Amit Chakrabarti

At the intersection of innovation, technology and public impact. Founder of @Merit_future, Head of @VodafoneBiz Ventures, Ex @Oxford_Capital, @OxfordSBS alum

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

Excellent video on how to think about leverage and how it will create wealth in the new economy.

[GDP @bookwormengr]

Writing this as an Indian who works on AI in leadership role for one the largest companies in the world (though strictly my personal opinion, but based on verifiable data).

You heard it first here:
—————————-
First some more shocks:
You heard DeepSeek.
Wait till you hear about Qwen (Alibaba), MiniMax, Kimi, DuoBao (ByteDance) all from China.
Within China, DeepSeek is not unique and their competition is close behind (not far behind).
IMHO, China has 10 labs comparable to OpenAI/Anthropic and another 50 tier 2 labs.
The world will discover them in coming weeks in awe and shock.

AI is not hard (I am not high)
————————————
Ignore Sam Altman.
Many teams that built foundation models are below 50 persons (e.g. Mixtral).
In AI, LLM science part is actually quite easy.
All these models are “Transformer Decoder only models”, an architecture that was invented in late 2017.
There are improvements since then (flash attention, ROPE, MOE, PPO/DPO/GRPO), but they are relatively minor, open source and easy to implement.

Since building foundation models is easy and Nvidia is there to help you (if not directly, then by sharing their software like “Megatron” that is assembly line to build AI models) there are so many foundation models built by Chinese labs as well as global labs.

It is machines that learn by themselves…if you give them data & compute. This is unlike writing operating system or database software. Also, everyone trains on same data: internet archives, books, github code for the first stage called “pre-training”.

What is part is hard then?
———————————-
It is the parallel & distributed computing to run AI training jobs across thousands of GPUs that is hard. DeepSeek did lot of innovation here to save on “flops” and network calls. They used an innovative architecture called Mixture of Experts and a new approach called GRPO. with verifiable rewards both of which are in open domain through 2024.

Also, there is lot of data curation needed particularly for “post training”
to teach model on proper style of answering (SFT/DPO) or to teach them learn to reason (GRPO with verifiable reward). STF/DPO is where “stealing” from existing models to save cost of manual labor may happen.

LLM building is nothing that Indian engineers living in India cannot pull off. Don’t worry about Indians who have left. There are plenty in the country as of today.

Then why India does not have foundation models?
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It is for the same reason India does not have Google or Facebook of its own.

You need to able to walk before you can run.

There is no protected market to practice your craft in early days. You will get replaced by American service providers as they are cheaper and better every single time. That is not the case with Chinese player. They have a protected market and leadership who treats this skillset as existential due to geopolitics.

So, even if Chinese models are not good in early days they will continue to get funding from their conglomerates as well as provincial governments. Darwinian competition ensures best rise to the top.

Recall DeepSeek took 2 years to get here without much revenue. They were funded by their parent. Also, most of their engineers are not PHDs.

There is nothing that engineers who built Ola/Swiggy/Flipkart cannot build. Remember these services are second to none when you compare them to their Bay Area counterparts. Also , don’t trivialize those services; there is brilliant engineering to make them work at the price points at which they work.

Indian DARPA with 3B USD in funding over 3 years
———————-
What we need is a mentality that treats this skillset as existential. We need a national fund that will fund such teams and the only expected output will be benchmark performance with benchmarks becoming harder every 6 months . No revenue needed to survive for first 3 years.

That money will be loose change for GOI and world’s richest men living in India.

@protosphinx @balajis @vikramchandra @naval

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@AllisonPearson @Telegraph A devastating read. Thanks Allison for writing this and putting a giant spotlight on this national scandal!

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@narendramodi Great initiative. But cyber security to protect data has to be robust.

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

A bit of a late post but I'm excited to have started a social impact advisory firm @Merit_future. Read about our journey and how we plan to help FTSE 100 and other UK companies create and scale social impact programmes that drive innovation and impact. https://t.co/laVIRUK9xd

[Vodafone Business IoT @VodafoneIoT]

Can #IoT revolutionise education? 📚
From fostering collaboration to creating flexible learning spaces and facilitating communication for students with disabilities - there are endless possibilities!

Discover more! 👇
https://t.co/oUPuHJqe3G

#IoTConnectivity #Education

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

This commentary is so much on the money. The innovation is happening on Google’s cash cow and will it have the stomach to disrupt its own business?

[Othman Laraki @othman]

GenAI poses a much deeper pickle for Google than I initially assumed... The last few weeks completely echo the time I was at Google in the early 2000's when we were up against Microsoft - except this time Google is on the receiving end.

Looking back, we beat Microsoft not because we had better tech, but because we forced them to play on our terms AND at our "clockspeed."

Many (myself included) were viewing Google's LLM problem as one of catching up with the technology - specifically OpenAI. It stands to reason that with all its incredible talent, infrastructure, users and data, Google can and will catch up to OpenAI and likely be able to build better technology.

But I'm realizing that's likely to be wrong. The debacle last week (and even more, Google's response) puts a point on the real and somewhat unsolvable problem Google faces now.

Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI tomorrow - it lost to it over the last ten years.

The problem that Google faces today relative to the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity is very similar to what we did to Microsoft 20 years ago. What ChatGPT in particular has made us realize is that many of the tasks that we have so far labeled "search" and where we click on blue links are really tasks of research, analysis and decision-making.

We viewed Google as the way to complete these tasks because 20 years ago, Google solved the most important challenge in that workflow, which was to bring all the world's information to within one click in the form of a search engine.

Over these 20 years, Google built and has been harvesting one of the most profitable business models in history (remember that we used to talk with similar admiration of the operating system + desktop productivity biz model).

The problem now, is that ChatGPT, Perplexity and others have shown us that A LOT of the tasks we used to think of as search engine-based workflows are even better served through an exchange with this new piece of technological magic (similarly to how PageRank made Google Search feel magical 25 years ago).

The real problem for Google is one of clockspeed. Google all of a sudden has its ass on fire and is trying to innovate into the future. But, that innovation now has to happen at the heart of its business. OpenAI doesn't care about messing up an ads business model - they can just iterate with a product/quality purity that is impossible for Google to get.

Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI in the coming few years. It has lost over the past decade, when it could have evolved/iterated AI into its model at its success-encumbered clockspeed. Now that the game is on, but on a startup clockspeed, there is no chance for Google to catch up and even less win this next cycle.

This problem compounds over time, because every single day that goes by, we are all feeding OpenAI our usage patterns, feedback, custom GPTs, integrations, etc... At this stage, there is no way for Google to shift its clockspeed unless it is willing to give the middle finger to the market and its customers for a while and say sorry, the future beckons - feel free to opt out and invest your money elsewhere.

The sad part is that Google actually has the wherewithal to do that, but few incumbents are ever able to pull it off. Meta/Zuck have done this several times (mobile transition, VR bet and now AI), so we know it's possible, but it is exceedingly unlikely for that to happen. People often think that's only possible because Mark is the founder, but I think it's because of his posture between risk and opportunity.

I'll close this with the phrase that I think captures this posture: Our missed opportunities will cost us more than our mistakes

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@narendramodi “@TweetHelperBot download this”

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@TweetHelperBot @Mrbeastparodyy @narendramodi @TweetHelperBot download this

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@AnkitaBnsl @TweetHelperBot download this

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@Starboy2079 @threadreaderapp unroll

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

@greatbong Congratulations Arnab. Kudos to your persistence. Dreams do come true!!

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

Excellent article on the evolving changes in the classroom and education due to AI.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Based on what I have seen, I think we can assume three things about AI & education:
1) AI tutors are going to be very effective
2) AI writing will not be caught by anti-cheating software
3) Human instructors will be freed to focus on making learning better
https://t.co/prg1eJiFyQ

[Vodafone Business @VodafoneBiz]

Head of Vodafone Business Ventures, Amit Chakrabarti explains the importance of #EdTech in the post-pandemic world. Learn more via @FENews: https://t.co/mJkRiEYvXm
#DigitalLearning #DigitalEducation #Connectivity

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Reddit is a startup university.

You just need to know who the teachers are.

9 golden subreddits to build a $1B business:

[Vodafone Group @VodafoneGroup]

If you’re heading to @Arch_Summit in Luxembourg tomorrow make sure you visit the Vodafone Zone to find out how our innovations are helping to build a better future. https://t.co/CHHBZZIpTg

[Vodafone Group @VodafoneGroup]

Meet #ConnectedLiving, an app by @VodafoneBiz that provides digital care for assisted living and connects people with their carers and beyond 👵📱👪

Discover how this technology is helping Europe care for its communities at home ⤵Meet #ConnectedLiving, an app by @VodafoneBiz that provides digital care for assisted living and connects people with their carers and beyond 👵📱👪

Discover how this technology is helping Europe care for its communities at home ⤵Meet #ConnectedLiving, an app by @VodafoneBiz that provides digital care for assisted living and connects people with their carers and beyond 👵📱👪

Discover how this technology is helping Europe care for its communities at home ⤵️

[Amit Chakrabarti @amitchacks]

Connected Living: My reflections on how technology can help Europe care for its communities at home https://t.co/c9tyNdLRjn

[Vodafone Business @VodafoneBiz]

We’ve already connected 1,700,000 students in over 5,000 educational establishments in 14 countries worldwide. Together we can make progress engaging students, energising teachers and building toward the future: https://t.co/qvGtneJx8T

#EdTech #education #ConnectedEducation