Dev Bajaj

SDE-1 | Grad @BITSPilaniGoa | 👨‍💻 ,🏏 & 🌐

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music...

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

One of the most important (and overlooked) scenes in the Odyssey is the encounter with the Lotus-eaters.

After nine days at sea, Odysseus and his men finally reach dry land. They go ashore to collect water, and Odysseus sends three men to go explore.

When his men don't return, Odysseus begins to worry.

The men had met some of the islanders (the Lotus-eaters), "who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back".

Odysseus ends up having to drag his men back to the ships and quickly sail away.

One must understand the symbolic power of the lotus. Its danger is not in any physical threat. The lotus is so deadly because it overloads you with pleasure, taking away all sense of urgency.

In this state of pleasure and relaxation, you forget your mission and your purpose. The men who ate the lotus flowers completely forgot about everything of value in their lives: their homes, their families, etc.

It's easy to think the monsters and beasts are the most terrifying threats you face. But because they're so obviously dangerous and remind you that death is a real possibility, they alert you to the value of life, and remind you of why you're fighting. But the real danger is a life so comfortable that you forget what you were trying to do in the first place.

Statistically speaking, it's unlikely you'll ever go to war or die of famine. But it is certainly possible that an addiction to your phone will derail you from your mission. Abundance of food and entertainment is far more likely to destroy you than most physical threats.

Yes, you will encounter plenty of Sirens and Cyclopes in life. But the real threat, which you must fend off every single day, is that of the lotus flower: a delicious indulgence that brings you immediate satisfaction, and makes you forget what you were fighting for.

[Corn ✧⍣ @cornski]

niggas pray all night for success then wake up and hop on ig reels

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

@piyushgaarg Hey i am interested

[Frontier Indica @frontierindica]

People underrate how much of Indian anxiety is rational.

When systems are low-trust, documents go missing, portals fail, brokers lie, roads are unsafe, and officials can harass you, hypervigilance is an adaptation.

This is why I think a lot of traditionally western approaches to anxiety and stress fail to treat Indian patients - they fail to take into account that the degree of dysfunction in our society is dialed up 10x compared to the West.

[No context Hazz ⛩ @HazzimIO]

No comments.

[Nick Davidov @Nick_Davidov]

Not a single grifter, natural resources extractor, heir, or financial speculator.
Builders, innovators, who created unprecedented wealth for their employees, investors, and made expensive things accessible to everyone. Living proofs that this can be done in a single lifetime by working hard and smart
God bless capitalism and innovation

[Tejasvi Surya @Tejasvi_Surya]

The US has suspended access to its most advanced AI models for every foreign national on earth - overnight, without notice.

For a country of India’s civilisational weight and geostrategic position, with its own unique security challenges, there is simply no alternative to building sovereign AI capability.

This moment makes that clearer than any policy argument ever could.

[Siddarth Pai @siddarthpaim]

In the US and China many frontier tech companies are led by top PhDs, deep researchers, or entrepreneurs who understand the science and product from first principles.

In India, too many “technology” companies were built on labour arbitrage, not original innovation. So when frontier AI arrives, many decision-makers are simply in the wrong room. They don’t know what to build, whom to hire, or what technical depth even looks like.

That is why the default response becomes licensing, JVs, reseller agreements, or renting data centers.

But none of that creates frontier capability.

A country does not become an AI power by hosting dinners or signing distribution deals. It becomes one by backing exceptional researchers, engineers, founders, compute infrastructure, and long-horizon technical ambition.

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

@DavidKPiano They still haven't got the Fable release news.

[sphinx @protosphinx]

Sir, they have blocked access to the very AI models you said we should share instead of build

[Frontier Indica @frontierindica]

I think today marks the day when many Indians will realize what some of us have been warning about for a while: the age of AGI and the takeoff towards the singularity is dawning.

Fable 5 access getting abruptly shut down is a small preview of the world we are entering.

India is not at the frontier. We are nowhere close. We are not even a has-been, because that would imply we were once there. We are increasingly at the mercy of frontier American models and perhaps open-source Chinese models, and this dependency will only deepen as these systems become more powerful and economically useful.

Our sovereignty goes with this.

We were already a semi-satrap. I think we are now moving towards becoming a full-on vassal state. One of the core colonies of the USG, to be sure. Perhaps one day even similar in scale and importance to what British India was to the British Empire. But a colony nonetheless.

In the future, a vast share of our exports and domestic production will be linked to lobotomized versions of frontier American models. We will be at the mercy of whoever in Washington and a handful of labs in California decides what that model is allowed to do, what it costs, who can access it, and what it is permitted to say.

Our services economy, the thing that built the urban middle class and still bankrolls most of what passes for aspiration here, becomes a thin reselling margin stacked on top of intelligence we did not build, cannot fully access, and cannot run on chips we do not fabricate.

You can nationalize a steel plant. You can ration foreign exchange. You can stockpile oil. But you cannot stockpile a model whose weights you were never handed.

And the gap does not sit still. It widens. The frontier ships a new tier every few months while our proudest sovereign effort is still mostly Indic-language systems for citizen services, not models competing with the Big Boys in California or Shenzhen.

The first time access is made conditional on something serious, a trade concession, a vote at some forum, a demand for data, we comply. Because there is no fallback.

And in that exact moment, we find out how much sovereignty we signed away for the convenience of cheaper tokens.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is so significant for us here in India.

The US government just told Anthropic to cut off its two most powerful models from foreign nationals, inside or outside America.

Anthropic could not cleanly fence off foreigners from Americans, so it pulled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone.

Let me walk you through what happened & explain what this means for us.

This week Anthropic launched two new models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

Both sit on the same very capable base. Mythos is the heavy one. It is so good at finding software security holes that Anthropic kept it limited to a small set of trusted partners under a program called Glasswing.

Mozilla said it fixed hundreds of security bugs using an early version of it. That cyber skill is exactly what makes the model valuable, and exactly what makes a government nervous.

On Friday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic's CEO putting both models under export control.

By one account, the trigger was another company claiming it had jailbroken Mythos. The government had also tried earlier to get Anthropic to delay the launch and failed. The letter came right after that.

Anthropic complied within hours but pushed back hard in public.

It says the so-called jailbreak is narrow. Other public models like GPT-5.5 already do this, and security defenders use it every single day.

Anthropic's argument is simple. If a minor finding like this can yank a model used by hundreds of millions of people, then no frontier model from anyone could ever stay online.

The company also built Fable with extra guardrails and a 30-day data retention rule specifically to catch and shut down misuse fast, so being recalled over this stings even more for them.

Now, what does this mean for you and me, building on these tools from Bengaluru or Pune.

Day to day, almost nothing changes right now. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are gone for everyone, but Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet and Haiku all still work. Your normal Claude usage is fine. ChatGPT and Gemini are fine.

But the deeper story is that the most powerful AI is now being treated like advanced chips. A controlled export.

The same way the US decides which Nvidia chips India is allowed to buy, it can now decide which AI models India is allowed to use.

And the word "foreign national" puts all of us in one bucket, friend of America or not.

Remember that Anthropic's own CEO was in New Delhi in February, talking up AI for India. That closeness did not stop the tap from being turned off.

So this can lead to interesting ramifications.

One. A two-tier AI world.

US persons get the top tier, the cyber-capable frontier. The rest of us get the model one notch below, and even that can vanish overnight. This order landed at 5:21 PM with zero warning and the model was gone the same evening.

Two. A massive reason for India to build its own.

Every minister and founder talking about sovereign AI just got handed proof. If a tool can be switched off from a foreign capital you do not vote in, you cannot put anything critical on top of it.

Not a bank, not a hospital system, not a government service, nothing.

Three. A lesson for builders.

Do not wire your product to a single model from a single country and assume it stays.

Keep a fallback model ready to swap in. Abstract your prompts so you are not married to one provider. Treat model access like a supply chain with risk.

Four. Slower, messier launches ahead.

If governments can pull a model over a narrow finding, every lab will get more cautious about what it ships and where.

Expect more launches that are geo-gated from day one, where India is simply not on the list at the start.

I use these tools all day and I am not about to stop. I am not panicking and neither should you. None of this breaks your workflow tonight.

But if you are building on American AI from India, treat today as the day to plan for access being pausable.

Keep a backup. Read the sovereign AI conversation a lot more seriously than you did last week.

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

laying bricks isn't mundane when you know you're building a cathedral

[gal౨ৎ @prtygal777]

they bloom regardless

[Devanshu @DevanshuXi]

Someone else built the geospatial indexing system.
Someone else open-sourced the hex grid math.
Someone else solved large-scale routing, spatial partitioning, and low-latency location systems.

We just pip installed it, add a .in domain, raise a Series B, and start calling ourselves “deep tech.”
The entire “hyperlocal revolution” is basically Uber’s H3 library with Google Maps API and a React Native frontend, and underpaid engineers who are gluing SDKs together for peanuts.
That’s not breakthrough engineering but an integration work with a marketing budget.

If you carefully notice, The moat isn’t technology here.
Its the investor money, delivery fleets, and who can burn more cash before the next funding round.

Real engineering is building the distributed systems underneath these abstractions.
Designing the indexing algorithms, Writing the networking stack, Solving the scaling problems before they become libraries on GitHub.
That work mostly happened elsewhere.
We just imported it and turned it into a valuation deck.
The worst part is the talent absolutely exists here.
Some of the smartest systems engineers and researchers I’ve met are Indian.
But instead of funding original research or infra work, the ecosystem rewards copycat apps and “AI-powered” wrappers and Hex-GM Copies.
Then people wonder why ambitious engineers leave the country.

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

"Engineering, product, and design are all merging into a 'builder' role"

Yeah... I'm not so sure. This feels like an oversimplification and podcast talking point. Reality is a lot more complex.

Even with 1000 "Member of Technical Staff" titles, someone still has to wake up and care 100x more about Product or Design than anyone else. It is their Main Thing™

That's not to say MTS titles are universally bad, but I think they're an example of this 'builder' talking point that's become bastardized.

AI and coding agents have made generating code easy and yet... you're in for a world of pain if non-engineers ship a bunch of slop and don't have great engineers to tame the complexity.

The SF hivemind has a tendency to overfit what works at startups for every company. And to be fair, sometimes this is true! Startups can be a leading indicator for how the industry is changing and often cause disruption.

However, it is going to be incredibly hard to disrupt the extremely human parts of corporate jobs. You really think there's going to be a PM who also does some engineering and design on the side at JPMorgan Chase?

This is true for the simple parts of most jobs, like people wanting to have ownership over something and do good work, move up a career ladder, support their family, get paid well, make an honest living...

And also the hard parts: internal politics, some critical business system that has a bus factor of 1 which has been running for 15 years and isn't documented anywhere because it's that guy's job security. The real world has a lot of this stuff.

It's easy to pontificate about all roles collapsing but it's actually really nice to have a specific person or team who is an expert in one thing that you can work with. I don't expect that to change. Further, I think AI disruption to knowledge work will take decades to play out because it is more fundamental to the human condition (e.g. sociological/organizational) than pure intelligence.

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

real, was just on the verge of doing it

[Blaize @Rxblaize]

This new WhatsApp feature is so unnecessary, one wrong move and you laugh at a death notice.

[Adithya Krishna Menon @AdithyaKM_]

India needs people who can develop 'controversial' tech. India needs it's own Palantir. Combating misuse of tech is possible only if the development is Indian owned. That needs people like him.

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

Everywhere now

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

the four horsemen of the apocalypse

[Dev Bajaj @DevBajaj02]

The city is beautiful, all the places to explore, roam around. The food and Delhi metro. But the problem starts as you get on the streets, and the crowd sometimes or safety kicks in. Weather is bearable, and i love the winters here but the pollution makes it horrible.

[Kaustubh Misra @MisraKaustubh]

Most of the city may go to (and is going to shit) but at least some things in Delhi stay as they are.