India will never produce an NVIDIA, and it has nothing to do with talent. R&D is the purest form of investment, and the central bank has spent decades making investment the dumbest thing you can do with a rupee.
I've been surfing the semiconductor wave for a while now, reading 10-Ks for fun. Spent last month in the Bay Area and the gap between India and the US is not a gap; it's a different universe. Conversations about agentic AI and the next decade of hardware, with my boomer relatives Waymo-ing around SF and self-driving home on Tesla FSD like it's normal. Nobody there thinks any of this is remarkable; they already live in the future.
NVIDIA spends nearly twice as much on R&D as every listed company in India combined. Silicon Motion, the world's leading maker of NAND flash controllers and around since 1995, ploughs 29.7% of revenue back into R&D. Micron runs 10.2%, NVIDIA 9.9%, on revenue bases that dwarf anything we have. India Inc? 0.85% of turnover, and half our listed companies report zero R&D at all.
The easy move is to lambast our promoters and the dhandomaxxing capitalist class, or the foreign MNCs running India as a glorified offshoring unit, or the babus who fund nothing useful. Satisfying. But Wrong. The reason no rational Indian founder pours money into frontier R&D is that there is genuinely no payoff at the end of it. Why?
1. R&D compounds, and compounding punishes laggards. At the edge of science a 1-2% gain is a moat; Intel spent 20+ years performing impossible physics every 24 months because Moore's Law was the business model, and that consistency makes them one of the goated companies of all time even after they got mogged recently. NVIDIA lives the same way today: invent at the limit or cease to exist. If you're 50% behind, no quantum of innovation closes that. You never touch the high end. You stay a mass-market producer of things that already exist. India is precisely there.
2. The supply side is the real thesis, and it's monetary. Two decades of high inflation, high money-printing, high nominal rates. That regime subsidises consumption and taxes patience. R&D is the longest-duration, highest-variance bet on the board; it is the first thing a 8% risk-free rate kills. Frontier R&D only ever gets funded two ways: a psychopathically risk-tolerant capitalist with cheap capital, or a state with Stalin-grade control. The USSR took agrarian peasants to the first man in space in 20 years; China built its own version. India has neither the state capacity, the political will, nor the balance sheet to do that. So nobody does it.
Talent was never the bottleneck. Capital structure was. If you want a SpaceX or a TSMC born here, you need an environment where a conglomerate can deploy $10B and sleep at night: a low-rate regime that makes long-duration investment rational, IP and patent courts that actually function, and policy that doesn't get rewritten every 2-3 years on a minister's whim. Stability is the input. Innovation is the output.
Bay Area versus Bombay, we are several universes apart, and you cannot print your way across that distance; you can only compound your way there, and we've spent years optimising for the opposite. The gap won't be bridged. With luck, it narrows.
CBSE people didn't configure their AWS bucket properly and now we can paginate & enumerate all their media which has 2026 answersheets & question papers. ListObjectsV2 works without any auth and the bucket root is listable too — anyone on the internet can download any scanned booklet — across institutions. Multiple institutions are using the same bucket, insanely insecure.
This is a dopamine loop, and it’s one of the most powerful ones humans have ever encountered.
Every time you prompt an AI and get a useful result back in seconds, your brain gets a hit. Variable-ratio reinforcement, same mechanism as slot machines, except the reward is real: actual output, actual progress, actual leverage on your ideas.
Traditional work follows a delayed-reward structure. You write code for 6 hours, maybe it compiles, maybe you get feedback in a week. The gap between effort and reward is wide enough that motivation decays constantly.
AI compresses that loop to seconds. Effort → reward → effort → reward. Your prefrontal cortex stays engaged because the next payoff is always one prompt away. This is why people describe it as “fun” when they’re actually working 14-hour days. The subjective experience of effort disappears when reward frequency is high enough.
The “harder than ever” part is real too. When your bottleneck shifts from execution to imagination, you run out of excuses to stop. There’s no “waiting on the build” or “blocked by review.” Every idea you have can be tested immediately, which means your brain never gets a natural stopping point.
People who thrive on this are selecting for a specific neurotype: high novelty-seeking, high conscientiousness, tolerance for rapid context-switching. That’s maybe 10-15% of the population.
The other 85% will experience the same tools as overwhelming, not energizing. And that split is going to define the next decade of who captures value from AI and who gets displaced by it.
@Tejasvi_Surya Even a simple approach of building elevated cycling +walking track on metro pillar could reduce the traffic as well as improve overall health. Look at Amsterdam
I bought a Tata Safai accomplished edition in Jan end of 2025. there is an issue regarding the sync switching on and on automatically creating an annoyance to music play. 2 services later at Key motors Bangalore the problem exists
@TataMotors@TataMotors_Cars can you help here
@anilananth@MLStreetTalk Thanks for the wonderful book and interview. Out of the mlst interview one topic that we did not hear from you is a broad definition of intelligence. How would you define it
@svembu@Deepakswami2571 I think what matters really for the future is 2 parts, 1) Skill, 2) Ability to abstract and connect concepts together. Unfortunately, we educate on skills but not on abstraction. More practice on skill leads to abstraction, but one must be made aware on the same
Here's my conversation with Sam Altman (@sama), his 2nd time on the podcast. We talk about the board saga, Elon lawsuit, Ilya, Sora, GPT-5, $7 trillion in compute, open source, and AGI. This was a truly fascinating conversation.
It's here on X in full, and is up on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else. Links in comment.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
1:05 - OpenAI board saga
18:31 - Ilya Sutskever
24:40 - Elon Musk lawsuit
34:32 - Sora
44:23 - GPT-4
55:32 - Memory & privacy
1:02:36 - Q*
1:06:12 - GPT-5
1:09:27 - $7 trillion of compute
1:17:35 - Google and Gemini
1:28:40 - Leap to GPT-5
1:32:24 - AGI
1:50:57 - Aliens
@IndiGo6E@IndiGo6E so without web checkin and boarding pass we cannot use the digiyatra facility which goi has provided. Are you wanting to support goi initiative or not?
@AmericanExpress for India payment you seem to have created theost complicated online process on @billdesk which never works, nice way to take late payment fee
Horrible service on ather we have 2 vehicles but they did not diagnose the problem and solve just washed and sent the scooters back still shaky forks @atherenergy@tarunsmehta