Multibagg AI founder slams Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal: ‘Hosting models isn’t innovation’

Aaditya Anand, founder and CEO of Multibagg AI, has issued a strongly worded critique of Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s latest LinkedIn announcement, dismissing the company’s AI infrastructure efforts as little more than “patriotic chest thumping.”

In a scathing post, Anand questioned the significance of hosting open-source models like Meta’s Llama 4 on Indian servers, arguing that the move lacks real technological innovation and is instead a repackaging exercise wrapped in nationalistic rhetoric.

Aggarwal had earlier shared that Krutrim, Ola’s AI venture, is now among the first in the world to host Meta’s Llama 4 models on Indian servers. He also highlighted that the company has already deployed several DeepSeek models, with pricing between ₹10 to ₹60 per million tokens. The newer Llama 4 models, he claimed, would be available at even more disruptive rates of ₹7 to ₹17 per million tokens. Aggarwal positioned this as a major step towards “technological independence” and “digital sovereignty,” aiming to empower Indian developers and startups.

However, Anand was unimpressed, criticising the announcement for being more about optics than substance. “After raising 280 million dollars, he is excited for hosting an open source model? An intern having a good PC with GPU can do it in their bedroom,” he wrote, referencing the availability of open-source models like Meta’s Llama that developers can run independently.

He further compared Krutrim’s pricing with global offerings, stating, “Disruptive pricing? I think he hasn't seen the pricing of Gemini Flash models or GPT-4o mini. FYI, that's less than ₹10 per million tokens.”

Anand also questioned the narrative of democratising AI for Indian developers, suggesting that the community was not waiting on Krutrim to gain access to such tools. “Being delusional is the only solution for him,” he remarked, in a sharp rebuke of Aggarwal’s tone.

On the claim of digital sovereignty, Anand was scathing: “All he did was host someone else's model on his own servers and [is] pretending like he has put the Indian flag on the moon. The entire offering is just a repackaging. You are not building India's future, you are just renting it locally.”