Sourav

Building AI Products @ genAI centre of excellence |
Long form - Substack

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Some of the biggest team issues come from having people who are the wrong stage fit. Eg engineers who focus on optimization when you still need product market fit or not recognizing when you do have fit and building something shiny and new instead of chasing it.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced that the most underrated trait in a romantic partner is that they bring peace into your life. Days are filled with enough chaos and uncertainty. Being able to come home to someone who defaults to emotional consistency, who creates a peace, is massively underrated.

[Vatsal Sanghvi @vatsal_sanghvi]

i am so tired of paying for ai subs that i just spent $150 on notanothersub. ai

will curate free alternatives to popular ai tools

if you are using a good free alternative to a popular LLM/ai tool - pls drop in comments below

lets not go bankrupt with paying 100 x $29/mo

[Ben Thompson @benthompson]

I really enjoyed the one interview I did with him. I am sad it will only ever be one. I’ve made it free to read.

https://t.co/V0sXKvjxf5

[Sourav @souravOs]

@evanlapointe Which book is just opposite (underrated)? @evanlapointe

[Sourav @souravOs]

@zomato @zomatocare

[Sourav @souravOs]

@zomato wtf the delivery person couldn't find me and ate the birthday cake that I ordered

[Evan LaPointe @evanlapointe]

Some helpful ideas for ambitious people to ponder:

Systems thinking is the only way to shift your mind from hacks, tips, and tactics to strategies.

And if you aren’t a strategist, people can’t *actually* trust you, because they have good reason to believe that, in solving one problem, you’ll create another.

If you are an ambitious person, this is one of the most valuable things to understand early.

Early in your career, you’ll be surrounded by tactical problem solvers appearing to win (this seeming reward is why early and middle career people get caught up in this thinking), but as tactical thinkers hit the ceilings their mentality installs, you, instead, will have infinite headroom, simply because people see that you think exceedingly well.

This advice will not apply if you do not work at a top-tier company. In fact, you’ll need to be careful with clear thinking around unclear thinkers (you can still think well, but you will need 10x communication skills). But if you want to be at the top of the game, you cannot be seen regularly missing the forest for the trees. The earlier you practice this, the better.

Most people these days are talking about tactics. And, unfortunately, people are actively discouraging clearer systems thinking. This is why we, and businesses, are getting dumber.

Get smarter.

[Vishal Sikka @vsikka]

Hello World!

I'm excited to share the launch of Hang Ten Systems, a new endeavor to help enterprises thrive in the age of AI.

AI is upon us all like a massive new wave. And I learned a long time ago that when there are big waves around, it is time to surf. Not just to surf, but to hang ten — to master the wave so well that you can walk all the way to the front of the board and hang your ten toes off the front.

Hang Ten is already helping some of the world's biggest and most important enterprises — like Fresenius, Siemens Energy and others — hang ten on the biggest wave of our lifetimes. Our dream is to help enterprises not just transform with AI, but use it as a force to do what no one could do before.

We're backed by a remarkable group. Mayfield leads our round; @NavinChaddha and I were students together at @Stanford and always looked for an excuse to work together. They are joined by @aramcoventures, the strategic venturing arm of Saudi @Aramco, one of the world's largest companies and a key leader in energy and infrastructure, as well as some of Silicon Valley's best-known angels. And I'm privileged that Jerry Yang — also a friend since Stanford — serves on our board. Building Hang Ten with me is the core team I've worked alongside for years: @navinb, @sanjaypaloalto, Tao Liu, Frank Yu, Pradeep Panicker, Yusuf Safdari and ten other big wave surfers.

Over time I'll share more about Hang Ten and our work. For now I'll say only this: I have seen, firsthand, the dramatic things AI delivers for the people and teams who somehow just know what to do with it — I have watched them, and myself, reach in minutes what could take teams years of toil. And I have seen the far greater number who get none of it, and who often end up causing harm instead. In that gap lies the biggest opportunity of our time.

It is time to ride this wave. If you're a surfrider — someone who lights up at the chance to help businesses solve the hardest problems they face — write to us ([email protected])!

— Vishal

[Hamel Husain @HamelHusain]

Tomorrow @sh_reya and I kick off this free AI product engineering mini-course. Topics covered over 12 talks:

1. Design/UX & Evals
2. Retrieval
3. When & how to use open models effectively

With these legends: @TheZachMueller @bclavie @xeophon @GoAbiAryan @barrowjoseph @willccbb @marek_galovic @beirmug

Sign up & learn more here https://t.co/ssygeCw8eT

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Imagine a gym where everyone lifts according to birth year.

That's basically how we organize education.

[Deepak Abbot @deepakabbot]

{I am hiring a PM for indiagold} In last few months, I have spoken to some 40 people but have not made any offer. Not because they weren't good, most were. It just wasn't the right fit. They worked in large teams on a structured product, more featured focused than business, low/no interaction with customers, zero appetite for operations heavy business like ours, still trying to understand how AI can scale them.
So if you are someone who builds, thinks about the business, stays close to customers, and doesn't mind a hard operational problem and you want to work directly with me, mail me at [email protected]
We're reimagining gold lending for the next 100 million borrowers - combining technology with a deep physical operation most fintechs won't touch.
Please RT and share in your network

[Sourav @souravOs]

@bargava any reco for quality OCRs?

[Rahul Sanghi @RahulSanghi1]

🚨🐅⛵️HIRING - INDIA'S BEST WRITERS

For the last six years, our mission at Tigerfeathers has been to build a home for the most thoughtful writing and storytelling from India's tech ecosystem.

Today this is just one piece of a larger media and investing puzzle that'll be the first of its kind on the Subcontinent.

We have a bunch of awesome projects lined up for the next 12-18 months that includes ramping up the output on our existing channels (Tigerfeathers, Runtime, Next Up India); launching new IPs; expanding IRL; and creating a media ecosystem that justifies and amplifies the work of the most ambitious companies of our time.

The throughline that cuts across everything we do is Quality - that's it. Every time we hit publish we want to make sure that it counts, that we earn people's attention, and that we send waves of serendipity towards the people that trust us with their stories.

With that being said...

We're expanding the team - and looking to hire India's most cracked researchers, editors, writers and storytellers (ideally these roles should fit into one person).

Specifically, we're looking for:
- delusions of grandeur
- a relentless curiosity and optimism
- a visceral irritation with sub-par and sloppy work
- an ability to simultaneously teach and entertain (via your writing)
- a love of rabbit holes (and burrowing deep)
- an unreasonable commitment to making exceptional things (i.e. a love of the game)
- an assortment of weird interests across Indian tech, history, art, capitalism, culture, and everything in between.

You will work on some of the most exciting pieces and profiles about individuals, ideas and ventures that will define 21st century India; and you will work alongside people that count themselves as the best in the world at what they do. Also, the vibes in the group chat are immaculate.

If any of the above sounds like you, fill in the Google Form (linked below) and we'll get back to you asap.

PS: Several of our friends at India's best deep tech startups and funds are also looking to fill similar roles, so if we like your work but it turns out you're not the right fit for us, we'll do our best to find you another awesome home for your talents.

[Sourav @souravOs]

@evanlapointe Wishing a speedy recovery

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

What's the job market like, as a hiring manager trying to fill positions, or as an engineer looking for a new job?

I'm collecting anecdotes and stories to supplement the data. DM me your observations + stories, and will share (anonymized) what I have.

Feels like an odd market

[Julia Turc @juliarturc]

This is what happens when you plug LLMs into voice assistants, instead of a decade of handwritten rules.

This video dissects Voxtral (a family of OSS speech models) and the foundational work behind it (audio tokenization, semantic/acoustic disaggregation, etc).

Thank you @MistralAI for your collaboration and for your detailed technical reports in an increasingly opaque industry!

00:00 Intro
01:03 Modular vs end-to-end speech models
03:30 Speech-to-Text
06:07 Delayed Streams Modeling (DSM)
09:41 Whisper Streaming
10:33 Voxtral Realtime
13:07 Voxtral Text-to-Speech
14:28 Throwback: WaveNet
15:24 Audio tokenization
20:39 The Voxtral Codec
21:49 Back to Voxtral TTS
25:30 Outro

[𝒢𝒾𝓁𝒷ℯ𝓇𝓉 @AbakpaJob]

highly recommend owning a cat because it makes dealing with every negative emotion a little bit easier. it's difficult to feel the full weight of crushing reality when a little freak is doing olympic laps around your home after taking a loud shit

[shyamal @shyamalanadkat]

after close to four years at @openai, i moved from the bay area to india earlier this year. i still believe deeply in ensuring true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to all. having grown up here, i've also always felt deeply connected to the ecosystem here.

over the past several weeks, i've been speaking with researchers, engineers, and thinkers across india and apac. it's become clear that there are many who want to build the future from here. moving back felt like the counterintuitive choice. i no longer think that's true.

what's been missing is the belief that you can build institutions of global consequence from anywhere. and more importantly, the ambition and the will to pursue ideas that seem impossibly large at first. this may be a once in a generation opportunity.

more to come soon. DMs open if this resonates.

[Sagar Awatade @SagarAwatade]

I don't know who else to tell this to, so I am going to tell my story here.

Every day is a struggle for a young business, but the last few months have been harder than usual.

We are a small Indian company. For more than ten years we have been building a homegrown brand in a product category dominated by big foreign players.

There are almost no Indian names in this space. We set out to be one.

We started in 2014. Over the years we began making parts in India instead of just importing, and we started selling in the US, Dubai, Nepal, Malaysia and South Africa.

We showed up at global trade fairs to represent an Indian brand on the world stage.

In 2023 we changed the import code we use for our product. We did not do this quietly. Every shipment was declared. Nothing was hidden. We didn't invent our approach.

We followed written professional advice and the way this product is treated in markets around the world.

And now we are facing a government demand running into tens of crores in duty recovery and penalties, plus personal penalties on the founders and even on an employee.

For a company our size, this is not a fine we can pay and move on from. This ends us.

We have not run from any of this. I am not built like that. It is not how I was raised. We have written to the authorities, met officials in person, and we have now filed a writ in the High Court.

All we are asking for is a fair treatment.

I set out to build in India and sell to the world. I am asking only that the system back honest founders trying to compete globally, instead of breaking them.

The process is the process, and it exists for a reason. But process should not feel like punishment.

From where I am standing today, it does.
I am not giving up. I have worked too hard for this. If you have read this far, please share it. If you know someone who can help, point them my way. Help me get the word out.