Ola's AI Arm Krutrim lays off 50 employees in third round since June

Ola's artificial intelligence unit, Krutrim, has laid off around 50 employees from its linguistics division, including team leads and transcribers across regional languages such as Bengali, Malayalam, and Punjabi, according to The Economic Times report. This marks the third round of layoffs since June.

So, far more than 200 employees have exited the firm due to layoffs and leadership departures, people familiar with the matter told ET.

Also Read: Ola Krutrim lays off around 100 employees in second-round: Report

The latest job cuts have left the linguistics team skeletal, with exits including team leaders and staff managing text-to-speech projects, sparking concerns about the pace of Krutrim's ongoing initiatives.

The layoffs come as Krutrim builds its more ambitious project yet - Krutrim 3, a multibillion paramater large language model (LLM) designed to strengthen the company's AI capabilities.

In a statement, a company spokesperson said the restructuring was part of a strategic realignment to create leaner and more agile teams, the report added. "The current phase of the data annotation project involving in-house linguistics has been successfully completed," the spokesperson noted, without addressing specific queries on the scale of layoffs, leadership exits, or the progress of Krutrim 3, ET added.

Earlier reports indicated that Krutrim's layoffs and restructuring were linked to funding delays and limited traction for its AI products.

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