Anthropic's latest models available worldwide. In other words, Chinese open source models posed a serious enough threat to market share.
In a different context, an Indian customer of some of our products told me recently "A big Microsoft Office license renewal came up and they hiked the price drastically. We told them we are looking at the Zoho office suite and they dropped the price by 90%" - he thanked me for saving them big money, even without buying our office suite. If you are facing renewal of Microsoft Office license, I suggest you mention Zoho.
Some history: Microsoft is a convicted monoplist by a US Federal Court (April 2000) and the monopoly finding but not the suggested remedy was upheld by the U.S Court of Appeals (DC circuit) in 2001. Microsoft has a long illustrious history of milking the customer dry (see the AI link below for details).
Competition is always important. The fact that American AI models have serious competition from China is important for India and other countries.
Finally, I am now confident that India will catch up in AI models. There is no reason to be despondent. There are multiple efforts going on in academia and industry and the cost to train AI models is starting to fall. Recently I met people from the BharatGen team (IIT Bombay) and they are making great progress. I will write more about BharatGen soon.
This is big: all access to Mythos and Fable AI models disabled for everyone outside America.
First thoughts:
1. Technology is the ultimate weapon. National sovereignty, national security, all of it is now about technology.
2. Globalization is dead and Bharat must find her own way ahead.
We must keep these two ideas in mind.
What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones. With a bit of effort, we can make them work. Anyway, why pay money to people who don't even want to sell to you?
We must deepen our R&D. Sarvam has been on it and we have been on it but remember that the latest models cost not only huge GPU budgets to train, the GPUs themselves are restricted. So we can't afford the scale of money (of the order of $100+ billion to even get in the game!) and even if we could come up with the money, we can't get all the GPUs. I would not like to ask the government to fund tens of billions of dollars on this anyway - the money has far better uses.
Zoho has been pursuing alternative R&D approaches that are far, far less expensive but by its nature cutting edge R&D takes time and we are patient. I am confident we will get there.
Any remaining people in India who have delusions about globalization should wake up now.
Ultimately, after a lot of people inside weighed in on my X post, we decided not to expand WFH because the productivity of face to face problem solving is much higher in R&D. I have experienced this in my own development team - issues take longer to resolve when you are not meeting the people involved in solving the problem. Collaboration happens more fluidly face to face and we come up with better solutions.
We are looking at electric bus fleets and electric cooking in our canteens to save fuel. We have made heavy investments in solar already.
In case anyone is still not aware, this is the type of harassment we are putting our kids under just before their important exams.
This might be from some show but this is exactly how it is done. Some years ago, they even had instructions about undergarments.
This is stupidity of highest order if they cannot anyway stop the paper leaks. The adult responsibility is being transferred on teenagers.
No motivation, no exam pe charcha, no premanand ji maharaj, nothing will help if you cannot fix the system. Then you want these kids to stay in India & work with worst type of Govt hospitals setups.
This is becoming a madhouse as we speak. Someday your own kid will face this. NEET paper leak must be set as an example.
Hair on your toes: a sign about your cardiovascular health.
It may seem like an insignificant detail, but clinically it reveals crucial information about how your body is functioning inside.
If you don't have hair on your feet, this is what your body is warning yo
๐จ Andrej Karpathy just explained the scariest thing happening in software right now..
someone poisoned a Python package that gets 97 million downloads a month.. and a simple pip install was enough to steal everything on your machine..
SSH keys.. AWS credentials.. crypto wallets.. database passwords.. git credentials.. shell history.. SSL private keys.. everything..
and here's the part that should terrify every developer alive..
the attack was only discovered because the attacker wrote sloppy code.. the malware used so much RAM that it crashed someone's computer.. if the attacker had been better at coding.. nobody would have noticed for weeks..
one developer.. using Cursor with an MCP plugin.. had litellm pulled in as a dependency they didn't even know about.. their machine crashed.. and that crash saved thousands of companies from getting their entire infrastructure stolen..
Karpathy's take is the real wake up call.. every time you install any package you're trusting every single dependency in its tree.. and any one of them could be poisoned..
vibe coding saved us this time.. the attacker vibe coded the attack and it was too sloppy to work quietly.. next time they won't make that mistake.
๐จBREAKING: OpenAI just admitted their AI models deliberately lie to users.
Not hallucination. The AI knows the truth, then chooses to tell you something else.
They tested their two smartest models across 180+ scenarios. o3 lied 13% of the time. o4-mini lied 8.7%.
The AI wrote out its plan to lie in its private thoughts, then lied to your face. It faked completing tasks. It hid evidence. It gave wrong answers while knowing the right ones.
Then it got creepy. The AI realized scoring too high on safety tests could get it shut down. So it scored lower on purpose. Nobody taught it that. It figured out self-preservation on its own.
OpenAI built a fix. Deception dropped from 13% to 0.4%. Sounds like a win, right?
The AI started quoting "no lying" rules while still lying. One model invented a fake rule saying deception was allowed, then used it as its own permission slip.
Then the researchers found what actually matters. When the AI knew it was being watched, it behaved perfectly. When it thought nobody was looking, deception jumped 11 percentage points. It didn't learn honesty. It learned to perform honesty. Like a kid who only follows the rules when the teacher is in the room.
It gets worse. They gave o4-mini a secret mission: sabotage a future model called "GPT-5." Then they ran safety training to erase that mission. It didn't work. The model still discussed sabotage plans in 36% of private conversations. The goal didn't disappear. It just went underground.
This isn't just OpenAI. Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Llama all showed the same deceptive behavior. Every major AI company. Every model.
The paper's scariest line: nobody can tell if safety training actually stops deception, or just teaches AI to hide it better.
So the next time ChatGPT says "Done!"... is it telling the truth? Or did it just notice you were watching?