India Loves Llama, But Flirts with Mistral and Qwen

Mistral is back in the game. The French AI startup is rolling out new models one after another, winning over developers globally. However, it faces stiff competition from Alibaba’s Qwen, Meta’s Llama, and DeepSeek R1. Indian AI startup Sarvam AI recently launched Sarvam-M, a 24-billion parameter hybrid language model built on top of Mistral Small. However, some, like Menlo Ventures’ Deddy Das, raised doubts about the need for Indic LLMs unless they are clearly world-class. But this doesn’t take attention away from Mistral. In a blog post, Sarvam AI shared that it applied SFT and RLVR techniques to fine-tune Mistral Small, which was released under the Apache 2.0 license. The result was Sarvam-M, where “M” stands for Mistral. The model shows strong gains, with a 20% average