India Launches Its Most Powerful Open-Source LLM
India’s AI innovation space has welcomed a new contender. Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter large language model (LLM), is the flagship model unveiled by Indian startup Sarvam. Designed for performance and precision, Sarvam-M stands tall among globally recognized models.
A Model Tailored for Deep Understanding
Sarvam-M is built on Mistral Small and enhanced through a meticulous three-stage process. These include Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), and Inference Optimisations.
SFT focused on curating a challenging and diverse dataset. The team filtered generated responses using custom scoring, optimizing for quality and cultural relevance. This step helped Sarvam-M perform well in both complex reasoning tasks and casual conversations.
Through RLVR, Sarvam pushed the model’s boundaries further. By designing reward systems and using specialized prompt sampling, Sarvam-M became highly proficient in logic-heavy tasks like math and programming.
Post-training, the model underwent quantisation to FP8 precision. This improved inference speed without affecting accuracy. The integration of lookahead decoding increased efficiency, though the team notes concurrency issues still need solving.
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Real-World Applications and Benchmarks
Sarvam-M excels in tasks ranging from conversational AI to machine translation and education. Its strength in Indian language comprehension is a standout feature.
One of its benchmark successes is in the romanised Indian language GSM-8K, where the model achieved an 86% performance improvement. Sarvam-M even outperformed Llama-4 Scout on multiple benchmarks and is comparable to much larger models like Llama-3.3 70B and Gemma 3 27B.
In English-language tasks such as MMLU, it showed a slight 1% dip. Despite this, its performance remains impressive across diverse use cases.
Open-Source Access and Developer Use
Developers can now access Sarvam-M via Sarvam’s API. It’s also available on Hugging Face for direct experimentation and deployment. This availability makes it easy to explore Sarvam-M's potential in real-world projects.
By combining power, precision, and accessibility, Sarvam-M represents a significant leap in India’s AI journey.
