The AI race is hotting up with yet another player marking its presence – this time with an interesting multilingual model. On Thursday, Pranav Mistry, founder and CEO of artificial reality start-up Two AI, backed by Jio Platforms and South Korean Internet conglomerate Naver, posted about Sutra-R0, the first reasoning model from his artificial reality start-up. He claimed that in early results it beat OpenAI-o1-mini and DeepSeek-R1-32B in most Indian languages.
Later, speaking to businessline over a Zoom call, Mistry, a tech prodigy who shot to fame with his work on Samsung Galaxy Watch, Gear VR, and the gesture-based Sixth Sense wearable technology, emphasised that small models like Two AI’s Sutra have the capability to disrupt and one does not need to chase LLMs built on thousands of GPUs.
“Now that DeepSeek has come, and the realisation has happened that small models can work, Sutra is getting a lot of attention. People are understanding that it doesn’t require a 10,000 people team to build and lead this particular market,” he said. Mistry says the AI chapter is just beginning and India should not compromise and say let’s just build an application layer. “We should build core capability, build internally and lead this game,” said Mistry who shuttles between Silicon Valley, Mumbai and Seoul where Two AI has its offices.
“I think AI is only valuable, specifically in countries like India, when it is accessible at the mass scale. In order to do this, we need two things — an AI that actually understands the Indian context and nuances of our dialects, and it needs to be cheap enough,” says Mistry. “For almost one and a half years, we have been building Sutra with the single goal that the AI can have multilingual quality because languages are what create bonding between people,” stresses Mistry, who himself speaks seven languages — including Chinese, Korean, and a smattering of Japanese. Unlike other models that need to train a Hindi model or a Tamil model, Mistry says Sutra is unique in that it is a single model that can serve 50 languages.
Mistry says that Two AI is building full stack AI-solutions for enterprises powered by Sutra and these are already being used by large banks in South Korea and large retail companies in India. “On the consumer side we are also building what you may call the India version of Perplexity, powered by our own Sutra models. We call it Geniya and that is going to come this summer,” he says. The AI-powered search experience Geniya.com is already in public beta.