Zoho, a cloud services and software provider based in India, has announced plans to develop a large language model (LLM) to rival ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM 2 models. The company’s founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, is spearheading the project, which aims to create proprietary models capable of summarizing, paraphrasing, and adapting to new tasks.
We have been working on AI for a decade now. When customers needed ChatGPT integration, we gave them that by integrating with 13 of our apps as we announced recently. In the short term, we have built the integration with ChatGPT, but we are also building proprietary large language models, said Praval Singh, Vice-President of Marketing and Customer Experience at Zoho.
While the company has not established a specific timeline for the project, Singh confirmed that Zoho’s engineers are using more AI than before. He also stressed that AI and ChatGPT will not be used to replace jobs.
Zoho has offices in approximately 50 locations worldwide, including eight in India, with data centers located in Mumbai, Chennai, Shanghai, Dallas, Sydney, and Melbourne. Despite some economic upheaval, CIOs at the company are working to optimize cost and value. Singh sees reasons to be optimistic about Zoho’s future in India, where the company can leverage its solution capabilities and bring on new customers.
Zoho’s move into LLMs follows that of other major tech players, including OpenAI, which created GPT-3, and Google, which unveiled PaLM 2 last year.
