Giri

running on coffee, chaos and curiosity

[K.Annamalai @annamalai_k]

An Important Announcement https://t.co/IcEnfaZGRK

[Babu Bhaiya @Shahrcasm]

Scenes in Tamil Nadu Assembly Soon...

[Finbarr Taylor @finbarr]

https://t.co/KRlTbtnA8A

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

"When you have 5, 10, 20+ AI GTM agents ... you need a hub. And for the most part, that hub is @salesforce today.

It's a Renaissance for @salesforce." with @kylecnorton CRO @owner

[Marc Benioff @Benioff]

Agentforce just hit 11.14 TRILLION tokens served - that's a real force of real agents! Real use & real adoption. Powering agents for sales, service, marketing, commerce, Tableau, & Slack across the enterprise. Mahalo to our Ohana for their epic velocity after only a year in service, and you're making the Agentic Era real! ❤️🤖

[Kanika @DalRotiForLife]

Caught in the IndiGo flight mess? We're taking legal action (PIL) regarding these systemic failures.

We need 250+ passengers to join before Dec 10. Let's raise our voices together for better rights.

Support the case here: https://t.co/r0M1jlDQfW

[Marc Benioff @Benioff]

Salesforce FY26 & Q3 Growth & Agentforce >3.2 Trillion Tokens!

Salesforce Growth:   

FY26 $41.55B (Guidance)
FY25 $37.9B
FY24 $34.9B
2023 $31.4B
2022 $26.5B
2021 $21.3B
2020 $17.1B
2019 $13.3B
2018 $10.5B
2017 $8.4B
2016 $6.7B
2015 $5.4B
2014 $4.1B

Salesforce Operating Cash Flow:
FY26 $15B (guidance)
FY25 $13.1B
FY24 $10.2B
FY23 $7.1B
FY22 $6.0B

Salesforce Margin:
FY26 34.1% (guidance)
FY25 33%
FY24 30.5%
FY23 22.5%
FY22 18.7%

All numbers non-GAAP. Reconciliation to GAAP op margin can be found here:

https://t.co/92rEogzoBM

[Marc Benioff @Benioff]

🧵 Cyber Week 6PM PT Update – Nov 28! +11% YoY online spend (and still climbing) 🔥 Zero multi-customer incidents or Sev1s 🙌
AgentForce Marketing Cloud:
7B messages delivered
├ 5.3B emails
├ 1.5B mobile pushes
├ 175M SMS
└ 39M OTT
Slack is nothing but ❤️🎉 right now.
Proud doesn’t cover it—this Ohana is unstoppable. Keep cooking. 🚀
#CyberWeek #SalesforceOhana

[Giri @giri619]

#NewProfilePic

[Salesforce @salesforce]

Your supply chain deserves better than spreadsheets.

Agentforce Supply Chain turns every process into an agentic workflow—where supplier onboarding, invoicing, and logistics run themselves.

Meet the new industry standard at #DF25: https://t.co/pYFIwy4oMp

[Balaji @balajis]

DECOUPLING FROM DOLLARS
The US sends India billions in printed dollars for valuable goods. This is actually the US government ripping off India, like it does Vietnam, and everyone else, including its own citizens...not vice versa.

To be precise: last year India exported $87B of valuable goods to the US for $42B of goods plus $45B worth of increasingly worthless dollars:

That difference of $45B was, effectively, made up by money printing, which the Fed does at will:

The current administration incorrectly thinks this is a bad deal for America, because they haven’t fully thought through the fact that the US can print dollars. India was giving America something that's always valuable (namely goods) for something that America can just print out of thin air (namely US dollars):

So...who was really ripping off whom?

As mentioned, this is the same trade America had with Vietnam. Vietnam worked hard to send America shoes, while America sent Vietnam printed dollars. And it’s the same trade America had with many countries, before the trade war. The world sends the US valuable goods, and gets mere Federal Reserve database entries in return:

The only reason the US had the right to do that — to run the financial database of the world, to print trillions for itself, and to freeze and seize the funds of billions — is because it set up what we call the rules-based order, what is in reality the American Empire. And of course it profited from that empire tremendously, but so did most of the empire's participants.

But now MAGA is dismantling that empire. It’s cutting off trade, talent, and even tourism. It’s abandoning its military commitments and telling allies to fend for themselves. It’s cutting off foreign aid and domestic universities. It is, in short, becoming a country not an empire.

The reason is because MAGA is fundamentally confused. It romanticizes 1945 America (the manufacturing country) without fully admitting that 2025 America makes its money in a completely different way, by managing the hub of a global financial empire.

Because the US is in denial about what it is — a money printer, not a manufacturer — it's currently on track to lose both the money-printing and the manufacturing. For example, the tariffs target the entire world (thereby reducing demand for the dollar in global trade) while also cutting off machine tools and raw materials from US entrepreneurs (thereby inhibiting the buildout of domestic manufacturing).

Anyway, I won't linger on the outlook for the US. It's made its decision and will live with it. Perhaps it will indeed be a Golden Age of Reindustrialization. And perhaps the transition to a "republic, not an empire" will go much better than the similar imperial climbdown of the UK or the USSR.

What should countries like India and Vietnam do?

They should turn a necessity into a virtue. The trade war has provided a powerful Schelling Point for the entire world to simultaneously stop using the dollar at the same time. This is also what America says it wants, for foreigners to stop "exploiting" it by accepting its printed dollars for hard goods.

So: abide by America's wishes and stop trading goods with America for dollars. Instead, trade goods with each other for local currencies (rather than USDs) and use gold for storing value (rather than USTs). Because there is no global reserve currency issued by a single country, trade remains roughly balanced over time.

Singapore's former PM calls this "world minus one." It's the continuation of global capitalism, just without America, who has voluntarily taken itself out of the game. Yes, there's a short-term adaptation cost, but the quicker that a country can decouple from the dollar the better.

Start saving in hard money instead.

[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

[Giri @giri619]

Visited Vattakottai today, an 18th century fort built by the Tranvancore kings. Offers some stunning views of the western ghats and the ocean !

[Giri @giri619]

Golden hour 🌅

[Giri @giri619]

Kanyakumari -> Poovar island

[Giri @giri619]

#NewProfilePic

[Giri @giri619]

First time driving to South Tamilnadu. Amazing roads, so picturesque. NH44, you beauty 🤩

[BCCI @BCCI]

𝙏𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙠 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝘼𝙨𝙝𝙬𝙞𝙣 🫡

A name synonymous with mastery, wizardry, brilliance, and innovation 👏👏

The ace spinner and #TeamIndia's invaluable all-rounder announces his retirement from international cricket.

Congratulations on a legendary career, @ashwinravi99 ❤️

[Giri @giri619]

Thank God for Bumrah 🙏🏻 time and again and again and again…🙌 #INDvsAUS