Sarvam, BharatGen offer AI cheaper than DeepSeek. Can they sustain it?

Industry stakeholders said the comparison comes with a caveat. While OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek develop large, general-purpose AI systems designed to perform a broad range of tasks across multiple languages and reasoning benchmarks, BharatGen and Sarvam’s current models are smaller, specific to Indian languages, and yet to be proven among consumers and enterprises. “Some of the cost advantages are structural and will remain because of engineering efficiencies. But part of the current advantage comes from policy intervention designed to accelerate India’s AI ecosystem,” said Jibu Elias, country lead for responsible computing at non-profit internet services body Mozilla Foundation. “Over time,…