Manmohan Sethumadhavan

super funny that microsoft had a strong brand like 'office' and some mbas decided that 'microsoft 365' and 'copilot' should replace it

If you have no insurance, hospital bill for a surgery – Rs 5,00,000 If you have 10 lakh insurance, hospital bill for a surgery – Rs 10,00,000

Humans didn't come from the apes you see today. Instead, humans and modern apes are like cousins who share the same great-great-great (millions of greats!) grandparents a very long time ago. That ancient grandparent species doesn't exist anymore, and over millions of years, one branch of the family became us while another branch became chimps, gorillas, and so on. Evolution isn't like a video game where one character levels up into another. It's more like a tree growing many different branches at the same time, each going its own direction. There are no half-human, half-ape creatures walking around because those in-between forms lived and died over millions of years, and we actually have their bones as fossils to prove it. Today's apes aren't "trying" to become human - they're perfectly good at being apes, adapted to their own homes and lifestyles. So really, asking why apes aren't turning into humans is like asking why your cousins aren't turning into you.

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.