Prateek Gautam

Product @Myntra for living | Co-founder @ InLogg | #IIT Guwahati | Biz-Tech Geek | Longform devotee | #Drummer | Ardent #Music Buff | Umm....I was lying !

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

Time-lapse video of #BangaloreRains

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
—Douglas Adams

[Google Antigravity @antigravity]

Antigravity's first Google I/O. Hold on to your keyboards.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

If you're an AI startup in India, renting processing power from the government to train your model costs about $0.7 per hour. The same hardware on Amazon Web Services costs $3.7. On Microsoft Azure, $6.6. The Indian government is subsidizing AI infrastructure at rates that would make most Western startups do a double-take.

I read all 26 pages of the white paper this tweet links to. The numbers inside are wild.

The IndiaAI Mission has a budget of about $1.2 billion over five years, approved in March 2024. Almost half of that, roughly $500 million, goes straight to building the processing power AI companies need to train their models. The original plan was to deploy 10,000 processors. By December 2025, they had 38,000 running. 3.8x what they promised.

A government open call in January 2025 pulled 506 proposals. The four startups picked first were Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, and Gan AI. Eight more were added by September. India now has 12 separate teams building AI models, ranging from tiny ones for basic chatbots to massive ones rivaling those from the US and China. They cover language, voice, vision, medical diagnosis, material science, and even brain-computer interfaces.

The one I keep coming back to is Sarvam AI. They raised $41 million from Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. In May 2025, they released a model built on top of a French AI system (Mistral Small) and customized for Indian languages. It got roasted online. Critics said it was a foreign model in Indian clothing. So they went back and built Sarvam-105B completely from scratch, using Indian hardware under the government mission. It outperformed China's DeepSeek-R1 on certain tests, even though it was a model six times larger. Both were released for anyone to download and use in March 2026.

There's something else buried in the paper I haven't seen another country try at this scale. India is building a copyright system specifically for AI training data. Under a December 2025 government proposal, AI companies can train their models on any copyrighted content they can legally access, books, articles, music, anything. Creators cannot say no. But the moment an AI product makes money, royalties are collected by a centralized government body and distributed back to creators. Singapore allows AI companies to use content without payment. China requires strict consent before training. India is trying a middle path, and publishers are already calling it forced participation.

Stanford's AI Vibrancy Index, which measures a country's overall AI strength across research, talent, infrastructure, and investment, ranked India third globally in 2025. Up from seventh in 2023. But the actual scores tell you how far the gap still is: US at 79, China at 37, India at 22. And India's $1.2 billion budget sits next to China's $47.5 billion semiconductor fund and Saudi Arabia's $100 billion Project Transcendence.

India is currently spending 40x less than the frontrunners. This white paper is the most detailed public bet yet that smart infrastructure design can close that gap.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

My dear young person,

Don’t succumb to mediocrity. There’s enough of it going around. Aspire for craftsmanship, as that is what leads to joy and beauty.

The world needs more people who’re proud of what they make, and less of those who couldn’t care less.

[Tiago Forte @fortelabs]

Wait, so the founder of Anthropic is "Amodei," as in "loves god"?

And he leads Anthropic, meaning "human-centered," which is being used in military strikes?

And the creator of ChatGPT is "Altman," as in "an alternative to humans"?

And he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed?

And then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a company that promised to do no evil?

And the whole global AI arms race is being driven by people who claimed to be worried about AGI taking over the world?

Either the universe is an extremely cliché writer, or has a brilliant sense of humor

[mitsuri @0xmitsurii]

How was the show Silicon Valley so ahead of its time?

[Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar]

one day you'll resolve git merges by hand for the last time without knowing it

[Snehil Saluja @mrsnhl]

A 1 crore earning techie's life has no value in Bengaluru.

And if you're not earning that much? Your life has even less.

My sister and her friend were driving home in my car. They stopped at a red light - the logical thing anyone does. A drunk driver in a mini-truck didn't feel the need to stop. He slammed into them instead.

I know he was drunk. She knows it. The highway police knows it. The truck owner knows it.

No arrest was made.

The truck driver never showed up at the station. The owner never showed up. Nobody cared. My sister and her friend - both injured, both terrified - kept going back to the station, back to the accident site, explaining what happened over and over, just trying to get a report filed.

I was in the US. All I could do was talk to them on calls, helpless.

Here's what the police told them:
"If nobody died, an FIR doesn't make sense."
"Just claim first party insurance."
"Third party insurance doesn't pay much anyway."

And then, quietly, one officer pulled them aside and told the truth: "These truck mafia bribe us. Nothing will happen."

Nothing happened.

The truck was KA04 AE6550. The police themselves said if they'd been on a two-wheeler, both would be dead.

We had 100% insurance from Reliance. Claim rejected. Reason? "Misrepresentation of facts." These two, even while injured, kept showing up to represent the facts. Reliance still found a way to deny them.

The law says if someone hits you from behind, the person behind is at fault. It was a red light. How does a truck driver not see that?

Trust me, this isn't about money. I'll manage the repairs and the medical bills. I have savings. And I have a decent credit score; I'll take a personal loan if I have to. That's not the point.

The point is this: my sister is afraid now. Afraid that anything can happen to her at any moment and there's no one - no system, no law, no institution - that will protect her.

But how do I tell her the world is supposed to be fair? How do I tell her to trust the system? How do I explain that the drunk driver walks free, the truck owner was never questioned, and the police pocketed their bribe and closed the file?

I can't say to any official, "What if this was your daughter? Your sister?" Because their daughters travel in cars with security escorts. They will never know what it feels like to be ordinary and unprotected.

So I'm saying it to you, an ordinary reader.

You're on the road. You stop at a red light. A drunk driver in a truck rear-ends your car. Your loved one is inside, terrified.

And then you learn: there is no recourse. None.

The truck owner pays off the cops. The insurance company rejects your claim. The system shrugs.

This is Bengaluru in 2025. This is India in 2025. This is what your life is worth here.

One more thing. The friend in the car? He's one of the smartest people I know. close to top 100 rank in IIT-JEE. AI engineer and one of the biggest data companies. At 23, he is valuable to be paid more annually than the cost of five such trucks, that too, in India. He's patriotic. He pays his taxes. He stays in India even though he constantly gets offers to move to the US.

This is the confidence our system gives to someone who is clearly an asset to this country. All this unfairness - for a drunk truck driver.

@blrcitytraffic @BlrCityPolice - tell me. I've always avoided raising fingers publicly. But what else can I do?

[LINKIN PARK @linkinpark]

Brigade Innovation Garden. Bengaluru, India. January 23rd.

[loaf @lordOfAFew]

This is a moment in time.

Openai will be close behind. Followed by Google.

Microsoft will do something similar and distribute to billions instantaneously.

Apple will incorporate a similar technique

And like that the entire world economy will shift over 12 months.

The promise of what has been told to you for the past 3 years is here - and it’s this ergonomics. Agents on your Mac/pc, operating on files like how you work.

After this comes billions of agent transactions accelerating information transfer in the purest form of capitalism, accelerating civilisation.

What a time to be alive. Stop scrolling, start building the future.

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

@blore_traffic Silk board to KR Puram traffic estimate seems off. Many sections are showing deep red on Google Maps.

[Siddharth @sidsimharaju]

My 2025 coffee recap

I visited 50+ coffee shops and cafés this year.
These are my personal favorites from the places I visited.*

Best pour overs:
1. Ground up
2. Benki
3. Kappu + Nerlu (Indiranagar)

Best milk-based coffee:
1. Still coffee
2. Kahale (Filter)
3. Latte & Co

Best place to work:
1. Paper & Pie (Indirangar)
2. Blue Tokai (Kora)
3. Beanlore (HSR)

Best ambience:
1. Subko Craftery
2. Mara (HSR)
3. Araku (Indiranagar)

Best cold brew:
1. Bonomi
2. Goldrush
3. Korebi Coffee

*Based purely on my experience and the places I visited.

[Bangalore Traffic Tracker @blore_traffic]

Traffic Status on ORR:
KR Puram Metro Station-->Silk Board Junction: 31mins. -6%⬇️ less than normal.
Silk Board Junction-->KR Puram Metro Station: 32mins. -3%⬇️ less than normal.

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

Tilak Varma - you beauty! What a memorable match finishing inning.
And the winning 4 from Rinku. 😍
#INDvsPAK #AsiaCupFinal

[Nikunj Kothari @nikunj]

In today's 996 chest-thumping culture, don't forget about the quiet ones keeping your company together..

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

Only if revenue/KM could be used to prioritise public infrastructure spends.

[Kiran Kumar S @KiranKS]

You know how important Bengaluru's Outer Ring Road IT corridor is, for India's economy?

KR Puram Metro to Silk Board.
19 km.
500+ IT companies.
9,50,000 high paying jobs.
₹1,50,000,00,00,000 IT exports per year!

State and Central govts MUST help with infrastructure!

Look at it from another angle. Every kilometre here earns India a billion Dollars in precious foreign exchange!! I don't know of any other 15-20 km road in India that is so vital for India's GDP. The least the governments can do is fast track Metro, provide arterial road connections to avoid jams, provide a chopper service from the airport, prevent flooding, give world class bus service that is timely and give tax rebates for car pooling.

I feel this specific road deserves ten times the attention it gets.

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

After a long time, reached office in 20 mins for a 12km commute on ORR via Silk Board.

[Bangalore Traffic Tracker @blore_traffic]

Traffic Status on ORR:
KR Puram Metro Station-->Silk Board Junction: 26mins. -20%⬇️ less than normal.
Silk Board Junction-->KR Puram Metro Station: 27mins. -18%⬇️ less than normal.

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

@spotifyindia Ten - Pearl Jam
Nevermind - Nirvana
Bas Ek Pal - Mithoon
Hybrid Theory - Linkin Park
Aadat - Jal The Band
Baran - Parvaaz
Born to Die - Lana Del Rey
Blinding White Noise - Skyharbor
Shalimar - Achint

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

Commute heavy corridors will show early PMF for efficient public transport. Expect blue line to do even better.

[Bangalore real estate @Bangalorereal1]

Mega numbers for yellow line Day 1.

Till 9 p.m., the Yellow Line had already carried more than 52,600 passengers — nearly double the initial projection of 25,000 to 30,000.

Note: Only 3 train sets are operating at this moment. This line may just become one of the most significant and important lines in the current operational network of Namma metro once more train sets are added though this year.

@Suchithkidiyoor

[Prateek Gautam @pkgnext]

@dorje1974 The vertical scale seems to be heavily exaggerated compared to the scale of distances on the horizontal surface.