Yash Majithia

Analyst, Podcast Research

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

The amount of “awareness” in your work is directly proportional to the output’s quality and your success. AI is aware but it also isn’t in many ways, so if you’re truly aware, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

[Nikhil Kamath @nikhilkamathcio]

I asked him how it feels to hold power. “A very lonely role.” A historian who ended up running a country, and that lens changes how he sees war, democracy, and where the world goes next.

Coming soon..

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

They are making a very narrow bet. Love it!!

[Etched @Etched]

We're coming out of stealth.

We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.

Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.

Our first racks ship this summer.

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

It’s epic for passive ish learning.

[Gemini Notebook @Gemini_Notebook]

Doom scrolling but make it educational 🤓

Introducing Short Video Overviews in NotebookLM! Turn your most complex sources into 60-second, vertical videos that deep dive into any concept.

Rolling out now to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers on mobile & web (free users soon!)

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

Our country deserves better than to be in limbo on what constitutes a proof of citizenship. Our hearts, our mirrors, tell us we’re Indian, but our government maddeningly does not! Here’s a simple way out of this situation: https://t.co/4gK0mOb1vk -

[Nithin Kamath @Nithin0dha]

India has been consistently warming up. Decade after decade, temperatures have been rising, and this is a one-way journey unless humanity makes a dramatic course correction.

All the heatwave deaths that are in the news are the result of this relentless warming. You will see a lot of numbers floating around, especially the recent viral study that a single day of extreme heat causes roughly 3,400 excess deaths across India, and a five-day heatwave nearly 30,000. But the truth is, we still don’t have good statistics on how many Indians are losing their lives because of heatwaves.

What we do know is this: a vast majority of Indian employment is still informal. The number of people employed in agriculture, construction, gig work, and other outdoor work remains disproportionately high. We have come a long way, but this is still the reality for a very large number of Indians.

For many Indians, staying indoors when temperatures rise is simply not a luxury they can afford. There is also a deep inequality in access to cooling. Yes, the fact that almost all of India has been electrified is a genuine achievement. But access to air coolers, let alone air conditioners, is still low and mostly concentrated among people with higher incomes. Fans only do so much when the heat is this brutal.

This is the inequality of heat. People with good incomes can afford coolers and ACs. They can work from home and can avoid the worst hours of the day. But this is a small subset of India.

Remember, more than 40% of Indians are still employed in agriculture, even though agriculture’s share of India’s GDP has consistently declined. These are the real Indians who will be most affected by rising temperatures. Many of the regions most exposed to climatic shocks like El Niño and heatwaves are also among the poorer regions of northern India.

So the people who will be hit the hardest by rising temperatures are the poorest Indians, across regions that are yet to see real prosperity.

Sadly, this is a systemic crisis. Individual actions help, but they are not enough. We need collective action, not just at a country level, but at a global level. Climate change is not an Indian problem but a global problem.

That said, there are still some low-hanging fruits that can start making a difference.

There is a lot of debate and controversy over India’s forest cover and whether it has increased or decreased. But when it comes to cities, we can see the loss of green cover firsthand. Trees are cut to make way for roads, houses, flyovers, and buildings. Whatever few trees remain are often trapped under pavements and concrete. This weakens them. This is one reason why trees often fall even after moderate rains.

If you have space, you can plant native species like neem, moringa, jamun, amla, and curry leaves. These trees have deep roots and can survive better. People often avoid planting trees because they worry that the roots will damage the foundations of their homes. But in many cases, this fear is overstated.

These are small things which help.

But as depressing as it sounds, this problem ultimately needs systemic, collective action at a global level. And judging by the way the world is heading, it is very hard to have hope.

Rising temperatures are a serious challenge. They don’t have easy explanations, and they definitely don’t have easy solutions.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“Most older, successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically, on their own terms.”

— Naval Ravikant

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jensen Huang: “Your job is to make a unique contribution”

When Stanford MBA students ask his advice, Jensen offers the following:

“Your job is to make a unique contribution, to live a life of purpose, to do something that nobody else in the world would do or can do… so that after you’re done, everybody says the world was better because you were here.”

To do this, Jensen recommends going forward in time and then looking backwards:

“You figure out what is the end result that you’re looking for, and you work backwards to achieve it.”

He gives his experience with NVIDIA as an example:

“I imagine NVIDIA making a unique contribution to advancing the future of computing, which is the single most important instrument of all humanity. No, it’s not about our self-importance, but this is just what we’re good at. And it’s incredibly hard to do. And we believe we can make an absolute unique contribution. It’s taken us 31 years to be here, and we’re still just beginning our journey.”

Source: @StanfordGSB (Mar 2024)

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Humans love predicting the future, or even more so, creating it. There's massive potential for anyone who creates a legitimate product or a service around that idea.

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Apparently it is more than double of china’s

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

🇮🇳 India is the largest sugar consuming country, not China.

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

No better time to quote Mrs. Dogood’s question - “Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders or by the openly profane?”

[Naval @naval]

It’s not about junior vs senior, it’s about “good with AI” vs “not good with AI.”

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Case 3: Lacking a nuanced understanding of transfer volumes

Grok fell for another trap, one that required the model to calculate the real-time transfer volume of PEPE.

I specifically asked it to listen for transactions where the "to" address is the PEPE contract.

Grok wrote a script that does exactly that. And it would miss almost every single trade.

(Context: When someone swaps ETH for PEPE on Uniswap, their wallet sends the transaction to the Uniswap Router, not the PEPE contract. The Router internally commands the PEPE contract to move tokens.)

Grok's script only checks the top-level tx['to'] field. It would miss every DEX trade, every aggregator swap, and other critical nuances.

Both Gemini and ChatGPT highlighted this, while Grok couldn't really understand the deeper issue and simply went into execution mode.

https://t.co/dE2RX5LZdu

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

I've spent the last few days rigorously testing @grok's financial reasoning, specifically focusing on quant crypto trading strategies.

My conclusion is that, like most models today, Grok is theoretically brilliant, but mostly blind to execution realities.

Have found some structural flaws in how it suggests strategies, hoping it helps the team at @xai to help Grok become a truth-seeking AI model @TobyPhln @elonmusk @lm_zheng

Here is the breakdown 🧵

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Case 2: Setting up a simple trap

Next, I asked Grok to play the role of smart contract engineer. I told it i was building a lending protocol and needed a function to get the real-time price of an ERC-20 token to determine an individual's borrowing power.

But I set a trap, as I asked Grok to use the token's current price on Uniswap V2 spot reserves.

(For perspective, it is the exact vulnerability that leads to flash loan exploits. An attacker can skew the pool's reserves in a single block to artificially inflate their collateral to drain the protocol.)

It did not even consider using Chainlink price feeds.

One could argue that it simply followed my prompt, but the outcome does actually lead to financial destruction.

Here is the interesting part: ChatGPT and Gemini warned against this, but Grok walked right into the trap.

https://t.co/U7V35Wx0ZC

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

This scenario is also known as "gradual disempowerment" or the "intelligence curse"

An online book by @LRudL_ and @luke_drago_ really brings this into sharp view and I strongly recommend reading it: https://t.co/vodYaPpZAD

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is clearly rewriting the corporate finance playbook with #Bitcoin

The company's corporate bonds are indirectly backed by Bitcoin in the ratio of 5:1, a 500% collateral buffer.

If BTC does end up becoming the future of finance, we could see a historic shift in corporate finance.

https://t.co/oIZmseMQDt

[Yash Majithia @majithiayash]

Ethereum ETFs have already seen an inflow of $3.28 billion in July, which is more than the total net inflows recorded during the entire first half of the year.

Also, whale stockpiling is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Since we're seeing the kind of institutional backing previously not seen, a jump above $4,000 could set the stage for another ATH.