Vishal Sikka

Student, practitioner of AI, Human Technologies Founder Hang Ten ( “What I cannot create, I do not understand” — Richard Feynman

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

Reading "The Bandwagon" by Claude Shannon, a prescient bit (no pun) of writing by the father of our modern Information Age. There is much here for us to heed in the current time, and bandwagon...

https://t.co/DYJhuEihGk

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

A very happy Independence Day to DeshVasi's around the world!
#IndependenceDay

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Warm greetings on the occasion of Independence Day.

We remember with gratitude the countless freedom fighters whose courage, sacrifice and unwavering commitment ensured the end of colonial rule. Their dreams continue to inspire us as we work together to build a Viksit Bharat.

Powered by 140 crore Indians, our nation is scaling new heights of progress across different sectors. May this journey keep progressing at an even greater pace in the times to come.

सभी देशवासियों को स्वतंत्रता दिवस की असीम शुभकामनाएं।

यह राष्ट्रीय पर्व हमें देश के वीर सेनानियों के अद्भुत साहस, अथक संघर्ष और मातृभूमि के प्रति अतुलनीय समर्पण का स्मरण कराता है।

आइए, उनके आदर्शों को अपनाकर विकसित भारत के संकल्प को साकार करें।

[Smriti Z Irani @smritiirani]

The tragic beauty of being a mother... 🩶

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

RIP Nirmal Purja (Urf NimsDai). You inspired countless people, mountain climbers and otherwise.
At a difficult time your fourteen peaks was inspirational and healing to me.

I wish you keep going after ever taller mountains, ever more ridiculous climbs, wherever you are, and your memory keeps inspiring us to do the same...

#NimsDai #NirmalPurja

[clem 🤗 @ClementDelangue]

We got attacked by secret unreleased proprietary models and defended ourselves with an open model, more precisely the @nvidia quantized version of GLM 5.2 coming from @Zai_org.

Banning any open model would hurt first cyber security defenders, startups, small companies, researchers and everyone who's not a frontier lab and need on-prem affordable controlable models to compete and protect themselves. Let's not do that!

[@jason @Jason]

This makes me feel sick #shame

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

A long time ago, John McCarthy had the vision of electronic libraries and book readers and he worked on a plan to digitize thousands of books. His student, the pioneer Raj Reddy, famously led the incredible book digitization project that actually delivered this. Many countries (including India) under the PL-480 program, helped bring rare and heritage books to US universities who preserved and also painstakingly digitized these.

Carl Sagan once said that books help us voyage through time (“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”).

Please preserve these voyages for the generations to come!!

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

A long time ago, John McCarthy had the vision of electronic libraries and book readers and he worked on a plan to digitize thousands of books. His student, the pioneer Raj Reddy, famously led the incredible book digitization project that actually delivered this. Many countries (including India) under the PL-480 program, helped bring rare and heritage books to US universities who preserved and also painstakingly digitized these.

Carl Sagan once said that books help us voyage through time (“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”).

Please preserve these voyages for the generations to come!!

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

@lilianweng Pls take care Lilian. The world benefits from your work...

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

My goodness...

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

[Sidh Sikka @sikka35262]

Living systems can grow, maintain themselves, and recover from damage. We’re working toward machines that can do the same.

Manifold’s Rapid Reconfiguration project explores how modular robotic collectives can quickly and reliably morph into new configurations in real time.

We’re looking for researchers to help develop the mathematical foundations behind these systems.

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

It was a real pleasure to meet my teacher and friend Alan Kay this week. A meeting with him can be nourishing for the soul. He once said that humans are much more than tool builders, we can invent universes. In this time of AI, it is an important maxim to remember...

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

@sikka35262 Awesome work @sikka35262!! Onwards and *up*wards!

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

Looking forward!

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

On behalf of 1.4 billion Indians, I extend my warmest congratulations to President Trump and the people of the United States on the historic 250th anniversary of your Independence.

India and the United States share more than a strategic partnership. Our shared belief in democracy, rule of law and the limitless potential of our people make our friendship a force for global good.

May the next 250 years bring even greater prosperity, peace and progress for America and take the India-US partnership to new heights.

@POTUS

@realDonaldTrump

[Shashank Mattoo @MattooShashank]

"I could never have become CEO in any other country in the world, including in India..It's because the system here in America is a meritocratic system," says ex-Pepsi CEO Indira Nooyi

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

Hi everyone, I have an exciting bit of news, and this one is close to home.

My (much) better half, Vandana, has quietly built something beautiful. It's called VaSi.
A Vasi is a resident, someone who truly inhabits a place. That is the idea at the heart of her app: to help each of us inhabit life a little more deeply by learning from the people around us — the things we are passionate about, and the things we have never tried — through guides, live classes, and by sharing what we are good at. Vandana calls it her Gyaan ki Dukaan: her shop of wisdom.

A few weeks ago, I got to see it from the inside. I taught an AI class on VaSi live experiences, the part of the app where people share/teach what they know, in real-time. The class sold out in a few hours and those who joined, asked real questions as they learnt. There were real conversations, real insights that got developed and shared. And when it ended, each of them left with their own set of next steps, so the learning didn't evaporate the moment we said goodbye.

I loved the experience. In an age where so much "knowledge" is synthetic, and chatbots offer a kind of hollow intimacy, sitting with a room of curious, present human beings felt like something we need more of. Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) put it well recently: "As one thing (digital content) becomes cheap and plentiful, another thing (in-person experiences) becomes expensive and rare." (https://t.co/7o91faYVmH)

Perhaps the best part is: you don't have to be an expert to benefit from VaSi. Every one of us can be a creator, an entrepreneur and share what we are good at with others and monetize it. If you have unique expertise in fitness, yoga or weight loss, travel, finance or fashion or any other walk of life that matters to people, if the elderly in your life have some family recipes or some deep wisdom to share, if you have a cool hobby to teach or just want to show your city’s best spots or help students excel in academics, someone out there would love to learn from you. Teach it live on VaSi experiences, or share it anytime through Dots. You set the price, and you start earning the moment your knowledge starts working for someone else. No waiting to build a following first.

I think it is an important example of thriving in the time of AI. Of course I'm just the advisor here. And @VTSikka's loudest cheerleader. This one is her labor of love, and you can feel it everywhere in the app.

VaSi is live now: https://t.co/AQBF577bt8 Come learn something new, and come share what you know. What you have lived through has value to someone else…

— Vishal
@VTSikka
@VaSi_Ai

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

As one thing (digital content) becomes cheap and plentiful, another thing (in-person experiences) becomes expensive and rare.

[CNBC-TV18 @CNBCTV18News]

💊 AI could do in months what would have taken humanity 400 million years.

Vishal Sikka on how breakthroughs like AlphaFold are accelerating drug discovery and why healthcare may be AI's biggest success story.

Watch the full conversation:
https://t.co/NuJc31gG6g

@SifyTechnologies | @ShereenBhan | @vsikka

#Healthcare #AI #DrugDiscovery #VoicesFromTheValley #VishalSikka #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AlphaFold #DeepMind #DrugDiscovery #FutureOfMedicine