Ola’s AI assistant Kruti goes dark as Krutrim 3 development stalls, sources say

Outage and access issues

Kruti, the AI assistant from Ola’s Krutrim unit, is currently unavailable across Apple’s App Store, Google Play and on the web, it has been reported that users attempting to reach kruti.ai saw a “site not found” error while internal links showed a maintenance notice. The Economic Times verified removal from the app stores and found the web presence either down or temporarily disabled. An email to Krutrim seeking clarification went unanswered as of press time.

Staff cuts, stalled work

It has been reported that the disruption follows layoffs in Krutrim’s linguistics team last year, the same unit charged with training the company’s language models, and the exit of key executives amid fundraising difficulties. Multiple sources told ET that the planned Indian multilingual follow-up model, Krutrim 3 — touted as a multibillion-parameter project that would use a mix of Krutrim and IndiaAI GPU clusters — has been stalled. Allegedly, lack of funding and limited technical uptake have compounded the problem.

Ambition vs. execution

Kruti launched with fanfare last June as an agentic AI able to handle text, voice and images, and was positioned by founder Bhavish Aggarwal as an answer to global rivals like ChatGPT — “crazy hard” work, he wrote on X. But promise and product are different beasts. Sources say Krutrim’s V2 12-billion-parameter model underpinned the app, yet users and developers reportedly found poor documentation and limited technical maturity, leaving adoption thin.

What happens next is the real question. Will Ola double down and revive the project after internal retrenchment, or is this the quiet end to an overambitious sprint? For now, the lights are off on Kruti — and the Indian AI playbook just gained a cautionary footnote.

Sources: economictimes.indiatimes.com