Kunal Kashyap

Read. Learn. Apply. Repeat

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Pain is certain. Suffering is optional.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Our man is confusing consumption with investment.

The 1.39 Cr is just the buy-in. The dividends aren’t paid in cash.

[Sumit @beingsumit01]

Now Bro explain why he don't want kids

Bro say🎙️: Why I spend 1.39 Cr 🤯

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Most cogent pro-gun arguments I’ve read. The state naturally seeks a monopoly on violence. An armed citizenry with a sanctioned right to challenge that monopoly; serves as a daily reminder that power ultimately resides with the people — surest safeguard for democracy

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

[Pawan @PawanKChandana]

As everything slowly begins to sink-in, and after finally getting some sleep last night, I wanted to share a small personal note…✍️

The first call I made after Vikram-1 successfully reached orbit was to my Dad.

He is the man who made my journey possible—with dreams for me far bigger than the ones I had for myself, and by simply never giving up on me.

Until my 8th standard, I was a bad student. I scored 51 marks in Maths and even failed another subject. Back then, I could never have imagined that I would one day make it to an IIT—or have the privilege of contributing to India’s first privately developed rocket reaching orbit, making India only the third country in the world to achieve this.

When I called him after the launch, he just cried.

And cried.

He couldn’t speak a single word.

But I understood every word he couldn’t say.

I managed to hold back my tears when Vikram-1 reached orbit. But somehow, writing this, I can’t.

Thank you, Dad. ❤️

And a big shout-out to every dad who dreams big for their children—and never gives up on them. 🙏

P.S. A picture with Dad from one of my birthdays after starting @SkyrootA.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Is it just me or does it seem like claude wrote this thread ?

[Vinodsrinivasan @vinodsrinivasan]

Indian banks are pitching NRIs in the US and Singapore a “risk free” way to multiply FCNR deposit returns.

You put in $1 million. The bank lends you $9 to 19 million more.

One clause in the loan document changes the entire math. A thread.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Same learning. CEOs are good to get intros and right connection. Not a replacement for the guy who holds the key.

[Sandeep Mall @SandeepMall]

I know many CEOs who lead major banks and corporations. Whenever I try to bypass the system by starting at the top, the work didn’t happen.
If you want to get the work done, approach the person doing the work. When you force a decision from above, you bruise their ego, and they create more hurdles. The person on the ground holds the key. Respect the protocol.

[Niket Raj Dwivedi @niketrajdwivedi]

Horn OK Please is written on the backs of trucks in India.

During World War 2, Britishers were sending India’s diesel to Europe. This caused a shortage naturally and India switched to Kerosene as fuel to run trucks.

Kerosene is volatile and trucks would blast in accidents and collisions.

So they started writing “HORN PLEASE ON KEROSENE”.

On Kerosine eventually became “OK” and got placed between Horn Please.

That’s how we got Horn OK Please.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Very interesting. Sales AI agent meet Procurement AI Agent. Now go negotiate!

It’s a problem at a newer layer of abstraction for you and me to solve - what do I program so my agent always wins over your agent.

[Vladimir Keil @askvladi]

Announcing Lio's $30M Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz!

Procurement still operates like an administrative back-office function: rigid software, manual workflows and endless headcount. Enterprises spend over $180 billion annually on procurement talent and roughly $10 billion on procurement software, yet the problem persists. More software hasn't solved it. More hiring won't either.

Introducing @Lio_Technology (formerly askLio) the world's first multi-agent system for procurement. Our virtual workforce is already deployed at some of the world's largest enterprises, taking over the manual work that buries buyers, shared service centers, and BPOs today. But Lio doesn't just do the same job - it does work that was never humanly possible: renegotiating every contract, sourcing across every category, and preparing as well as analyzing every negotiation, all at once.

Lio's AI agents operate on top of existing procurement software and ERPs - no rip-and-replace - autonomously executing workflows end to end.
The results speak for themselves:

-   95% adoption rate
-   85% reduction in manual work
-   10% incremental savings
-   100% customer retention

Lio isn't a dashboard or a copilot. It's the execution layer for enterprise procurement. As one Head of Procurement put it:
"Lio is a cheaper, more scalable, and faster-to-onboard alternative to outsourcing."

Lio’s agents are already managing billions of dollars in enterprise spend across dozens of Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies – from manufacturers to reinsurers to huge industrial conglomerates.

This raise accelerates our US expansion and the growth of our agent ecosystem as we build the infrastructure powering AI-driven procurement.

A huge thank you to our incredible team, customers, and advisors. Proud to have outstanding investors on board: the round was led by @a16z - special thanks to @seema_amble - with participation from SV Angel, @HarryStebbings, @ycombinator, and a group of leading procurement executives and successful founders.

Additional thanks to @BKRoberts, @arampell, @jamdac, @zephratic and @t_blom.

Whether as an enterprise partner or a new team member — join our mission now!

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

I thought I was the only one

[Sherry @SchrodingrsBrat]

Sometimes I get a dream that’s the sequel of a dream from 5 years ago

[Jonathan Gorard @getjonwithit]

Calling c the "speed of light" completely misses the point. Rather, c is the "spacetime exchange rate": how many units of space you can exchange for one unit of time.

In actuality, everything travels at the "speed of light", just not necessarily through space alone... (1/4)

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

I have to say, this is a phenomenal speech. To talk about science, space and future of humanity in *this* foreground. He has reminded everyone that is we are the leaders of this world. Jai Hind !

[Hindustan Times @htTweets]

#WATCH | PM Modi made his first public speech after the Indian Armed Forces attacked Pakistan in the early hours of May 7 to avenge the Pahalgam terror attack.

https://t.co/6u0OUCSVQG

#OperationSindoor

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

How are your children using AI?

(Serious replies only, retweet for reach)

[Alok Jain ⚡ @WeekendInvestng]

No IT upto 12L
Suddenly everybody shall be having 1L per month income.

[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

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

The 21st century is almost one quarter over and it’s still easier to find information online than on your own computer.

[Nikolay Kukushkin @niko_kukushkin]

We think that all memory is stored in the brain. But our study published today in @NatureComms shows that all cells—even kidney cells—can count, detect patterns, store memories, and do so similarly to brain cells. My first (co)corresponding author paper!🧵https://t.co/biaahYiPRW

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

For everyone who said, calculus/coordinate geometry is not useful in real life :)

Also @vidyamadhavan2 - calculus/coordinate geometry is still technically high school math. No ?

[Vidya Madhavan 😶‍🌫️ @vidyamadhavan2]

@K2_181 High school math doesn’t work in EV, as 80% charging doesn’t equal 80% of the distance, given charging and discharging are exponential functions and not a linear ones.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

Freedom is the foundation of well being. Well said.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Controlling parenting isn't good for kids. It puts their well-being at risk.

238 studies, 38 countries, 126k ppl: Kids with controlling parents have higher rates of depression and anxiety. Kids with autonomy-supportive parents are happier.

Freedom is a foundation of well-being.

[Kunal Kashyap @lessknownkunal]

@miten Very well articulated.

The real difficultly in building a resilient business is: it means leaving opportunities on the table when the times ‘seem’ good. It’s just so tempting especially for people who ambitious.

[Aviral Bhatnagar @aviralbhat]

Limiting education to the narrow pursuit of making money is the biggest disservice you can do to yourself