexist. It is time for a wholistic financial sector view.

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

3 AI predictions for 2024!

[Moneycontrol @moneycontrolcom]

#GlobalAIConclave | Here's a look at 3 bold predictions by Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder, https://t.co/h1vMb5LjnF

Catch the live updates here👇
https://t.co/1XiD4MMvCa

@PaloAltoNtwks @EY_India @EYnews @YottaInfra @GoogleIndia @Rajeev_GoI @PriyankKharge @AndrewYNg @crmiller1 @maryesnapp @sriramragh @gangadharansind @svembu @prashanthp @chandrarsrikant @ShereenBhan

[Moneycontrol @moneycontrolcom]

#GlobalAIConclave | Here's a look at 3 bold predictions by Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder, https://t.co/h1vMb5LjnF

Catch the live updates here👇
https://t.co/1XiD4MMvCa

@PaloAltoNtwks @EY_India @EYnews @YottaInfra @GoogleIndia @Rajeev_GoI @PriyankKharge @AndrewYNg @crmiller1 @maryesnapp @sriramragh @gangadharansind @svembu @prashanthp @chandrarsrikant @ShereenBhan

[Bala Parthasarathy @balap]

OpenAI was also a giant experiment in corporate structures. Blending nonprofit with for profit. Having funky board structures to support it. Sounded like a great Silicon Valley experiment by itself. Led to this mess. A normal board with investors would’ve never let this happen

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.