After an episode when the AI-powered LinkedIn chatbot referred to Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal as 'they', Aggarwal had a major announcement to make regarding his company's cloud service provider. Until now, Ola was using Microsoft's Azure service, but Aggarwal announced that the service was being moved out. This followed his condemnation of LinkedIn for allegedly pushing what he called an "unsafe and sinister" political ideology in India.
The 38-year-old Aggarwal shared his concerns on LinkedIn, flagging the use of personal pronouns like 'they' and 'them' – pronouns that are usually understood to be gender-neutral. He expressed apprehension about the spread of what he called "pronoun illness" in India, noting its introduction in some educational institutions and even on CVs. His post, where he criticized the trend, was reportedly deleted twice by LinkedIn, citing it as "unsafe".
Aggarwal also took to his handles and expressed his discontent, saying that a need to develop indigenous technology and AI in India is necessary. Aggarwal said that Ola will migrate all its cloud workload to its own AI platform called Krutrim from Microsoft's Azure. Aggarwal further invites other developers to migrate away from Azure, proposing a year of free cloud usage on Krutrim.
Krutrim Si Designs has been labeled as 'India's own AI' model, led by Aggarwal and another board member at ANI Technologies Limited, which is the parent company of Ola, Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti. Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023 in Bengaluru with a project team based in India and the Bay Area, US.
Aggarwal's move from Azure only shows the dominance of Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud services market; Amazon's AWS leads the market with a 32 percent market share, and Microsoft's Azure has a 23 percent market share as of 2024, according to Synergy research group.
In the criticism, Aggarwal emphasized Ola's commitment to diversity, saying that they run one of the largest women-only automotive plants. He further stated that they need to adhere to the law of the land instead of "community guidelines" as dictated by the corporate and stated that data ownership lies with the creators and not the corporations.
In the pronouns issue, Aggarwal called it a "woke political ideology of entitlement" that Indians don't quite understand. He said that LinkedIn was imposing much on Indians by thinking that they need to practice such things and accused the platform of silencing other dissenting voices.
Other users supported Aggarwal for speaking out against what they called foreign influence, while others told him that respect for people's gender identity and pronouns was basic human decency. The debate that Aggarwal's stance brings to the fore raises complicated questions on cultural values and corporate influence in the digital age.
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