Rishabh Verma

More bad news for mobile phone users in India (after SIM binding): Our government is mandating a government app (sanchar saathi) on every new phone, permanently, Reuters reports. Will be pushed to your phone via OTA. New smartphones need to have it. Users cannot delete it. This is a first. India has never before required an unremovable state app on every device. Russia does btw, with its MAX Messenger (started September 2025). A few comments regarding this: 1. Sanchar Saathi is a lost phone tracker, but if it gets embedded with no possibility of removal, it becomes a government tracker on your device. IF the government is allowed to get away with this, what’s next? A mandatory digital ID app? Digiyatra forcefully installed on each device? An app that disables VPNs or tracks your app and browser history? An app that sends copies of your messages to the government once a month? Once the OS layer is opened to the state, it doesn’t close. 2. Legally, one can argue that your mobile phone is your personal space, and this is an invasion of your personal space. It’s where we have our most private conversations. Exchange sensitive information with people we trust. How do we know this app isn’t used to access files and messaging on our device, which is unencrypted on device? Or a future update won’t do that? This is clearly an invasion of our privacy. 3. Remember how the government exempt itself from much of the Data Protection Law. This explains why. The Data Protection Law will make private companies more accountable and the Indian government less accountable. 4. Bloatware is already an issue with some phones (It’s why I don’t use Samsung). Now there’s more, and this time the government is forcing bloatware. I guess we’ll all have to root our phones now. When you buy a phone with bloatware, you're choosing to buy it with bloatware. This is different. 5. The way things work with India’s Department of Telecom, there was no public consultation, the order wasn’t disclosed. Just forced. This is dictatorial in nature. If they get away with this, more will follow.

I had a 20 minute conversation on the phone with Mr Sivakumar today and felt so utterly helpless at the end of it. He broke down in tears many times. From placing his daughter’s body in the morgue to the response of the police, from cremation grounds to cops, he spoke of hostile red tape and open corruption. This for a man mourning the death of his 34 year old daughter. Blood boiling and heart breaking

Bangalore startup idea: Fill potholes in Bangalore. The patch becomes your ad space.

I am deeply saddened by the loss of civilian lives in the recent Pakistani aerial strikes on Afghanistan. A tragedy that claimed the lives of women, children, and aspiring young cricketers who dreamed of representing their nation on the world stage. It is absolutely immoral and barbaric to target civilian infrastructure. These unjust and unlawful actions represent a grave violation of human rights and must not go unnoticed. In light of the precious innocent souls lost, I welcome the ACB’s decision of withdrawing from upcoming fixtures against Pakistan. I stand with our people at this difficult time, our national dignity must come before all else.

80% of the traffic can be reduced with below metro connections if added with the existing one.@WFRising @CivicOp_india @GBA_office @GBAChiefComm @ChristinMP_ @bengalurupost1

1 hours, 5km done, 10km more to go! Hopeful to reach home before dinner! Thank you @siddaramaiah sir, for caste survey! 🙏🏻 #bengalurutraffic

Hello @GBA_office - can you share an update on the pothole fixing work you have done at Vibgyor Road?

Vibgyor School Road, East Bengaluru. Tarred on 26th September, and now, within just 15 days, the tar is peeling off! Imagine the level of corruption! Shame on the citizens of Bengaluru for tolerating such agencies, politicians, and officers! @siddaramaiah @DKShivakumar @GBA_office @MALimbavali #BrandBengaluru

Video from the accident site in Gunjur where a life was lost today. Just look at the condition of the road. How many more deaths before someone takes accountability? #Bengaluru #Accident #BadRoad #BrandBengalur

📍Bengaluru, KA | Pothole-ridden roads in central Bengaluru cause a vehicle to flip over. This is where Karnataka’s highest road tax is going.

Official Account btw 🤡🤦‍♂️ >Workers without any safety gear. >Using bare hands & basic tools for patching. >Uneven, temporary patchwork that won’t last >Tax money wasted, public still suffers. Municipality = Zero Safety + Zero Quality. 🤦‍♂️

AI-native commerce isn’t the future: It’s the current operating system at @ShopdeckD2C Honoured to have exchanged notes with @alexschultz , Chief Marketing Officer at @Meta , one of the most influential voices in global advertising. @rishabhv07 #AICommerce #D2C #Ecommerce

@IT_Kabootar @OpenAI Got it in the morning

Hey @OpenAI , Plus user here. Waiting for the agent-mode to be enabled. What's the practical timeline that we can expect?

homes in bangalore come with 2 balconies, 1 parking & a free river when it rains😅 so we built a flood-risk map in our product search for your home to see flooding intensity link in next post

“Mahindra is the fastest-growing car brand in South Africa, increasing monthly sales by 40% YOY. In March it set a new record of 2,253 sales, Mahindra has jumped to the eighth-largest vehicle manufacturer in the country,” We will compete. Globally. topauto.co.za/news/128355/th…

@Ajain112 Sorry to hear this :-(

Our dog finally left us today morning. I got him as a small baby and he stayed with us for 9.5 years. It’s just so painful. He gave my family a lot of love. Whenever we would be stressed, his presence would make the day bearable. He was a small child in the family, that stayed a child for his entire lifetime. We were lucky to have him, and he was lucky to have a family that never put him in a cage. He was never a “dog” but more of a child. My mother gave him as much love as she gave me. He was truly lucky to have someone like my mother care for him. I always thought that I had a few more months with him. It’s not his time to leave. I thought one day, I will go on a long drive with him, make him eat whatever he wants and record the whole thing. But, life just does not wait. With time, I will learn to process the pain. But, I will never get that feeling of hugging him again. You shall be missed, always.

One of the city lake of Bengaluru rejuvenated 2 years back was filled with black thick sludge with sewage and chemicals last 30+ years lake bed was not seen,may be quantum of the water is less but quality of the water is this,slowly quantity will increase with similar quality 💧

Why Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners Isn’t a “Good VC” Spoiler: This is not a story about unicorns. This is a story about crows. And it starts with a childhood nickname that became a prophecy. #StartupThread #VC

Writing this as an Indian who works on AI in leadership role for one the largest companies in the world (though strictly my personal opinion, but based on verifiable data). You heard it first here: —————————- First some more shocks: You heard DeepSeek. Wait till you hear about Qwen (Alibaba), MiniMax, Kimi, DuoBao (ByteDance) all from China. Within China, DeepSeek is not unique and their competition is close behind (not far behind). IMHO, China has 10 labs comparable to OpenAI/Anthropic and another 50 tier 2 labs. The world will discover them in coming weeks in awe and shock. AI is not hard (I am not high) ———————————— Ignore Sam Altman. Many teams that built foundation models are below 50 persons (e.g. Mixtral). In AI, LLM science part is actually quite easy. All these models are “Transformer Decoder only models”, an architecture that was invented in late 2017. There are improvements since then (flash attention, ROPE, MOE, PPO/DPO/GRPO), but they are relatively minor, open source and easy to implement. Since building foundation models is easy and Nvidia is there to help you (if not directly, then by sharing their software like “Megatron” that is assembly line to build AI models) there are so many foundation models built by Chinese labs as well as global labs. It is machines that learn by themselves…if you give them data & compute. This is unlike writing operating system or database software. Also, everyone trains on same data: internet archives, books, github code for the first stage called “pre-training”. What is part is hard then? ———————————- It is the parallel & distributed computing to run AI training jobs across thousands of GPUs that is hard. DeepSeek did lot of innovation here to save on “flops” and network calls. They used an innovative architecture called Mixture of Experts and a new approach called GRPO. with verifiable rewards both of which are in open domain through 2024. Also, there is lot of data curation needed particularly for “post training” to teach model on proper style of answering (SFT/DPO) or to teach them learn to reason (GRPO with verifiable reward). STF/DPO is where “stealing” from existing models to save cost of manual labor may happen. LLM building is nothing that Indian engineers living in India cannot pull off. Don’t worry about Indians who have left. There are plenty in the country as of today. Then why India does not have foundation models? ——————— It is for the same reason India does not have Google or Facebook of its own. You need to able to walk before you can run. There is no protected market to practice your craft in early days. You will get replaced by American service providers as they are cheaper and better every single time. That is not the case with Chinese player. They have a protected market and leadership who treats this skillset as existential due to geopolitics. So, even if Chinese models are not good in early days they will continue to get funding from their conglomerates as well as provincial governments. Darwinian competition ensures best rise to the top. Recall DeepSeek took 2 years to get here without much revenue. They were funded by their parent. Also, most of their engineers are not PHDs. There is nothing that engineers who built Ola/Swiggy/Flipkart cannot build. Remember these services are second to none when you compare them to their Bay Area counterparts. Also , don’t trivialize those services; there is brilliant engineering to make them work at the price points at which they work. Indian DARPA with 3B USD in funding over 3 years ———————- What we need is a mentality that treats this skillset as existential. We need a national fund that will fund such teams and the only expected output will be benchmark performance with benchmarks becoming harder every 6 months . No revenue needed to survive for first 3 years. That money will be loose change for GOI and world’s richest men living in India. @protosphinx @balajis @vikramchandra @naval

@Ajain112 @AbhishekMarkets @Tweets_by_RJ Automatically increase but they'll ask for financial statements and take a subjective call at higher numbers

@AbhishekMarkets @Tweets_by_RJ Thanks abhishek. Appreciate the comment

Indian meta experts. Till what number does meta give credit line. Like how many crores? < This is a serious question > My meta credit line is 85 lakhs right now.