A post by Aggarwal on May 6, calling the usage of the pronoun ‘they’ an “illness”, was taken down by LinkedIn after it fell afoul of its professional community policies. On Saturday, Aggarwal said that the Ola group of companies would move their businesses in house, in response to the actions taken by LinkedIn.
“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… 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,” Aggarwal said in a post on X.
Aggarwal’s announcement comes just days after Krutrim AI, the artificial intelligence unicorn founded by him, opened up its cloud infrastructure and cloud services for business. Krutrim Cloud will be offering GPU-as-a-service on its AI computing infrastructure, allowing enterprises and developers to train and fine-tune their models, Aggarwal had said at the time.
Ola would also help build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) social media framework similar to Unified Payment Interface (UPI) as a response to what Aggarwal called Linkedin’s “monopoly”. “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””, he added.
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In a series of posts following LinkedIn’s actions against his post, Aggarwal doubled down on his protests against the block. “Dear @LinkedIn this post of mine was about YOUR AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister,” he said in a post. In reply to one of the posts, Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal joined Aggarwal in protesting the LinkedIn action. Meanwhile a number of users also protested Aggarwal’s criticism of the usage of gender pronouns.
