Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal joins issue with OpenAI's Sam Altman; says AI costs can be brought down

Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal joined issue with OpenAI Founder Sam Altman for his statement that Indian companies can't build products like ChatGPT, and said that his AI startup Krutrim would show how it's done.

Responding to a question from the audience on improving AI adoption at DevSparks 2024, YourStory’s developer summit, Aggarwal said, "All these large western computing companies make you believe that AI is so hard to do and it's only us (the global tech companies) who can do it."

He said that OpenAI's CEO Altman had said Indians wouldn't be able to make a product like ChatGPT. “We will show them how to do it,” Aggarwal said.

The Ola founder went on to say the new cloud computing platforms introduced by them will make AI cost much lower and also relevant to the Indian population.

Commenting on the Krutrim, Aggarwal admitted that it has to catch up with ChatGPT, but added, “Unless the start is made, how can we move ahead?”

Sam Altman, during his India visit in June 2023, remarked that it would impossible for any Indian tech company to build a competitor for ChatGPT. This created an uproar among the India tech community, though Altman later clarified this was because of huge budgets needed to build such models.

Aggarwal termed AI as once in a multi-generation opportunity and felt India could be at the centre of all action.

“In the last 30 years, the centre of gravity for data was created in the US, and now they are coming to India for demand. India is not just an open market, it is the creator of paradigms of the future,” said Aggarwal.

He also promised that the mission of Krutrim would be to grow the developer ecosystem in India.

“We grew up in a western digital paradigm. We see an Indian paradigm emerging now,” Aggarwal remarked.

(Disclaimer: Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, is an independent director at Ola Electric.)