Ola Announces AI Research Fellowship Program At IIT Bombay

Ola, the Indian multinational ridesharing company which recently forayed into the Artificial Intelligence (AI), has announced technology fellowship program for AI researchers at IIT Bombay. The program welcomes engineering students from top institutions nationwide.

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and chairman of Ola, has also been an alumnus of IIT Bombay. “Today, India is at the ground zero of a massive technological revolution. And we, at Ola, will do everything it takes to develop a robust talent pool and future technologies out of India, for the world,” said Ola founder. The Ola Technology Fellowship Program is designed to identify, support and mentor graduates with exceptional potential in their disciplines, added Aggarwal.

According to the founder, the fellowship program at IIT Bombay aims to foster a conducive AI research ecosystem for students. To provide fundamental research in computing and AI, the program includes research projects, internships, seminars and conferences, to gain real-world experience.

Mentioning that recently, Sunil Wadhwani, an alumnus of IIT Madras announced an endowment of Rs 110 crore to set up the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI in the college.

According to the information provided by experts in the field, there is a huge demand for AI talent in India and globally. In a recent report published by Nasscom and EY, shortage of deep tech talent in field such as AI, Machine Learning (ML) and advanced computing the fast growth of India’s enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firms may impede.

Aggarwal’s new venture Krutrim, which means “artificial”, turned to a unicorn after infusion of of $50 million in funding led by Matrix Partners. The company aims to focus on building the entire AI computing stack. In December last year, the venture also unveiled ‘Krutrim’ its first multilingual Large Language Models (LLM).