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[Physics Memes @ThePhysicsMemes]

Pure math is cool #test

[Mujahid مجاہد मुजाहिद @mujahidbaaz]

Today, a handful of digital landlords use algorithms to dictate our reality, while closed AI threatens to chnge the ways we connect. We cn either let gatekeepers continue to consolidate their power or we cn reclaim the open source spirit tht built the web. https://t.co/LoMwsm8yky

[Mohit Chauhan @mohitlaws]

Environmental activist and former IIT professor G. D. Agrawal died after a 111-day hunger strike in 2018, demanding stronger legal protection for the Ganga River.

Neither the media covered his protest nor did the government listen to him.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours.

This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12.

381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find.

India sent five kids.

All five came back with gold.

Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad.

We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :)

That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them.

Now here is what the exam actually was.

Two papers. Each five hours long.

The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs.

The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids.

That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer.

Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours.

HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too.

Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO.

Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze.

In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver.

Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade.

Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018.

So who built this.

The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy.

They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane.

The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai.

The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri.

Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra.

This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own.

The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast.

That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world.

But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think.

That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years.

So yes, be proud. Loudly.

HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD.

But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India.

I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have.

But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying.

Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.

[Amitav Ghosh @GhoshAmitav]

"...a global order which has promoted mass consumption as the universal benchmark of human progress now also demands environmental restraint from those who have consumed the least."
https://t.co/W5dkQKSZWV

[Prashant Bhushan @pbhushan1]

Modi ji ne Gujarat model ka danka baja dia hai

[sanjoy ghose @advsanjoy]

Bharat ek khoj-pre Amritkaal India had an appetite for nuance. See this short clip where the brilliant Irfan Khan explains the Muslim dilemma which ultimately led to Partition!

[Sulaiman Ahmed @ShaykhSulaiman]

JUST IN: Egypt Manager Hossam Hassan:

"We were better, but football is unfair. Maybe they want to keep the world champion and Messi going in the World Cup for marketing purposes."

“I’ll speak my mind regardless of the consequences. This match was clearly rigged, and the whole world saw it.

And one more thing if they want Argentina to win so badly, why invite everyone else to compete?”

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

During a Bloomberg interview, Yann LeCun (@ylecun ) explains why LLMs are limited in terms of real-world intelligence during a Bloomberg interview.

"Language is a very approximate, reduced, quantized, and simplified description of the world, and LLMs can only deal with discrete sequences of symbols. The world is much more complicated than language.

The biggest LLMs are pre-trained on the totality of all the publicly available text on the internet. That’s about 20 trillion words, or 30 trillion tokens.

A token is about 3 bytes. So total 10¹⁴ bytes of text.

This is the amount of data a four-year-old has seen through vision during four years. Now, the text, though, would take 400,000 years to read?

So, there is enormously more data from sensory input, like vision, touch, and everything else, than there could ever be through language."

A child does not need 400,000 years of reading to understand cups, doors, balance, faces, falls, or heat, because the body is already collecting dense feedback from vision, touch, motion, and consequence.

Text strips most of that away.

It turns a living scene into symbols, then asks the model to infer the missing world from traces left by people describing it.

That is why an LLM can sound fluent about physics and still have no native sense of how fragile glass feels in a hand.

Moravec’s paradox names this reversal: the things humans find intellectual can be easier for machines than the things toddlers do without applause.

The hard part is not producing an answer, but building a model of the world that survives contact with weight, friction, surprise, and failure.

----

Link to the full video on Bloomberg's site. Link in comment.

[barkha dutt @BDUTT]

This is beyond words

[Uncle Ade 👑 @Uncle_Ade77]

"We didn't lose to Portugal, we lost to biased refereeing....I have played football all my life and never have I imagined a strand of hair touching the ball could determine if a team stays in the world cup or not"

- Luka Modric

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Larry Page (Google's founding CEO) knew it back in 2007

"When AI happens, it's going to be a lot of computation and not so much clever Blackboard, whiteboard kind of stuff, clever algorithms, but just a lot of computation.

My theory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it's about 600 megabytes compressed, so it's smaller than any modern operating system, smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system. "

---

From "Google TechTalks" YT channel (link in comment)

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.

Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now:

1) that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities

2) that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns

Why are Palantir specifically starting to be vocal about this?

First off, major middle-powers, even US “allies”, are one by one showing them the door. In June, France announced that the DGSI - its domestic intelligence agency, which had relied on Palantir since the 2015 Paris attacks - would replace it with French firm ChapsVision, with Prime Minister Lecornu explaining (https://t.co/SLhEGprBZC) that France “cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere” and shouldn't depend on the goodwill of companies “capable of turning off the tap.”

Germany moved even earlier: its domestic intelligence service, the BfV, also selected ChapsVision over Palantir (https://t.co/pDZVj4SYUY), and the German military has said it will no longer use Palantir at all. Then, just this week, Spain instructed state-controlled companies - including strategic firms like Telefónica, Indra and Navantia - to avoid signing any new contracts with Palantir (https://t.co/0ik4UAFrT7).

Even in the UK, Washington's most loyal vassal, the NHS's £330 million data contract with Palantir is under review following parliamentary pressure (https://t.co/uJl6g4BMsW), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police.

Palantir making a lot of noise around them caring about sovereignty makes a lot of sense: it's damage control since they keep being told they're a sovereignty risk.

I doubt it will work - because it's true: they are a sovereignty risk - but the fact that they feel the need to be vocal around this tells you where the wind is blowing: they're not shaping the narrative, they're reacting to one they're losing.

What they're saying against closed-source AI (basically a broadside attack on OpenAI and Anthropic), is again highly self-serving. Palantir's sudden love of open-weight AI models conveniently coincides with them launching 2 days before a partnership with Nvidia to sell exactly that: open models models (NVIDIA's Nemotron) in sovereign environments.

So it's essentially a product launch.

It doesn't make what they're saying wrong: it is factual that the value proposition of closed-source AI labs looks increasingly unsustainable. I mean: you're paying 10X the price of Chinese open-source AI models for something that's not really better (or just marginally) and on top of that you have zero control over your data, or the models themselves.

When Palantir says that "the architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha," they're right. I'd add that this also means you shouldn't trust Palantir either with that "tribal knowledge"... they obviously left this part out 😉

When you take a step back, these two things have major implications on many other US companies.

SpaceX - which just went public at the largest IPO valuation in history - is one clear example as I describe in my latest article on the new space race with China (https://t.co/JK3ELAyEVO).

If countries like France concluded with Palantir that they couldn't depend on a company “capable of turning off the tap” when it’s merely analyzing their data, what should they conclude about a company that aims to literally control their entire connectivity - at one man's whim, from space?

What percentage of SpaceX's crazy market cap is based on the assumption that foreign governments will not do to Starlink what they're currently doing to Palantir?

And SpaceX - or Palantir - aren't alone: a significant proportion of the top US tech giants, who rose in a world where no one questioned American technological hegemony, now face an environment that's much less conducive to the kind of lock-in their business models - and valuations - depend on.

When you pair this with the fact that it increasingly looks like the US made a wrong bet with closed-source AI - an extremely expensive wrong bet - the picture that emerges is of a country that bet its economic future on two things - proprietary AI and captive allies - and is losing both at the same time.

And to compound the problem, it doesn't help that the official narrative of the US government - via the voice of Jacob Helberg, the Under-Secretary of State (https://t.co/Z1rotPl9Ee) - is to be vocally opposed to "AI Sovereignty": essentially telling everyone "you know what, your worst fears are real, our tech companies are really out to undermine your sovereignty."

Read Helberg's post (the one I linked) and put yourself in the shoes of - say - a European or Asian leader and ask yourself how you'd react to being told that building your own AI capabilities is "marching in perfect formation into the past," that your pursuit of sovereignty is really just "synchronized mediocrity," and that your only path to the future runs through American technology.

If it was me in a position of power, I'd read this as a massive wakeup call: when another country's official position is that your sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it.

So yes, it looks like - unexpectedly - Palantir, of all companies, is being quite the canary in the big tech mine. Yes they obviously do this for self-serving and cynical purpose, and yes they're of course also very much part of the problem and not the solution. But it doesn't make them wrong: sometimes it takes a vulture to tell you something is dying.

[Megatron @Megatron_ron]

🇺🇸🇮🇱Palantir CEO Alex Karp:

“I am the most publicly supportive CEO of Israel, and that's true.

I think Israel is on the side of good.”

[Dr. Ruchika Sharma @tishasaroyan]

India's collective conscience is so déad that a bright mind has been in jail without trial, without bail for 6 years now, yet there has been very little outrage over this thoroughly illegal incarceration. What a morally vacuous society! https://t.co/t4QgKXSnkz

[Seyed Abbas Araghchi @araghchi]

"Mission Accomplished," Mr. Mullin.

You also accomplished something else: proving to the world that you have no business hosting an international tournament. Your conduct has been a masterclass for how to squander the dignity that comes with being a host.

[RichaChadha @RichaChadha]

Air conditioning will not prevent climate change, but will exacerbate it.
ACs can cool you briefly, if you have money and no power cuts.
But bechara AC bhi jal jayega , jalega aur jalayega bhi. So severe is the heat!

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, i want to say, we will ALL need to become climate activists in this country, sooner than later.

[Restitutor Orientis 🇱🇮 @restitutorII]

Dans le sud de l'Iran, où les températures peuvent atteindre 50°C à l'ombre, les habitants utilisent depuis plus de 2 000 ans un système d'architecture bioclimatique: les badgirs, ou tours à vent. Très répandues dans les régions désertiques du pays, notamment autour de la ville de Yazd, ces structures constituent un véritable système de climatisation naturelle.

Leur fonctionnement est ingénieux: la tour capte le vent en hauteur et l'achemine à l'intérieur du bâtiment. L'air traverse souvent un bassin ou un réservoir d'eau souterrain, ce qui le refroidit davantage par évaporation. En parallèle, l'air chaud est évacué par d'autres ouvertures grâce à l'effet de cheminée.

Grâce à ce procédé entièrement passif, l'intérieur des habitations peut rester étonnamment frais, même lorsque la température extérieure dépasse 45°C, et ce sans recourir à la moindre source d'électricité.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Ahmad @TheAhmadOsman]

Eric, thank you for making the case for Opensource AI so clear