How Ola’s shenanigans reached the gates of MapmyIndia Premium

Ola’s co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal seems to have been stung by the nationalist bug lately.

Ola’s co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal seems to have been stung by the nationalist bug lately. And the bug encounter could not have happened at a more opportune time than when the ride-hailing firm was looking to buttress its position ahead of its stock market listing. Post listing, Ola Electric Mobility shares soared, performing far better than analysts and investors’ expectations. The share price jump was a result of something more than the underlying electric vehicle business itself.

Mr. Aggarwal began his evangelical mission to proselytise Indian startups to go the ‘swadeshi’ digital way last year. In December, he announced AI startup Krutrim, and two months later, raised a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.

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In February, the firm unveiled a large language model (LLM) that was trained on a set of Indic languages to perform ChatGPT- of Indian languages. Mr. Aggarwal said Krutrim stays true to “Indian cultural ethos and solves real Indian problems.”

Early users of the chatbot pointed out several flaws in its responses. Some alleged that the chatbot was a wrapper on the ubiquitous ChatGPT. One user screen recorded their interaction with the chatbot and posted it on Reddit. In that video, they queried the bot asking whether it was using a ChatGPT API. The bot replied ‘yes’ before auto-correcting to a standard chatbot response that it was built to assist users.

Promotional posts from the company about the AI chatbot on social media platforms received comments from Ola’s electric scooter buyers who complained of poor vehicle quality and lack of customer support, asking the CEO to focus on fix the scooters and provide a decent customer experience in existing business before launching new products.

Such criticisms did not the deter Mr. Aggarwal from launching his next desi salvo against foreign firms. This time, his target was cloud service players like Microsoft, AWS, and Google.