mind × the + gap ™

"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 ...

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...

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...

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...

The Election season is upon us again, and it is only fitting that The Supreme Court of India has taken up a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Electoral Bonds that were introduced in 2017 as a means of donations to political parties.  The capital involved is expectedly huge. After all, India is the world’s fifth largest economy and the most populous nation that goes through a 5-year election cycle with an overlap between 28 state elections and the national one. Electoral Bonds, as a fund-raising instrument, are primarily targeted towards corporates – including public limited companies except for those run by the government. And while the constitutional bench of Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice would evaluate it for constitutionality, it is important to conduct an analysis from the perspective of Companies Act 2013 as well as from the purview of good Corporate governance. This article offers an in-depth analysis of these implications.  Historica...

A tribute to Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who  introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book  The Innovator's Dilemma , which, in turn, led  The Economist  to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time."  Even more influential  for some would be his 2012 co-authored book How Will You Measure Your Life? . [try here ]. Christensen  passed away in Boston on Jan 23, 2020.

If you haven't taken the Stanford's Machine Learning MOOC by Prof Andrew Ng on Coursera, you are less likely to be taken seriously in the AI community. Or so they say. Somewhere in 2008 Andrew Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program that placed a number of Stanford courses online, for free. Andrew himself was responsible for teaching one of these courses, Machine Learning, which consisted of video lectures by him, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class. The "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and started in October 2011, with over 100,000 students registered for its first iteration; and became one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford professors. Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller left Stanford to co-found Coursera in 2012. The Machine Learning course was one of the key offerings on the platform. And it continues to be #1 (check  here ,  here , or comprehensively here...

JEFF BEZOS SPENT AN EVENTFUL TIME with his larger Amazon.com engineering team in India recently. The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here ] ). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course). In between these two was a private dinner organised with a dozen or so CEO's in Bangalore. This paraphrased post is thanks to one of them [try here ] "minuting" the following five points that Jeff talked about among other things. #1: What was the hardest moment of your life? Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon. Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out t...

Cheers to Life!

There are two kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are broadly defined by wiki as follows: The Pygmalion effect , or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. On the other hand is the Golem effect , in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The theme was in the main stray of many English literary works during the victorian era. One of which is George Bernard Shaw's play titled "Pygmalion" from which Rosenthal effect gets its name. In Shaw's play, the protagonist, a professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. (The pl...