India needs its own tech platforms: Ola CEO
Rebuking Microsoft and its subsidiary LinkedIn, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, in a post, said India needs to establish its own tech platforms to shun the chances of being “culturally subsumed” and “governed” by western big tech monopolies.
Boycotting Microsoft, Aggarwal said Ola—an existing customer of Microsoft Azure— will no longer avail of its services, and will shift its entire workload to its homegrown Krutrim cloud in a week.
The backlash comes after LinkedIn removed the CEO’s post that called out LinkedIn’s AI for “imposing a political ideology on Indian users”. He had shared a screenshot from a generative AI response that used “they/their” pronouns to describe Aggarwal.
Berating the “pronoun illness”, he had said he hopes the practise doesn’t reach India.
“...the pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly LinkedIn has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out,” he wrote later.
Aggarwal called out to the Indian developer community to build a DPI (digital public infrastructure) social media framework. Lauding Indian DPIs like UPI, ONDC, and Aadhaar, he said the only community guidelines should be the Indian law.