‘No Product Was Ever an Instant Hit,’ Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Defends Sarvam AI

Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu has come out in support of the Indian AI startup Sarvam AI amidst the backlash against the recently released Sarvam-M LLM.

Responding to skepticism over the model’s impact and utility, Vembu said, “There is no product we have built that was ever an instant hit,” urging the team to continue building despite early backlash. 

“Even when we were the first mover in a new market and we had done a lot of technical work, we only got slow traction,” he said. He encouraged Sarvam’s team to keep pushing forward, emphasising that instant popularity isn’t necessary for long-term success.

The comments follow the release of Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter hybrid open-weight language model trained on Indic languages, math, and programming. 

With just 334 downloads in two days on Hugging Face—Sarvam AI received some flak. Das called it “embarrassing,” and said there’s no real audience for this incremental work. Das contrasted this with an open-source model, developed by two Korean college students, that garnered about 200k downloads.

His comments led to a heated debate among the Indian AI community. As of now, the downloads on Hugging Face are 718, showing that the interest amongst developers is increasing.

Amidst this backlash, Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar expressed optimism in a post on X. “Great to be receiving feedback on Sarvam-M. Please keep them coming. Will help strengthen our pipelines as we start to train our sovereign model,” he said, confirming that Sarvam is on the path of building a foundational LLM under the IndiaAI Mission.

Great to be receiving feedback on Sarvam-M. Please keep them coming. Will help strengthen our pipelines as we start to train our sovereign model.

This was particularly interesting - https://t.co/vs0KL0NLII

— Pratyush Kumar (@pratykumar) May 25, 2025

Read: Sarvam AI’s Backlash Exposes the Sad State of Indian AI