Skip to main content

A Thousand-days Challenge

"It is not the mountains we conquer but ourselves."
~ Sir Edmund Hillary
HOW WOULD IT FEEL to be up close and personal with Mt. Everest?

Or to humbly come to face with the Chomolangma ("Saint Mother") as they say in Tibet?

Well, we shall find out in next thousand days or less. Because that's the pledge: To camp underneath the summit of Mt. Everest within next 30 odd months or so.

A thousand days may seem rather stretched, but for a goal such as this, it may all get tight pretty quickly. And needless to say that a much more detailed planning and preparations are required - a whole mountain to surmount in itself before the actual one - mainly towards the physical fitness and mental toughness - as well as evaluating other professional, social and economical commitments and feasibilities. Over the past week or so while the decision over the destination for the challenge has been under debate, some of these aspects have been taken into due consideration. And, that helps.


A couple of pointers and a bit of background: While Mt. Everest has always been at the top of the list of dearness, Lewis Pugh's recent TED talk gave the final push. And though Mt. Everest is a more complicated and rather tougher ballgame all together, it was nice to read the encouraging post by Matt Cutts of Google from Kilimanjaro. Also, Chris Guillebeau had an interesting post a couple of years ago at his unconventional strategies blog asking to name one definitive place that one would want to visit in the lifetime (thanks Amelia for the link).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

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...

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...