Fresh exits at Krutrim as company ramps up work on AI models and semicon chips

Three senior executives heading engineering and AI product execution at Krutrim have left the company, even as Ola’s artificial intelligence arm continues to accelerate development work on AI semiconductors, Krutrim model 3, and data centres.

John Williamson, senior director; engineering head Dinesh Mittal, and Sharath Adavanne, director of applied AI, departed in the last couple of months, said people familiar with the development.

Krutrim has also laid off more than a dozen staff in linguist teams across multiple languages earlier this week, the people said.

However, a person privy to the development said the employees were hired for a specific project, which has since been completed. The person said nearly 600 people are currently employed in Krutrim's linguistics team, which focuses on AI model evaluation, curation of linguistic data, and prompting, as per the company’s job description for these roles.

ET had earlier reported that over 20 executives at leadership roles left the firm in the past year. Krutrim also faced backlash over the alleged suicide of an employee with claims of toxic work culture.

Also Read: Krutrim finds few takers for its LLMs and cloud products

A Krutrim spokesperson said in a statement that the company consists of a world-class team, and any workforce churn at the company is in line with industry standards and practices. The spokesperson added that the work on Krutrim Model 3, data centre and advanced AI chips Bodhi 1 and 2, is on track, progressing as per the company’s business roadmap and schedule.

A Navendu, head of business, Krutrim, told ET recently that the company is working on a multibillion parameter model and will see more use cases for the same, unlike Krutrim 2, which is a smaller model with 12 billion parameters.

ET has also learnt that the company is in talks with global players for manufacturing its Bodhi chips, which are currently in the testing phase.

Last week, the company launched consumer AI agent platform, Kruti, which can book cabs, deliver food and pay bills, currently within Ola’s ecosystem. It is also in talks with multiple services across healthcare and shopping use cases. Sunit S, SVP - design, said Krutrim is also pursuing partnership with ONDC, which offers services such as metro tickets and recharges.