Siva

Story in 3 pictures. Onus lies on GOI. Incentives have to favour tech and R&D DNA companies than the scaling and distribution oriented behemoths. PLIs should align for those who make original tech than those who beg/license tech and bulldoze market with their distribution game.

In an early meeting at Facebook (c. 2007), when I was describing the goals of Facebook Platform (an area I oversaw) Bill Gates yelled at me/us. His quote has stuck with me to this day: “This isn’t a platform. A platform is where the collective sum of revenues of the participants exceeds those of the platform itself.” Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the tokenmaxxing circle jerk.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

The Cerebras IPO is a watershed moment for the semiconductor industry. At $60B market cap, it’s amongst the biggest outcomes in entrepreneurship/ venture capital. For much of the last two decades, venture capital focussed on the application layer. Semis, which used to be the mainstay of venture capital in 80s/90s was completely forgotten. AI is now creating a vibrant playing field for new semiconductor companies. India has 20-25% of the global chip design talent. They are now recognising this opportunity and are stepping out to start new semiconductor companies. I was fortunate to partner with Agrani and C2i recently, both incredible teams from Intel/ AMD and Texas Instruments respectively. We will see many more. If some of these teams succeed, Indian semi startups may end up creating more value than Indian SaaS startups.

🚨 Oracle revoked the offers across IITs and NITs

Sometimes it’s high agency to move fast and break things; sometimes it’s to move slow and demand perfection. Sometimes it’s to plan ahead; sometimes it’s to be spontaneous. Key question is: are you doing what you honestly judge best, by your own lights, given your own context?

I often hear arguments that simulated consciousness cannot be real consciousness. But these arguments often miss the point that simulations are physically instantiated in a computer with real causal dynamics. It is not like a fictional character with no internal mechanisms.