PAiGPT, an AI-powered conversational chatbot for UPSC aspirants, recently released its app for Android and iOS. The team behind PAiGPT visited Old Rajinder Nagar, Delhi , known as the Mecca for UPSC preparations, to validate the app and received good feedback from students and educators.
The app’s USP is its ability to fetch real-time information on various topics and current affairs, similar to Perplexity AI and Google Gemini. However, what sets it apart is its feature that provides trending topics and the option to create multiple choice questions based on the available information.
Moreover, aspirants can upload images of editorials from popular newspapers and the app can generate summaries. Additionally, the company plans to introduce a feature through which the app can generate the summary in Hindi, even if the uploaded image contains text in English.
“If you use ChatGPT and Perplexity AI with multimodal capabilities, such as vision, you have to pay $20 a month, which is very hefty for any UPSC aspirant. But if you come to our platform, that cost will be around Rs 250 per month,” said Eshank Agarwal, founder of PAiGPT, in an exclusive interview with AIM.
“With PAiGPT, you will receive everything related to current affairs, including real-time information. You can upload your article editorial and receive a summary, MCQs, and subjective questions. You will also get an idea of the main questions that may come up,” he added.
PAiGPT was founded in September 2022 by Agarwal, Addya Rai, Siddharth Singh, and Deepanshu Singh. All three co-founders have a background in UPSC. Deepanshu, who has successfully cleared the UPSC exam, previously held the position of senior mentor and faculty at Unacademy, and is currently the chief strategy officer at PAiGPT.
Similarly, Siddharth Singh, serving as the CMO at PAiGPT, has a background with Adda24/7, where he developed exclusive and comprehensive UPSC IAS study materials.
“We are not competing with coaching centers. Our focus is on solving the pain points for Indian students and possibly expanding to serve western students in the future,” said Agarwal.
When asked if it was the next Perplexity AI of India, Agarwal was clear, “PAiGPT is PAiGPT”. “PAiGPT means personalized AI, India’s first answer engine for the students and world’s best in terms of fetching knowledge, and giving answers to the students”.
The tech behind PAiGPT
PAiGPT is built on top of Llama 2 7B. Agarwal clarified that they do not use OpenAI’s GPT model citing the high cost associated with it. He added that they have fine-tuned Llama 2 and trained it with 600 million tokens.
“We have created our own premises with 100 million tokens, secondly, we have used Red Pajama, and thirdly, we have taken data from popular newspapers like The Hindu,” said Agarwal.
PAiGPT uses RAG architecture and a search engine to fetch real-time information. “We crawl data from a browser and store it in RAG architecture,” said Agarwal. The company is also also using active quantisation techniques.
“If you use NVIDIA A10 and operate in FP32, that amounts to approximately 31.2 teraflops. However, our approach involves quantising activations from FP32 to INT8,” explained Agarwal.
Moreover, Agarwal said that they have deployed their model on AWS. However, he added that it is not economical, as the company is paying for the NVIDIA A10 GPUs at $10 per hour for two clusters simultaneously. The company is planning to partner with local cloud service providers to reduce the costs.
“We are trying to collaborate with local data centers like ESDS, E2E Networks, and others and reduce prices,” said Agarwal.
What next?
In the first week of May, the company will introduce a new feature called Prep Section. With this feature when users enter a keyword for any subject, AI will recommend a list of questions. “For example, if you type ‘Indus Valley Civilisation’, you can choose how many MCQs to generate, and then you can attempt an AI-based customised test series,” said Aggarwal.
Secondly, the company plans to introduce an answer evaluation tool. “The evaluation of the Main’s answer key is a big problem in UPSC. At any coaching institute, if you attempt the Mains paper, their evaluation may take up to seven days because they have very few human resources. We are working on addressing this issue. If you upload your Main’s answer key in PAiGPT, you will get the evaluation in real-time,” said Agarwal
The company is also planning to help students with their mental health. “In the coming six months, you will see PAiGPT also work towards students’ mental health with the help of AI,” said Agarwal.
Talking about PAiGPT’s counterpart, YC-backed SuperKalam, Agarwal said that the company is using OpenAI’s GPT-4. Interestingly, PAiGPT’s chief strategy officer Deepanshu previously worked at SuperKalam.
The company is bootstrapped and has invested Rs 1 crore till date, with each co-founder contributing Rs 25 lakh. Currently, the company is seeking good strategic partners. Agarwal said that the company is also in touch with Biocon Biologics and is planning to meet founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw soon.
“We are not constrained by funding,” said Agarwal, adding that the company can deliver PAiGPT to 10,000 users with just Rs 3 lakh. However, the company soon plans to raise funds with a valuation of Rs 30 crore. “We want to become a billion-dollar company in the next five years,” concluded Agarwal.
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