Supremacy - Book review

Parmy Olson - as a well respected voice on tech – takes a long hard look at the competitive landscape of the new AI movement in the world. This is of course before Deepseek and the ‘Six Little Dragons’  - arguably with the potential to disrupt the current one - showed up. But till the time of writing of the book she covers, in good depth, the landscape of how the AI bellwethers evolved in the US (and the UK).

She starts bottom-up on the current picture, which eventually – like everything tech – rolls into the current titans, principally Google and Microsoft. The key AI initiatives supported by each one is – respectively – Deep Mind and OpenAI. There are other investments as well of these tech titans (and others like Meta and Amazon) into companies such as Perplexity and Anthropic, and not to forget Grok by Elon Musk, but principally what is described is the birth of Deep Mind and Open AI, following the lives of their founders, Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman respectively.

While we see a small peek into their personal lives growing up – big talents that they are – Hassabis in Chess and Altman in Poker - the key takeaway from the book is how the rise of AI, and the companies founded, was driven by altruistic instincts and the idea to prevent AI from getting too big / harmful to the human race. And now, once grown up, how the idea has been overrun by commercial concerns of the investors, with profit-making (as an objective to raise funds) now forcing AI and their founders to lose independence – of their intent to keep AI safe. 

While DeepMind was busy winning Chess / Go games globally and Google kept its research on large language models and language translator under wraps until it was too late (we only heard of Lamda going sentient - as described in delicious details), ChatGPT stole a march in first introducing the models to the world (with questionable disclosures on data sourcing) - while growing further and further apart from Elon - one of its earliest investors - on its motives of profit making - which was necessitated by the constant need to raise money, which, I guess, does make the world go round. 

Notably, the book introduces another camp – now fired from Google – that advocated for AI safety and less biasness (comprising Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru) and their very well known work/ paper: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. 

 

 

Legacy of The Father of The Nation

An old post, that remained unpublished (or maybe i withdrew this after publishing)

You know how the opinions on all things controversial are.
Well, I have been thinking of reviving this blog ... and really no particular topic that feel strongly about came to my mind. And suddenly when i visited this other blog, my opinion was so moving to me that I thought it would be worth an entry here
I hold Gandhiji in high regard and I cannot understand the harm the Government has done to anyone by bringing these items back.

• It is a good idea to stop some fool taking the possession of these articles and then showing to the world how powerless India could be ... You and I would be still cursing the government .. for having failed to save the "pride" of India .. the legacy of someone we call the father of the nation.
• But maybe I do not credit the GoI for that. Perhaps they had to do it because congress has all this while stood for the Gandhi values and everything connected to that .. or so it wants to project.
• Mr. James Otis has no credibility to me ... and had he really stood for these values, he'd probably have not given it out to auction. So for all you know, he might have been there just to try to show to the world how little India is spending on Education/ How much on defence ... however, without any proof, I cant accuse him of anything, moneywise or otherwise
• There are millions of other things the government is not doing .. which it should. Some good examples are keeping the Ganges clean or maintaining monuments ... I dont see such coverage for these issues related to national heritage ... I am sorry, I AM trying to blame the whole media infra here

You know how the opinions on all things controversial are. Media knows best.

Gems they are shining

Credits to Jay Leno for this one ...
1. I wrote a cheque last weekend .. and the Bank bounced :)
2. Who the hell named them Securities
--
I have just two words ...
DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!!
DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!!
DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!! DONT PANIC!!!
--

The Wisdom of Crowds

I happened to read this marvellous book, the theme of which I have also started to realise over the past few years ... But putting it in this form would have required a lot of effort and research. Pretty interesting a read, the theme is centered around the idea that more often than not, it is the masses collectively that take the wisest or the most optimal decision. Not that they are always right, but unbiased decisions taken by the crowd is the best quality decisions that can be made.

According to the author, a crowd would act in Cognition, Coordination or Cooperation. There are essential ingredients that a crowd must posses (Diversity, Independence, Decentralization, and Aggregration) and the pitfalls that must be guarded against so that intelligent decisions can be taken . And amazingly, they correlate closely with what one would expect to see in a good B-school crowd. Having been in one once, I can bear testimony to the validity of these factors in practice. More about that on the wikipedia entry here.

There are a lot of interesting experiments cited by the author the context of which ranges from village fairs to NASA labs. These and a whole lot to do with "experimental economics". This comes with quite a bit of capital markets thrown in with their share of (in)famous incidents. This doesn't really mean that one has to be well-versed with the markets. But yeah, one would definitely transcend the meaning of "beating the street" once he/she reads this. The incidents are pretty recent, given that the book itself is not too old (2004). In one particular experiment at Caltech, it is mentioned how educated people would knowingly inflate the price of a security only by assuming that there was a bigger idiot around.

Over the past few years, I have myself become an advocate of free-markets, and my purpose really feeds on in good measure by the book. Except for the last part, where the author almost thrusts a case for democracy on you (I am pro-democracy), the book is a good fast read as you jump on from experiment to experiment.

IIML

well the exile is ending ... and i can see the horizons ... so i decided to continue ... perhaps a little inspiration from TAV ... but probably summing up the whole of the time spent here wont be possible ... for all one might know, i could lose interest again ... but still lets give it a try

it would be an understatement to say that this place made me work hard ... tooth and nail for every half mark (sometimes a quarter that i received) ... but now that i look back ... it seems that i might miss this place .. not just the people .... but the place ... something that i could not have thought of ... but this is something that i realized this time at home ... which was again after a very long time ....