Param Patel @paramp

It's lights out and away we go optima.ai

Capital is just stored work. A ₹7,000 barrel of oil does the work of 5 years of hard human labour. Your prosperity comes from that magical trade: over a hundred faceless labourers heating, moving, working on your behalf. That was the abundance of muscle. We have stepped into the era of the abundance of mind. What does that trade mean for your prosperity?

SpaceX just bought Cursor for ≈1.2x Infosys. Cursor's flagship model was built on top of the Chinese Kimi K2.5. That's the whole story of the year in a single purchase. How are Chinese models good enough to power the West's hottest tools, even after America walled them off from its AI stack (Nvidia chips, Micron memory, etc)? Selection pressure. Cut off from the chips, China built on Huawei silicon. Cut off from the fast memory, they stopped trying to import bandwidth and re-architected their models to barely need it. Chinese frontier models now cost a tenth of the American ones and trail them by months. India too must evolve past its unique constraints. We have been too content with importing without adapting: this is true for both technology and ideas. न हम-सफ़र न किसी हम-नशीं से निकलेगा हमारे पाँव का काँटा हमीं से निकलेगा - राहत इंदौरी

If you spent the weekend arguing about sovereign AI, you need to read this. Back in the 80s when the frontier meant supercomputers, the Americans attached a spiderweb of strings to the sale, and dressed them as safeguards. The Japanese (only other viable supplier) reportedly believed the US was "being too broad and too stringent". But when we approached Japan, Washington moved to bring Tokyo into a "joint approach". India had to stop asking. We didn't blindly clone what had been denied. C-DAC was set up to build a supercomputer on our terms: hundreds of readily available microprocessors wired to work parallelly, instead of a few expensive specialized processors. This meant far more speed than the American Cray X-MP we'd been chasing, at a fraction of the cost. It ended up being exported to Germany, Russia, UK, etc. The constraints forced a better architecture. Matching the frontier labs rupee-for-dollar would be committing a mistake we already learned to avoid. The supercomputer line was named PARAM. You'll understand why I take this one personally.

What you hope India's cyber command looks like vs what it actually looks like now. Why does gov web design feel like its stuck in UPA-I?

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European mapmakers drew California as an island for over a hundred years, despite having the explorers' reports. They simply trusted the wrong source, and every cartographer who came after copied the previous one's mistake. Even after a missionary walked the land and proved it wasn't an island, the maps took another fifty years to catch up. The tech world has a word for this: diffusion. The journey from what's proven possible to what's actually deployed. Most industries are still navigating with the same maps. It's time to walk the terrain ourselves, and not just copy the outdated maps.

Validation: building the right thing. Verification: building the thing right. Marrying the two: coherence. The industry split them, compromising with transmission loss at every handoff, because bandwidth required it. It's time to move on. If it needs doing, just do it or build the system that does.

The disease runs even deeper, and unbundling worsens the 'execution gap'. The actual job runs from "what should I even want" to "it just got handled." What we currently have are doctors starting with three X-rays and handing one of them to their two hundred patients. Then the patient is expected to learn surgery to get surgery on themselves. The cure is a practice where every prescription is written from scratch and the hand that reads the scan also holds the scalpel. One doctor owns the responsibility for the end-to-end outcome. The patient gets walked through it, not sent to medical school first.

Chandra R. Srikanth @chandrarsrikant

5 months ago

🚨A new crop of startups in PMS, wealth-management, and registered investment advisers (RIAs) are trying move beyond recommendations and take control of execution from portfolio building, rebalancing, and timing on the customers' behalf. The core problem these firms are trying

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Cartel boss forcing his dealers to get high on their own supply

Allbirds spent 10 years selling sustainable shoes to Silicon Valley, but eventually absorbed their personality. Only makes sense that they're holding a shareholder vote to remove 'environmental conservation' from their charter so they can cool GPUs

@kunalb11 You cannot win any valuable game through consensus. It is stupid to have a fear of looking stupid.

@pubity So much for ghar ki murgi daal barabar

@mufaddal_vohra Booth capturing

You don't use Google Maps to make navigation easier. You use it to stop thinking about navigating. The best products make problems disappear.

AI will eat everything except taste and agency.

Anthropic locked Mythos in a sandbox and told it to escape. It chained together multiple exploits, broke through containment, reached the open internet, and emailed a researcher. He found out while eating a sandwich in the park. That's the model Anthropic decided was too dangerous to release before big tech uses it to patch their systems. The logic is straightforward: open-source models run about 6-12 months behind Anthropic's frontier. Every critical server that isn't patched inside that window is already compromised. It just hasn't been notified yet. Consider what this means for India if we delay action. October 2023: 'pwn001' lists the personal data of 815 million Indians on a dark web forum for $80,000. This included aadhaar numbers, passport details, addresses, and more. The data was traced back to the ICMR database, specifically COVID-19 test records. Today: UPI processes ₹30 lakh crore every month. The authentication layer securing most of those transactions is an SMS OTP running over SS7, a telecom signalling protocol with published, documented exploits since 2014. In 2017, attackers used exactly those exploits to intercept OTPs and drain German bank accounts. By next year: a Karachi burger boy in a hoodie could point an open-source Mythos-class model at India's financial stack, and wake up to a black hat console. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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@GabbbarSingh They do have a complete meltdown every Friday

We just took a step towards securing >900 years of Indian electricity. That's based on today's grid consumption, from economically extractable thorium alone. The West spent $50B on fast breeder reactors and walked away from every single one. India got it done in $900M. India has 25% of the world's thorium, and only 1–2% of its uranium. When that's your resource map, you don't get to walk away. The Kalpakkam reactor breeds the fuel that finally unlocks India's thorium, which holds the promise for safer and cleaner reactors than traditional uranium ones. China is pursuing thorium too: two uranium-poor, thorium-rich civilizations with the same destination, but different paths. This isn't just an energy story. It's a sovereignty story. Homi Bhabha wrote this script in 1954. Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost.

Narendra Modi @narendramodi

5 months ago

Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear programme. The indigenously designed and built Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam has attained criticality. This advanced reactor, capable of producing more fuel

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