Harshit Pai

@AiyarYamini @maya206 This is yet another sign that India can never become a dictatorial state. There will always be people who will keep eternal vigilance to protect our liberty.

Democracy lives when people fight to save it. The large, organic crowd of young Indians from all walks of life exercising their democratic rights fills me with hope!

A must read if you want to know why @Kimi_Moonshot’s open-weight model launch is a big deal for India.

@dotgil @SkyrootA Agreed. Privatisation accelerated the base set-up by @isro

@HarshitPai @SkyrootA privatisation may have sped things up, though the six-year clock also included decades of public-sector groundwork

It took 51 years to privatise the space sector, but the launch of India’s first private orbital rocket took just 6 years. That shows the power of privatisation. @SkyrootA

Just came across this amazing article written by @MelMitchell1 in the @yalereview. One key takeaway for me: don’t believe ludicrous predictions of what AI can do. They are based on results of benchmark tests which are mostly inaccurate. A must read. yalereview.org/article/melani…

@MelMitchell1 Completely agree. If the same amount of investments go to open source models as have gone to models developed by @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI, AI innovations would become more democratic with more competition in the economy.

In the off chance than anyone cares what I think on this topic: (1) the open-source software movement has been enormously beneficial to socity (2) open-weight (& better, open-data) LLMs will be essential for understanding this technology & for it to be beneficial to society.

Read more here: open.substack.com/pub/harshitpai…

#6 The price of liberty is eternal vigilance Considering history repeats itself and we will least find governments which will try to curtail our liberties, we must eternally remain vigilant. (7/n)

I have taken a recent interest in history and the credit goes to @tripurdaman. His book taught me six important lessons on the authoritarian tendencies of governments which every critical citizen must look out for. I write about them in this edition of #Marginalia (1/n).

@ShamikaRavi @SkyrootA @isro Absolutely agree. The more public institutions act as the enablers for private enterprise, the faster we achieve prosperity.

Launch by @SkyrootA is more than a space milestone - it’s proof of what India can achieve when public institutions enable private enterprise. @isro built the foundation. Indian entrepreneurs are building the future. 🇮🇳

@iqtibaas88 The best weekend pass-time is to sort out your books. Sometimes through absolute serendipity you stumble upon a book you bought long ago which has new relevance in your new phase of life.

Today I tried sorting & arranging my English books in the cupboard. Will do the Hindi & Urdu books next weekend.

I would argue we are not open enough. It is because US and China had open economies did the capital flow into chip innovation, R&D, GPUs etc. which gave wings to @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI. And because of the open economy, these companies built incremental innovations on existing technologies. The solution is not to close the economy but open it further. And the benchmark is not whether India can build frontier models, but what can it incrementally build on top of the existing technology.

Why are Indian companies not developing frontier models? The answer is in economics, not talent. The biggest hurdle for an Indian company trying to develop frontier model is that right from the get go, it has to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI free plans + all Chinese open weight models. Chinese models mostly flourished due to the demand from their domestic market which OpenAI/Anthropic couldn’t meet as they’re unavailable in China. This unmet demand created space for innovation. China knows this story well, but here in India, we like unfettered, globalized free market, and that requires an upstart to compete with established companies from across the world. If India is serious about the AI race, it needs to create a massive guaranteed market for domestic AI or else it’ll be economically irrational for any funder to underwrite a product in a highly competitive, already established market.

@phreakv6 One of the greatest struggles in a reader’s life is to close the gap between number of books read and number of books purchased. I don’t think any reader has closed that gap till date 😂

my non-fiction space as it stands today. growth slowing down because certain things don't grow exponentially :-) wife catalogued hers, son's and mine and turns out we have 2600+ books at home now (roughly triple of what's here). unfortunately am not reading as much as i want to.

@acorn Agree, as @JonHaidt says, “moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions.”

I don’t think strategic analysts are best placed to advise on the US-Israeli war on Iran. Psychiatrists are.

There is a quote by @nntaleb which is very fitting here: “The mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence”