Arun Shankar

Taming AI @ Google

[James Blunt @JBlunt1018]

Keep shinning your light. This is STILL America, where hard work still pays off, despite what hateful nativists say, the majority of this country values it.

Congratulations!!!!!

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@JayaGup10 Beautiful written! Excellent article!!

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

https://t.co/yiGW8jKKXk

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@omjain23 @elonmusk @_avichawla @grok Holy smokes!!

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

🤣

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@WatcherGuru Phew, now I can rest easy 😮‍💨

Inverse Cramer is incredible

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

The impact will be hard to accept. The idea of purpose tied to careers will erode. Humans will still validate, but much of the excess will be questioned. We may be forced to rediscover meaning beyond work, closer to simpler ways of living.

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

We’re crossing the event horizon. There is no turning back. The next two years will be chaotic and disorienting. Change will ripple across every discipline and through society. What we thought was stable will be tested.

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

Deniers will keep denying. AI can already build complex systems end to end with strong requirements, coordination, and multi-agent orchestration. It can generate ideas, run experiments, and iterate at scale. This is not theoretical anymore.

[Santhosh Narayanan @Music_Santhosh]

I have lived in an area in chennai for the past decade where it is absolutely top tier dangerous especially at night with hooligans and criminals who are mostly high on substance. Many innocent construction worker friends in my studio site were attacked several times recently. One such criminal who was apprehended was just laughing without any pain when the police lathi charged as he was stoned beyond limits. Moreover most of these attackers are proud racists and blanket hate/attack people from other states. It is high time we acknowledge that many local political factions and several ‘caste’ based groups come running to support these mostly young boys who end up ruining many lives along with theirs. Can we please accept the realities of these incidents and act more realistically and save so many victims ? The lines between glorified violence on screen and real incidents such as the recent one have really started blurring and it is high time we act responsibly. Me included .

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet)

On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive.

For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise?

I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (https://t.co/RdaM23kvez) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet?

Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@felixprehn AI

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@airfrance @Delta imagine showing up to Air France check-in with 2 kids, only to be defined boarding because Delta never told us we needed a baby seat. Staff refused to help and told us to “go deal with Delta”. Zero support, zero empathy. Truly unbelievable treatment! DFW to CDG

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@sunpictures @Dir_Lokesh @iWamiqaGabbi @ArunMatheswaran @anirudhofficial Sick of Tamil cinema glorifying blood-soaked rowdies and endless killing. Violence isn’t style, it’s just stale. Time for better stories.

[Deedy @deedydas]

I spoke to immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn for an hour to answer the most pressing questions about the new $100k H-1B fee.

Sophie's (@Sophie_Alcorn) represented startup founders, employees and employers for over a decade in the Bay Area and is one of the experts on the topic.

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@CinemaScene404 I still remember watching this in theatres and being completely awestruck by Amy’s performance. As a die-hard fan of hers, I can say she truly deserved an Oscar for it, an absolute masterpiece, the kind of film you only get once in a lifetime.

[wh @nrehiew_]

If you needed another example that the algorithm has been completely abysmal in the past few days. This has 4K bookmarks and this guy has 160K followers.

What is happening?

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

API first mindset always wins!

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Sam Altman on the Paul Graham advice that saved Open AI: “Always make an API”

Four years into OpenAI, Sam Altman and the team realized that they would have to build a really big company to fund the development of their increasingly capital-intensive foundation models.

“We had this model called GPT-3,” Sam recalls. “I was turning up the urgency on the company to try and figure out a product, and we just couldn’t. It was cool, but it wasn’t good enough to make something that worked.”

Then Sam remembered a piece of advice from Y Combinator founder Paul Graham that stuck with him: “You should always make an API. No matter what, you should make an API. Good stuff will happen.”

Out of ideas for a product, the OpenAI team decided to make GPT-3 available as an API.

“Maybe somebody will figure out something to do with it,” Sam thought.

A few copywriting applications like Jasper and Copy AI did take off using the GPT-3 API, but OpenAI also noticed interesting behavior that eventually became a sleeper hit:

“Some people — not a lot — would just chat with that thing all day,” Sam explains. “It wasn’t very good but there was clear user signal that people wanted to talk to the models. And given that that was the only thing besides copywriting that had real traction, we said, ‘Maybe this is just he product we should build.’”

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public as a “research preview” using a model from the GPT-3.5 series. It reached over a million users in five days.

Video source: @khoslaventures (2025)

[Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy]

An innocent Dallas hotel manager was brutally beheaded in front of his wife & son, by an illegal migrant who had a final order of removal & such a bad criminal history that Cuba refused to accept him. He was released on Jan 13, right before Biden left office. This is horrific. It’s time to restore the rule of law.

[Arun Shankar @arunenigma]

@nameis_krishna @arrahman @Suriya_offl @kegvraja sat on train steps one night from coimbatore to bangalore, everyone asleep, breeze in my face, first time hearing munbe vaa. looped it all night. pure love in music. still hits. cult 90s vibe.