HMD has launched the Vibe 2 5G smartphone in India, preloaded with Sarvam's Indus AI chatbot — a 105-billion-parameter model supporting 22 Indic languages and mid-sentence code-switching. The partnership, announced at India's AI summit in February, aims to distribute a locally trained AI assistant through affordable hardware. The Vibe 2 5G is priced at ₹10,999 (~$114), and HMD plans to extend the integration to feature phones, where it holds a 4% market share. Indus has seen modest early traction with ~293,000 downloads versus ChatGPT's 43.9 million in India, but the bundling strategy targets linguistically diverse users underserved by English-language AI tools. Sarvam is reportedly raising $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.
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