Taking his fight further with Microsoft, Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Tuesday said that India needs to have its own full technology stack, including artificial intelligence models, cloud infrastructure, data centres and chips.
In conversation with author Rajiv Malhotra on social media platform X, Aggarwal said domestic technology stack was needed to lead the AI revolution and lessen dependence on big tech firms.
The model, which Aggarwal is suggesting is broadly on the lines of AI and tech sovereignty, which the government has been focusing on building.
Currently, India generates 20% of the data, but only has 3% of its data is stored within the country.
“Data sovereignty means that both, the location and control should be in India, not just the real estate. So, we need to have our own cloud technology stack which controls the data,” Aggarwal said.
“Unless, we build our own full stack, we wont be able to harness the power of both economic productivity and cultural strength of our civilisation,” Aggarwal added.
According to Aggarwal, that cultural narratives of those countries will dominate on whose datasets the language models (LLMs) are trained.
Last week, Ola decided to move its entire workload out of Microsoft Azure to its own cloud platform Krutrim. This was after Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removed Aggarwal’s post on ‘pronoun illness’, in which he called out the platform for imposing political ideology with regard to gender pronouns.
After the incident, Aggarwal had said that he would work with Indian developers to build a DPI (digital public infrastructure) social media platform.
Last year, Aggarwal launched Krutrim – the first made in India generative AI platform. Besides being only a genAI platform, Krutrim is also building the entire AI computing stack.
“Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) came to India and said you (India) cannot do it. That’s the day I decided I wanted to do it,” Aggarwal said, adding that there is a need to create technological and supply chain depth in India.
“The western companies are beholden to their shareholders, and they willingly bring these things (their culture and political influence) into India,” he said.
The idea, which Aggarwal floated on the digital product revolution in the country, is influenced from China, which identified technologies of future and thought strategically about taking a lead in that. “That’s what we in India need to do, I do believe the government is supporting that, given that we have production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme,” Aggarwal said. He added that there is need for Indian companies to double down on the research and development (R&D) to create own technologies for future.
Talking about the challenges with regard to training India-based AI models on India datasets, Aggarwal said, “ the data available in India on the Internet is in English largely. A lot of data in many Indian languages is not digitised”.
He said, Krutrim is now looking to have experts of different languages and areas like Sanskrit, history, etc, within the company to add to the credibility of its AI model.
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