Expect Electric Cars, Krutrim Pro, AI Chips, and More at Ola&#8217;s Annual Event
Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal recently announced Ola’s annual event to be held on Independence Day this year, where all three of his companies—Ola Cabs, Ola Electric, and Krutrim—will be making certain announcements. “Started planning our annual 15th August event! This time it’ll be much bigger! All our companies @Olacabs, @OlaElectric, and @Krutrim will be making major announcements!” he posted on LinkedIn. This was a tad ironic, considering he recently criticised the platform for being too woke and suffering from ‘pronoun illness’. AIM decided to predict what Ola’s upcoming event could be all about. Aggarwal has recently been enthusiastic about advancing AI in India. Ola recently introduced the Krutrim Android app in beta, which is similar to ChatGPT. AIM tested the app to see if it could pass the Indian UPSC exam, however the model failed miserably. Multimodal Krutrim Chances are high that Ola will launch a multimodal version of Krutrim called Krutrim Pro. Last December, Bhavish Aggarwal announced that Krutrim Pro will come in 2024. “Krutrim Pro comes out next quarter. This is just the start—we will continue to build other AI models across text, voice, and vision, and beyond LLMs,” he said. He added that Krutrim Pro will offer the right balance of performance and price, and will be able to power most day-to-day applications. Krutrim Pro will be integrated into the Ola Cab app and might also be integrated into the Ola Electric scooter S1. It will assist other apps, facilitating tasks like cab bookings, setting reminders, and messaging without the need to switch between applications. This is similar to what Tesla’s chief Elon Musk recently said about integrating Grok into Tesla. @Krutrim: India's own AI developed by Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal.This name derived from Sanskrit, translates to "artificial."Krutrim is a large language model which will be available in two classifications:1. The base Krutrim model, and2. Krutrim Pro, the more powerful one. pic.twitter.com/OHbY52OkUf— Hasan Toor ✪ (@hasantoxr) December 16, 2023 Krutrim might collaborate with Databricks to build a multimodal model. At the recently concluded Data + AI Summit, Databricks launched a text-to-image generation model, ImageAI, in partnership with Shutterstock. Aggarwal believes that there’s a discontinuity with the advent of AI, where Indian companies can build something like Google or OpenAI and compete with the international market, which is also not sitting ducks. “But we have an opportunity,” he said A New Social Media App Soon? Aggarwal hinted at the launch of a new social media app during a recent podcast. He said that Indian data isn’t owned by Indian companies but rather by American giants like YouTube and Meta. “India generates 20% of the world’s digitised data. We actually generate much more due to our highly active, young population,” Aggarwal said. He further explained that only one-tenth of this data is stored within India, with the remaining 90% stored outside the country. Last month, Aggarwal said that he is committed to working with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework. “DPIs, like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar, etc., are uniquely Indian ideas and are even more needed in the world of social media,” he said. Ola recently introduced the Krutrim AI Cloud as their first move in this direction. They’ve migrated their entire database from AWS and Microsoft Azure to the Krutrim AI Cloud. According to an estimate, Ola will save INR 15 crore by doing this. “The irony is that we create the data, but we don’t own the data. We don’t even store the data in our country,” said Aggarwal, adding that India’s data is exported from the country into global data centres and processed for intelligence by OpenAI and others, and then sold back to us at a dollar rate. He said that this sounds similar to how East India Company during the British rule of India used to operate with the textile and cotton industries. “Today is not a world for colonisation but this is exactly the same thing happening all over again,” Aggarwal added. Homemade AI Chip from Silicon Valley of India Aggarwal recently visited Taiwan for Computex 2024 and met with Arm chief Rene Haas. Ola’s chief has aspirations to build AI chips in India. Recently, Aggarwal said that the world’s largest talent density for semiconductors outside the US’ Bay Area is in Bengaluru. “But nobody is working on an Indian chip. The problem is not the talent. My peer set of entrepreneurs haven’t given them a platform,” Aggarwal said. “We have to create that platform to build a full stack compute in India,” he added. To fulfil its mission, Ola Krutrim  quietly acquired Bodhi Computing, a startup which builds and sells server-grade systems. Ola is developing advanced RISC-V and AI solutions for data centres and transportation. Ola EV Cars to Hit the Road Ola is likely to announce EV cars soon. “Ola Electric is a huge opportunity, especially if you look at the world of mobility—premium cars, luxury cars, mid-market cars, entry-level cars, two-wheelers, and three-wheelers,” said Aggarwal. Interestingly two years ago, Ola had announced that their team is planning to launch their electric car by 2024. This high-performance car is said to reach from 0-100 kmph in four seconds and range of 500 kilometres per charge. Citing examples of American and European car makers such as BMW, Ford, and GM, he said they have captured the Indian market. “Europeans have been the luxury makers, while the Japanese and Koreans have traditionally dominated the lower-end market for both cars and two-wheelers, with brands like Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Toyota,” he said. He reiterated that the time is ripe in India to shift to EV vehicles. “Now, we have an opportunity as a country because the Japanese are lagging in electrification. Hyundai is a good company, but the Japanese are behind. In two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and small cars, there’s no global champion of electrification,” he added. Aggarwal believes that India will be the world’s largest small car market. “… And all of this will be electrified. Plus, it will be electrified easier than the luxury cars because the proposition of electrification is lower cost of ownership,” he said.
Bhavish Aggarwal hinted at the launch of a new social media app during a recent podcast.
Bhavish Aggarwal hinted at the launch of a new social media app during a recent podcast.
["Ola Krutrim"]
["Go", "ChatGPT", "OpenAI", "AI", "AWS", "R", "Git", "Aim", "Ola Krutrim", "Azure", "Databricks"]
["AI", "ChatGPT", "OpenAI", "Aim", "AWS", "Azure", "Databricks", "R", "Go", "Git"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.