New Delhi: After LinkedIn’s AI chatbot referred to him as ‘they’, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal announced he was shifting his company’s cloud service account away from Microsoft’s Azure service. Microsoft is also the owner of LinkedIn. Aggarwal said that LinkedIn was imposing an “unsafe and sinister” political ideology on Indians.
The 38-year-old took a screenshot of the AI response and shared it on LinkedIn. He wrote that “Hoping that this ‘pronoun illness’ doesn’t reach India. Many ‘big city schools’ in India are now teaching it to kids. Also see many CVs with pronouns these days. Need to know where to draw the line in following the west blindly”.
“They” and “them” are personal pronouns, usually considered gender-neutral.
The post, according to him, was deleted by LinkedIn twice after pointing it out as “unsafe”. He took to X to call out the incident while mentioning the need to build “own tech and AI in India”.
This was followed by his announcement to cut ties from the cloud services of Microsoft’s Azure and shift it to his firm’s own AI platform Krutrim. He also put an offer for other developers to move away from Azure.
“Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own @Krutrim cloud within the next week. It is a challenge, as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this. Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that! Mail us on exitazure@olakrutrim.com. Offer is perpetually open!” his post read on X.
On @Linkedin, @Microsoft and their wokeness.
As an Indian institution, Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest women only automotive plants. Not 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5000 women now and will grow to tens of…
— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) May 11, 2024
Krutrim Si Designs is an artificial intelligence (AI) venture led by Aggarwal as ‘India’s own AI’ model. It was launched in April 2023 in Bengaluru along with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti who is a board member at ANI Technologies Limited, the parent company of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric. Its project team is based in India and the Bay Area (US).
Microsoft and Amazon dominate the cloud services market. According to the Synergy research group, Amazon’s AWS leads the cloud market share with 32 percent, followed by Microsoft’s Azure with 23 percent in 2024.
While pointing out Ola’s diversity, mentioning how it runs “one of the largest women-only automotive plants”, Aggarwal wrote that the only “community guidelines” should be the “Indian law”.
“No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on ‘community guidelines’!” his post on X added.
He also called the “pronouns issue” as “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. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it.” He wrote.
Agreeing with the Ola CEO, one X user commented, “Salute to you Bhavish for voicing out an uncomfortable but ugly truth about woke foreign influence. We stand with you”. Another wrote, “A bigger proof of how the agenda of Wokeism is totally executed by US-based corporations.”
However, some X users also pointed out that the issue boiled down to “respect”. “Respecting someone’s gender identity and pronouns is not a ‘woke political ideology of entitlement’. It’s basic human decency,” said one user.
Disclosure: Bhavish Aggarwal is among the investors of ThePrint. Please click here for details on investors.
Also read: NCR’s Shiv Nadar school wades into ‘woke’ territory. Adds non-binary gender option in forms
“Don’t be Influenced by foreigners” , meanwhile copying Uber, and American brand. It is just an advertisement for his venture. If you are offended by a word, the problem lies within you.
“They” and “them” are personal pronouns, usually considered gender-neutral. If that disturbs someone, it is amusing.