Rajat and Chirag Arya's 169Pi.ai: AI innovation for Bharat

(From left) Chirag and Rajat Arya Image: Amit Verma; Directed By: Kapil Kashyap

Rajat Arya and his younger brother Chirag Arya, co-founders of 169Pi.AI, were keen observers of what was happening in the world of AI. They already had some experience in building a small software business, having developed a few blockchain solutions for customers in the US.

Events such as OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman visiting India, in 2023, and the controversy that followed from one of his statements over what it would take to build a large language model piqued the brothers’ interest further. They started to look at how information about India was being portrayed in some of these models, and decided there was an opportunity to do something more desi, versus the West-oriented information on the internet.

That’s what prompted them to start 169Pi about a year ago, Rajat recalls. The name of the startup is inspired by the square of the number 13 and the mathematical constant Pi, which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter, he adds.

 “We are focusing on small language models,” Arya says. Computer scientists and engineers talk about software architectures that handle data in chunks of ‘64 bits’ or ‘32 bits’, he points out. The Arya brothers have built a model that represents pieces of data using only 1 bit per unit, which drastically reduces the compute power needed. The trade-off is in terms of accuracy and some other parameters, he explains.

 Such solutions are still very useful for a variety of applications because they offer significantly more affordable options due to the much lower compute power needed.