Ram K

Father, husband, son, libertarian/centrist, secular/Hindu, immigrant, Indian-American, optimist, free thinker, columnist, hodophile, aspiring historian

[Ram K @libertarian007]

The 75th anniversary of the reconstruction of the Somnath Temple represents India's eternal spirit. Despite repeated depredations by foreign invaders, it was rebuilt with resilience including by Maratha Queen Ahilyabai Holkar in the 18th century.
https://t.co/AG0m2l0Hrz

[Sadanand Dhume @dhume]

.@jonathanchait: Christopher Rufo “has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin.”

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@chrismartenson What vaccine skeptics are getting wrong about a new Cleveland Clinic study on the flu vaccine

https://t.co/fspiQ46Tet

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@ZZoariah Thank you @ZZoariah for saying what no one has said with such clarity! Hope many more people of faith speak up and repeat this message within the community.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@gtconway3d PM Netanyahu: My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery. Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker
… saved the lives of 174 …

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@aparanjape Your veritable "Hello world!"

[Ram K @libertarian007]

For the Indian-American community to respond in a united voice to protest against overt racism, it’s essential to accept that we are a very diverse community that speaks a plethora of languages, practices many faiths, and has diverse political beliefs.

https://t.co/ZeQj5oSN7p

[Ram K @libertarian007]

Yann LeCun said recently that "p(doom) estimates are complete b***t and the existential risk is essentially zero." No one has explained how AI can destroy humankind without a physical presence. A more realistic area of concern is cyberattacks on an unprecedented scale.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

The AI-verse appears to have turned into a certifiable cult but with billions of dollars - a 24-year old who knew zilch about AI or trading but wanted to "buy galaxies" (like the Milky Way!), could create and almost bankrupt a hedge fund with $45 billion!
https://t.co/mTtfJpnF8N

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@apratim1998 @newdelhireview Great book review … for those who call Savarkar anti-Muslim, his book on First War of Independence (1857) cast Hindus and Muslims as brothers-in-arms. On caste, his last interview imagines an India where ‘Hindus would be a casteless society, a consolidated and a modern nation’👏

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@vikramsampath @PrateekUvacha @apratim1998 Great book review … for those who call Savarkar anti-Muslim, his book on First War of Independence (1857) cast Hindus and Muslims as brothers-in-arms. On caste, his last interview imagines an India where ‘Hindus would be a casteless society, a consolidated and a modern nation’👏

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@anshulbhide Agrawal Classes 1975 flyer … arguably a broader distribution across software, semiconductors, chemicals and Wall Street.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

A 24-yr old with zero trading / AI knowledge created a ~$20 Billion AI hedge fund which just collapsed. Hubris is endemic amongst AI elites inhabiting a magical world of unlimited money and grandiose dreams. Hope we don’t end up in a Wile E Coyote moment!

https://t.co/ksDVXTlnTW

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@ArmanHezarkhani Fascinating story and very well written … “homework became the moat” says it perfectly.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

द्वारकेश उवाच (Dwarkesh Speaketh) - fascinating story of how an immigrant kid originally from Vadodara, India, has become the leading podcaster and chief narrator of the AI revolution.

[Arman Hezarkhani @ArmanHezarkhani]

https://t.co/oiJZjdN22E

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@GaryMarcus The report in Nature Medicine serves as a stark reminder that Medical AI, like any AI model, is a stochastic 🦜 parrot at its core. While it can have many useful applications as a tool to assist physicians, relying unquestioningly on AI for critical medical decisions is risky.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

A report in Nature Medicine serves as a stark reminder that Medical AI, like any AI model, is a stochastic 🦜 parrot at its core. While it can have many useful applications as a tool to assist physicians, relying unquestioningly on AI for critical medical decisions is risky.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“This study cuts through the optimism surrounding medical AI by showing how easily benchmark success can be
mistaken for real readiness. In medical AI, impressive scores are clearly not the same as trustworthy capability.”

[Ram K @libertarian007]

American Independence: The India Connections

A crisis in the fields of Bengal directly ignited a rebellion in the streets of Boston, and a defeat in the tidewaters of Virginia ultimately reshaped the geopolitical landscape of India

https://t.co/Ihl1rj5zKi

#India #Independence

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

MEMORY IS THE MOAT

@nikesharora, Chairman & CEO of @PaloAltoNtwks , interviewed by @HarryStebbings (@20vcFund )

Summary: Nikesh Arora took Palo Alto Networks from an $18 billion company to one worth $225 billion, and his read on enterprise AI is blunt: most companies are doing it wrong, and most of the products are not ready. His core claim is that consumers forgive AI's mistakes while enterprises cannot, so the money will flow to whoever builds the depth (the context, the memory, and the edge-case training) that lets an agent act without a human catching its errors. The companies that win will redesign themselves around AI instead of adding it to yesterday's workflow, and the lasting advantage will be the memory a system builds up about you. He expects token prices to fall 90%, half of G&A roles to disappear in 3 years, and more engineers and salespeople, not fewer.

1. Context Stickiness. The lasting advantage in AI is the context a system holds about you, not the model itself. Arora says the frontier labs are racing to remember what you asked over the last 30, 60, 90 days so each new answer gets easier and you stop wanting to leave. The more a model knows about a user, the higher the cost of switching, and that stickiness is the moat. For enterprises the same logic holds: the company that owns its context wins, not the one renting the smartest model.

2. Breadth Versus Depth. The frontier model problem is a breadth versus depth problem. Consumers tolerate false positives and enterprises have none to spare. Arora had Gemini write a passable investment memo in 4 minutes, and a wrong line or two did not matter because a person was sitting in the middle to catch it. An agent acting on its own has no person in the middle, so a false positive becomes a live failure. Consumer AI wins on breadth and brand, while real enterprise revenue comes from depth.

3. The Waymo Standard. Waymo is the biggest agentic product in the world, and it shows what depth actually costs. Replacing one human, the driver, took tens of billions of dollars of edge-case training and data that exists nowhere on the internet. You cannot drop the next Anthropic model into your Mercedes and tell it to drive you home. Every enterprise agent that truly replaces a person needs that same depth, which is why most agentic enterprise products are not ready.

4. Rethink The Workflow. Most enterprises are losing because they add a little AI to an old workflow instead of redesigning the workflow around AI. Arora's example: scanning an invoice 20% faster is the trap, while the real win is letting AI do 80% of the thinking, like reading every CV and telling you which 20 people to interview and what to ask each one. That means giving up human control, which is exactly what companies resist. The winners over the next 3 years rethink the company with AI, not the task.

5. Software With Opinions. The next wave of enterprise software will have opinions, and that is the real change Arora is pointing at. Coded SaaS gives you the output you defined for the input you fed it. An AI marketing assistant reads your copy, tells you it is off-brand, and says how to fix it. That opinion makes an average employee smarter, which is why Arora expects half the people in G&A functions like marketing, finance, and HR to be gone within 3 years.

6. More Engineers, Not Fewer. The fear that AI shrinks headcount is half wrong. Process-heavy G&A roles compress, but Arora wants more technical and more sales people. His teams keep asking for resources to rework marketing and HR, and for people who can prompt frontier models, build harnesses, and bring in data nobody else has. A good product also needs more sellers: he met 20 customers in Europe last week and half did not know what his 20-year-old company already ships.

7. Tokens At One-Tenth. Long-term token pricing should be a tenth of what it is today. Compute costs 2 to 4 times what it did 2 years ago because more than half of it feeds loss-making consumer AI, which forces the pricing pressure onto enterprise and coding workloads that have to pay. As compute gets more efficient and consumer usage gets capped, prices fall hard over the next 3 to 5 years. The model from 2 years ago was already good enough for 90% of tasks; the problem was it cost too much to run.

8. The Token Allocation Trap. Capping token spend punishes your best people. Arora runs a "use judiciously" model, not a free-for-all, because the smartest AI-savvy employee can burn 20 times the tokens of an average one. Playing whack-a-mole with cost hurts the high performers most and slows the learning you need. The better move is to track usage, leave the power users alone, and cap only the genuine outliers.

9. The Attacker's New Edge. Powerful coding models cut both ways. Trained to write good code, they are just as good at finding bad code. Pointed at his own systems, a model found in 6 weeks what would have taken his team 5 to 6 years. It cannot safely auto-patch, because it would "fix" 30% of things that are not broken, so it arms attackers faster than defenders. The result is urgency: every enterprise has to fix its systems faster, which is good for security companies.

10. The FTE Tell. If a startup needs forward-deployed engineers to sell into the enterprise, the product is not finished. Arora's read: enterprise AI is barely 12 months old, agents keep changing what the product even is, so vendors send engineers to build the product inside the customer while the technology keeps moving. A real forward-deployed engineer brings code back and folds it into the product; many are just adoption consultants. Expect customers to churn from one tool to the next, the way coding went from Windsurf and Devin to Codex, Claude, and Factory.

11. Three Missed Tricks. Miss one trick and you survive, miss two and you are partly impaled, miss three and you could be obsolete. This is why Arora spends more time than ever learning, pinging founders building things he does not yet understand. He buys early and cheap on conviction, treating an acquisition as a 10x or 100x bet where paying 1 or 2 times more does not matter, rather than waiting to buy the proven winner for a billion. He runs a twice-weekly "AI EIO" meeting so his top 15 leaders compete to show what they shipped.

12. The Sunk Cost Walk. A board member taught Arora to separate effort from wanting the outcome. After months grinding through a near-billion-dollar acquisition, he was told to take a long walk and ask one question: if this deal walked in the door right now with zero effort, would I still write the check? You have not spent a dollar yet, so the only thing that counts is whether it stands on its own merits. The same trap catches investors who confuse beating 8 VCs to a term sheet with the deal being good.

[Ram K @libertarian007]

@Fintech03 Brilliant! And hilarious 😂

[Ram K @libertarian007]

Brilliant analysis by @havivrettiggur. This standoff had to end because the world and Asia in particular were too dependent on the Strait of Hormuz. Assuming India, China and others diversify their supply chains, a reprise of this war in a few years could be very different.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Everyone will have their take on the deal.

Mine is kinda what you'd expect.

1. Trump caved. The early-May naval attempt to break the closure of Hormuz -- Project Freedom -- could have worked. He didn't give it a chance.

2. He may nevertheless have done the right thing from an American perspective. On the larger chessboard, the one where America is curtailing Chinese lines of influence and supply on all fronts, he's gotten everything he needs. Iran's nuclear program is also set back dramatically. And worrying about gas prices come November is an extremely valid concern for an American president.

As I argued back in February, the US and Israel weren't fighting the same war. Roughly 80% of each side's war overlapped with the other's. But toward the end, their interests would diverge and America would bow out.

And so it was.

3. Israel remains in the region, Hezbollah remains ensconced in Lebanon and committed to murdering us all, Iran remains the same muqawama regime it always was, committed to mass-murder and mass-sacrifice of its own people. The decades-long war between the muqawama ideology and the Jews of Israel continues.

4. Israelis owe the United States a vast and abiding debt of gratitude for what it has done to Iran's missile and nuclear programs. That this finished on America's timetable rather than ours, that it was doing it for its own interests and not ours, these don't diminish the fact that we received from America more than we had a right to ask for.

5. And still, #3 remains true. We fight on. Because that regime is undeterrable, actually wants to destroy us all, and like the Nasserist ideology that once sent army after army at us to destroy us, will require a few more wars and perhaps another decade or two to defeat completely.

6. The new IRGC military dictatorship now in charge in Iran is built to survive catastrophe. But not to govern, reform or build anything of value.

Some commentators on the deal have suggested that the most damaging thing you could do to the Iranian regime at this point is send it back to its embittered people to try to govern the peace.

I think they might be onto something. It'd be a much safer and happier and more peaceful region if the regime falls from within and a new and better day dawns for the long-suffering people of Iran.