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I'm impressed* by Amazon Rufus (*when it works)

Earlier this week #MuchCurious dropped in with a suggestion - Alchemy.  Over the millennia the word itself is full to the brim with mysticism, mystery, magic, and disproportionate rewards. The last one is something every human secretly strives for. To be sure, The Alchemist made Paulo Coelho the legend in pop culture, with quotes from that book such as - “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it” . Yes, it is that which gave Shah Rukh Khan one of the defining dialogues of his carrier (if you are a bollywood buff, you got the translation already; if you are not, it doesn’t matter really.) Now, this Alchemy is by Rory Sutherland. The legend from Ogilvy who has dissected human behavior and decision making in making the global brands what they are. The snippet read - "Imagine a world where a $100,000 watch is sold not because of its intricate mechanics, but because of the story of its craftsmanship. Where a bottle of perfume is prized not for i...
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OpenAI and the Network Effect (ft. Md Rafi and Ola Krutrim)

"Who is the greatest Bollywood singer of all times?" I typed into chat.krutrim.com It listed seven, but missed Mohammad Rafi.  Horrified, I followed up, "Why is Mohammad Rafi not in this list?"  And it missed the context, replying, "Mohammad Rafi is not in the list because the list you are referring to is not provided." With a deep sigh, it reminded me of Altman's India visit June last year. Someone asked him if India should invest in building a Foundational model (assuming funding and talent is not as issue). And he replied , "it would be hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.. you shouldn’t try”. Try they will, and they should. The world's fourth(?) largest economy has pockets of deep pockets that can sustain the demands of developing a resource hungry technology such at Foundational LLMs. But distribution, diffusion and monetisation remains challenging, when chatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in Indic languages are just an App ...
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Digitally.me (or, your next unicorn startup idea!)

Clone thyself as the next unicorn startup idea. Imagine you have the superpower to clone yourself. You can send this clone to as many places as you like. These clone presense will be present 24x7 for you. Serving you. As you. Like the various hats that you like to adorn, so do the clones. A clone for every Avatar of you that you’d like to personify. A clone for a situation, a clone for every need. Yes, imagine Agent Smith of the last act in The Matrix. Hundreds of “him”, doing work for him. Only, yours will be benign and avoid evil. Because you are not evil, and your clone is but what you are. My son was playing with a phone while I was on a separate WhatsApp call. He was making videos of himself, and he ended up capturing my voice from the call in the background. When I heard myself there, it gave me a start. Have you listened to yourself on a zoom call, video off, just a name displayed on the screen? Sarcasm aside, is that real you? Or is it an audio representation of you for tha...
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$NVDA: When You are The Moat

NVIDIA had their earnings call yesterday for the quarter ending Dec'23. Markets were muted in anticipation. As expected, the S&P 500 rose by 2.5% on the back of a strong performance and pipeline. The day after, NVIDIA stock rallied to all time high of $800. This gave the company a market cap of USD 2 Tn, surpassing Alphabet, Inc., and becoming the fourth largest listed company in the world by market value.  For perspective consider this - the single day gain of USD 277Bn was bigger than the largest listed company in India - the world's 4th biggest equity market, and by an estimate its market cap was now larger than the entire SENSEX of India. Who knew? Perhaps not even Berkshire Hathaway. (See share holding pattern in the links below). One of the simplest reasons for the meteoric rise of NVIDIA is, as Warren Buffet once famously said about resilient businesses, that NVIDIA provides a moat to the the software firms for their business of developing and productising AI and, sp...
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The Independent Directors at OpenAI

Sam Altman was the CEO and  Greg Brockman  was the chairman of the board  at OpenAI.org, the parent company that is listed as a not-for-profit organization in the US u/s 501(C)(3).   On 17 Nov 2023 both of them were fired by the Independent Directors of the board. This post talks about the 4-day drama that ensued at the back of these events, focusing on the role of Independent Directors. (Try here for a related earlier post.) One year ago the company launched the ChatGPT, the Large Language Model, that rose to prominence with its Generative AI capabilities (“GPT” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and human-like response and interactive interface (“Chat”). At launch ChatGPT was based on based on GPT-3.5 series. The launch took the internet by storm as Microsoft unveiled its commercial partnership with the firm, and its global marketing machine geared into action.  To accommodate for this new profit-making "partnership" endeavor, the firm came up with anothe...
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