Vikas Kumar

Ecomm | Tech | A Cricketer who tried | Views (if any) are personal

[Abhijeet Dipke @abhijeet_dipke]

Washrooms in govt schools in 2026!

Kids in rural India are being treated worse than animals.

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

@rishibagree Jayasuriya - the way he dismantled India's seamers was pure class!

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

New scam by #Bescom? Bescom official (Shekhar) comes to the Brigade Lakefront society for meter reading on 20th Aug and in the bill generated, the Reading date is mentioned as 11th Aug. Kindly register a complaint & clarify the same. #Mahadevapura @NammaBESCOM @CMofKarnataka

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

Goosebumps! Thank you for your relentless pursuit of excellence, constantly pushing the boundaries and inspiring a billion Indians in the process - Your secret admirer :)

[BCCI @BCCI]

Illustrious legacy 🇮🇳
Inspiring intensity 👏
Incredible icon ❤️

The Former #TeamIndia Captain gave it all to Test Cricket 🙌

Thank you for the memories in whites, Virat Kohli 🫡

#ViratKohli | @imVkohli

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

Empty metros & more traffic on the road! This is a masterstroke by @OfficialBMRCL officials. By increasing the fares, they have made a mockery of the public transport system and put more pressure on the already crumbling road infra in Bengaluru. 👏🏼👏🏼 #metrofarehike #bmrcl

[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?
———————
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

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

For those disappointed with the new EOP update of @ETMONEY, the only alternative I could find to view one's external portfolio for free is MF Central (JV of CAMS & KFintech), though the UX is below par! #ETMoney

[meet soni @meet_soni]

Bengaluru purple line metro stuck at Indiranagar from last 10 mins.

Display showing following message. What's happening?

#NammaMetro #nammametro #purpleline #bengalurumetro #bangloremetro #Bengaluru #Banglore

[Radhika Gupta @iRadhikaGupta]

This comic strip on the left was published by the same group that wrote the article on the right.

We may fail, New York Times, but we also rise and rise higher. And in being “first”, we have created our own club. The elites can watch.

[IndianPremierLeague @IPL]

MSD keeps everyone guessing 😉

The Lucknow crowd roars to @msdhoni's answer 🙌🏻

#TATAIPL | #LSGvCSK | @msdhoni

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

#IndianCricketTeam is not being sporting enough with these pitch tactics in my opinion & the winning at any cost mentality. If we can win it #Downunder in their home conditions, then we shouldn't worry. Hope the pitch lasts for 3-4 days at least! #INDvsAUS

[Abhinav Patwa @abhinav_patwa]

Fascinating read! You might have seen Di Maria getting emotional in the recent WC final, read this to know why. His story penned by him in 2018. So inspiring!
https://t.co/riseMlWkDv

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

Substance beats style anyday! #CROBRA #MenvsBoys #CroatiaVsBrazil

[MT Capital @MT_Capital1]

Giverny Capital has a stupendous track record - since July 1st, 1993 their Global Portfolio has beat the market by 4979.4%!

I read 20 years of their investor letters, here are my favourite excerpts👇🧵:

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

@TheBarmyArmy Laxman 281 any day!

[ICC @ICC]

MS Dhoni on Instagram: Consider me retired from 19:29 👀

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

@BLRSmartCity @BBMPCOMM @BBMPSWMSplComm Hi Team, I want to bring to your notice that this fine has illegally collected from us by Nagaraj (BBMP supervisor) for garbage non-segregation. My locality (ward #Ejipura) hasn't seen the door-to-door garbage collector for over 60 days!

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

@IndiGo6E 14 cases have already been detected in Thailand & a lot more cases are expected in the coming days! The situation looks scary. We await further updates on this at the earliest.
@MoCA_GoI @DGCAIndia

#coronavirus #Thailand

https://t.co/yPXf671fiR

[Vikas Kumar @cric_boy89]

Hey, @IndiGo6E @goairlinesindia is there any travel advisory/partial refunds available for countries infected with Corona Virus except China? We are skeptical about traveling to Phuket next week!
@MoCA_GoI @DGCAIndia

#coronavirus #nCoV #nCoV2019 #2019nCoV #Thailand