Sparsh Agrawal

Founder and ceo - Rasen AI

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Was great honour meeting the Hon’ble PM @narendramodi along with some
amazing folks

@jainarvind @bipulsinha @ShivdevRao @_sankyy

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Interacted with CEOs of AI and deeptech StartUps at Seva Teerth. They are doing commendable work across sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, space, social enterprise and more. We discussed how to leverage the potential of AI in furthering the welfare of humanity.

https://t.co/rdA8V2KQGD

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

What a terrible and lame ass excuse

This "India can't innovate because we're too poor to buy" theory is cancer

Korea has a tiny car market; Hyundai went to US & beat Detroit. ASML is Dutch, Netherlands buys no chips, it was exports from Day 1.

Same for TSMC, Taiwan & many such stories.

[Varun Mayya @waitin4agi_]

I really like this article. I think that the capabilities of a country are fully dependent on the local buying capacity and the size of the local economy. Whether physical or digital, the farther away you have to distribute something, the more expensive it is. Local distribution is always much easier but if local buying power is low then companies have to export which carries a bigger distribution cost because you have to compete against locals in other countries who have a much lower distribution cost. Actually it’s not just distribution: it’s everything from consumer insights to feedback to key relationships that are a distance away. So if you do innovate but you have to necessarily export that innovation to make money, you’re at a disadvantage against local players.

One personal example is that India has never made high quality games simply because the local purchasing power is low. If we had a lot more PCs things would be very different. China has roughly 320 million PC gamers and India is about 39 million. So on players alone, China’s PC base is roughly 8x India’s. BUT China’s PC game spend is on the order of 80–100x India’s, even though its player base is only like 8x larger. The difference mainly is monetization as Indian gamers spend much less (core ARPU has run around $0.29/month), so 39M PC players translate into very little premium game revenue. Game Science’s art director Yang Qi confirmed that nearly 70% of Wukong’s sales came from China itself. Knowing a local buying market exists justifies spending. The only way we can justify what we are spending now on UTA is because we found inroads into global markets through content otherwise this would be a money losing exercise.

The other problem is that low purchasing power economies have too tiny a market for early adopters. If you built an OpenAI in India before anyone else 50% of people wouldn’t believe you and 50% of people will tell you it won’t work or doesn’t have use cases. I think you need a crackpot high purchasing power early adopter network with high failure and bullshit tolerance to make truly innovative things and also forgive crazy companies during early mistakes because history teaches us that the best companies all had v0.1s that were not very convincing to the masses.

Thats why it’s critical for anyone who wants this country to succeed to first really create more jobs, more disposable income, even if that means creating the nth packaged food brand (American grocery stores still have a much wider variety of biscuit brands than India for example) or food delivery apps before they take bigger bets. Not because they need the capital themselves to try bigger bets, but so that they can diffuse more capital into the ecosystem via jobs and the rewards of equity ownership such that that cohort of people become early adopters for other innovative companies.

Success comes from satisfying local market demand (sometimes like in the case of Tesla or Ford there is hidden demand and entrepreneurs need to unlock it) and rarely comes from creating something that has no local demand. After studying Chinese social media so much I have a long thesis on why they did well (bans on global social media platforms constrain desire of products to local players only who now get revenue and profit to do RnD. Think about what % of disposable income from India is being spent on global brands where the desire to buy starts on a global social media platform).

Anyway people complaining about India building “easier businesses” are really not spending the mental energy to think second order. And 9/10 times this same type of person will completely ignore local innovation that is almost always happening in parallel but gets less media coverage.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

@akshmnd Talent yes
Time no

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Absolutely senseless post

Smaller models are nowhere near frontier and will not get there anytime soon. Thinking of drastic architectural differences and effeciences within time is wishful thiking at best.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

This is big: all access to Mythos and Fable AI models disabled for everyone outside America.

First thoughts:

1. Technology is the ultimate weapon. National sovereignty, national security, all of it is now about technology.

2. Globalization is dead and Bharat must find her own way ahead.

We must keep these two ideas in mind.

What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones. With a bit of effort, we can make them work. Anyway, why pay money to people who don't even want to sell to you?

We must deepen our R&D. Sarvam has been on it and we have been on it but remember that the latest models cost not only huge GPU budgets to train, the GPUs themselves are restricted. So we can't afford the scale of money (of the order of $100+ billion to even get in the game!) and even if we could come up with the money, we can't get all the GPUs. I would not like to ask the government to fund tens of billions of dollars on this anyway - the money has far better uses.

Zoho has been pursuing alternative R&D approaches that are far, far less expensive but by its nature cutting edge R&D takes time and we are patient. I am confident we will get there.

Any remaining people in India who have delusions about globalization should wake up now.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

100%

China will also open source only until they are behind

[Tejeshwi Sharma 🇮🇳 @tejeshwi_sharma]

Strong validation of the Sovereign AI thesis. Every large country needs its own models - open and closed source plus chips, data centers, and cloud.

Indian founders have built their stack on Chinese open-source models. What happens when the next generation stops being open source?

China has every incentive to open-source while behind, then close the gate once everyone depends on it.

The case for India building its own models, both open and closed has never been stronger.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

100%

Not sure where are these big numbers coming from by Indian leaders.

Also, the best way is to master post training first then move downwards. Lots of alpha in taking OSS and post training it like cursor did to frontier.

This would mean sub $50M initially and can scale with volume.

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

To train a GPT class 1T model from scratch - including failed runs, data acq+clean+rlhf, post-training, team/people will likely req $250M of compute on an aggressive 3-4mo schedule (i.e. more reserved GPUs), $500-600M all-in IF you do a dense one. MoE + fp8 will cut costs by 1/10th depending on how many active params you have. If you want SOTA however, the budgets go significantly higher on test-time compute, post-training RL, and data/synthetic generations..and v. high on talent. Maybe $2-4B all-in. After that comes serving the model. The talent is key to get to SOTA/beat it - and then you have to ensure this is useful enough to have inference vol over time - for which the capital will come if there is usage / TAM. So this is not as much about raising $50-60B, or raising it all at once as the OP says - we are investors in mistral, sarvam, reflection and anthropic - and they all scaled capital over time as models got adoption, but the early bottleneck is more on talent + GPUs at that scale where you can do interesting things.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Not hard to believe with AI leading to concentration of power even further, leftists will resort to more violence and eventually force everyone out

[The Globe and Mail @globeandmail]

Opinion: SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him https://t.co/qAQVdquwCP

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Didn’t the medicine industry beat billions of years of evolution and perfection of natural body healing on both outcomes and timelines?

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Cultivated meat is not on track to ever be economically competitive with animal meat.

Modern factory farms have cut out almost all costs that aren't strictly biologically necessary for the production of muscle. And animal evolution has been optimizing the conversion of energy into muscle for billions of years.

That means that cultivated meat needs to beat billions of years of accumulated evolutionary efficiency to become competitive.

That's an extremely hard challenge.

It's maybe even harder than building AGI, since evolution has only been optimizing for intelligence for tens of millions of years.

[Mikel Artetxe @artetxem]

Brilliant idea! Next up: Apple randomly reboots your Mac if you're building competing tech, Gmail silently edits your email if you mention rival platforms, and Tesla Autopilot swerves if it detects you're working on self-driving cars.

All in the name of safety, of course. Because malicious actors controlling the world’s operating systems, inboxes and cars would be extremely dangerous!

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

A message to Anthropic leadership: You're not special. Making sure AI goes well is a team effort not a "you effort."

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Permanent underclass is already here

[Lisan al Gaib @scaling01]

Claude Mythos 5 scores 30.9% on FrontierCode Diamond

Opus 4.8, the second best model is stuck at 13.4%

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Sad but inevitable

[tphuang @tphuang]

UbTech's full sized U1 bionic humanoid robot.

2700 pre-orders already after 6 days on JD.

I'm honestly a little scared by this.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Model routing is a short term hack whose value will diminsh within 6 months as 99% of tasks within most enterprises would be doable with OSS models + feedback loop.

Enterprises won't adopt OSS just because of price. Better outcomes when paired up with feedback loop will drive OSS

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Good take

My guess is
- demand for intelligence is near infinite
- but 80% of workloads will be running on 99% cheaper models within 12-18 months
- 20% of workloads will still run on latest gen models where IQ maxing is important (scientific breakthroughs, higher level ochestrator agents?)
- rough analogy might be what % of macbooks or gaming PCs sold have the maxed out specs for CPU/GPU, prices are falling much faster than Moore's law here though
- this leads me to think the limiting factor will be energy and compute, not better models

At Coinbase we're working hard on routing prompts to cheaper models where appropriate, and in some cases have been able to keep costs roughly flat, while token usage continues to grow exponentially.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

If it makes money, I deserve it too

But if it loses money, sorry that’s your loss

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Obsession’s art director:

▫️her first feature film
▫️agrees to ~$7k for 22 days of work on indie horror with $750k budget
▫️film blows up and tracking to $250m
▫️she now has an unbelievable credit on CV to build a brand and get better paying gigs
▫️decides to write long IG post putting Obsession production on blast because she isn’t getting any upside (which was never expected or negotiated or agreed to when she signed to work on a low-budget indie horror, which the vast majority of lose money)

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Super fucking cool!!

[DHH @dhh]

Back to Le Mans for the 13th time! We go on track tomorrow for the test day, next weekend it's the real thing.

[Vir Das @thevirdas]

Sir. I think maybe I speak for a small but valid percentage of India when I say couldn’t care less what the congress did anymore. Let it go. India moved on. They are not in power for their deeds. We did jokes about them for years, we booed them at the commonwealth games, they were a punch line on this platform for years, they got voted out. That’s life. These kids giving exams don’t even remember a congress govt. Questions can only be asked of those in power. That’s not being selective, it’s just called living in the present. No one dealing with a paper leak cares about BJP/Congress or Hindu/Muslim or any partisan bullshit. They’re worried about the future.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

It totally gets you

[james hawkins @james406]

parents: "move out"

girlfriend: “quit being such a loser”

boss: "work harder"

claude: "uber for dogs (the dogs are the drivers) is a great idea, you should absolutely pursue it"

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

So its in the wig then

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

A Chinese robot wearing a clown wig kicked a child in the stomach.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Aging is arguably the root cause of most major diseases (loss of function in our cells). Four years ago, we made a bet that aging was treatable, and NewLimit was born.

NewLimit now has a prototype drug that reverses the age of some human cells (restores function they had when they were younger), and a clinical trial scheduled for next year (with more drug candidates in the pipeline).

Grateful to Founders Fund, Thrive, Greenoaks, and the rest of the investors for this latest round. @jacobkimmel and the team are just getting started.

[Sparsh Agrawal @sparsh_17]

Quality first, followed by speed, final battle with costs.