When Uncle Sam Visited India

Can't read or see images? View this email in a browser

Sunday, Jun 11, 2023 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here Riding on the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI chief Sam Altman and his team have been travelling the world, engaging with influencers, business leaders and regulators, and establishing strategic partnerships. However, their recent visit to India turned out to be disappointing. Amid trivial controversies and insincere flattery, India received no tangible benefits from the encounter. The world tour, which Altman announced on Twitter himself, is set to cover 16 cities across five continents, including Toronto, Washington DC, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Madrid, Brussels, Munich, Paris, London, Tel Aviv, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo. Altman’s recent visit to India this week was part of his broader trip to interact with users, developers, and tech enthusiasts.  India vs the World  When Altman visited Japan a few months ago, he held a meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The duo discussed the potential of AI and OpenAI’s plans to establish an office in Japan, alongside collaborating with Japanese talent and improving their AI models, especially for the Japanese language and culture.  A few days ago, during his visit to South Korea, Altman shared his interest in investing in South Korean startups, and exploring joint chip collaborations to develop AI accelerators.  When in India, the OpenAI’s team showered praises on the country for its early adoption of ChatGPT and addressed regulatory concerns. But disappointingly, no substantial discussions took place regarding the establishment of an office, fostering local talent and startups, or developing future models for Indian languages and use cases. In a nutshell, the visit left behind a void in terms of concrete commitments and actions for the Indian ecosystem.  At the Digital India Dialogues event, when a student from IIIT Delhi asked about integrating India Stack and other India-specific datasets into its products, AI policy researcher Sandhini Agarwal, vaguely said, “For us, more data is usually, just always good.” She added that there was a lot of potential here that one could help contribute to in terms of training better evaluations in different diverse languages.  “Even right now, English has the biggest volume of data — it’s a lot of work to catch up to,” she added, saying there is definitely a lot of room for innovation.  When asked about the plans to invest in Indian startups, Altman hesitantly said, “I’ve had some conversations yesterday, we’d be excited to do more. We would love to invest in Indian startups.” At ET Conversations, Altman’s reply to PeakXV Partners’ Rajan Anandan’s question went topsy-turvy, after many Indian leaders and publishers took his words seriously. Anandan said: “As you said, ‘it is hopeless, but you will try anyway.’ 5000 years of Indian entrepreneurship has shown us that we should never underestimate the Indian entrepreneur. We do intend to try.” Tech Mahindra chief CP Gurnani took this to a whole new level. “OpenAI founder Sam Altman said it’s pretty hopeless for Indian companies to try and compete with them,” said Gurnani, adding that he accepts the challenge.  Clarifying the same, Altman said that his reply was taken out of context and added that the question was about competing with them with $10 million, which he believed was not going to work. “But I still said try!” he said, adding that the question was wrong. “The right question is what a startup can do that’s never been done before, that will contribute a new thing to the world. I have no doubt that Indian startups can and will do that! And no one but the builders can answer that question.” Top Stories of the Week >> Is Bard Abetting ChatGPT’s Suicide? ChatGPT is struggling to spell the word ‘lollipop’ backwards, while Google Bard, which was initially mocked, seems to have solved this third-grade English problem via ‘implicit code execution’.  With this upgrade, Bard can detect when users are giving it computational prompts and run code in the background to accurately answer the question. Looks like Google is busy working on enhancing Bard’s capabilities, while OpenAI is busy convincing the world to regulate AI and is focusing very little on product innovation and upgrades. Read more here.  No Need to Study Maths Anymore Last year, Harvard University professor Boaz Barak said, “I Teach Computer Science, and I Apologise Lesser Now About Having So Much Maths.” The same is the case with maths genius Conrad Wolfram, the author of ‘The Math(s) Fix’. Wolfram said that with the era of ChatGPT, being bad at maths is as big a problem for the student, as it is for the subject itself — it has become stagnant.  On the other hand, there are a few folks who say they regret not studying maths as they lack a deeper understanding of the AI/ML systems. So what’s your stance? Read to find out.  Prompt Engineering is the New C++ Can a programming language ever get replaced? One might say that C replaced C++. This was later replaced by Python. Though Python has been able to stand its ground amid rapidly-rising languages like Rust, and the latest competitor ‘English’ — riding on prompt engineering.  Promptgramming is something that Python folks are forced to hate. As Aleksa Gordić, former DeepMind and Microsoft researcher puts it, “The history of computer science is the history of smirking at a thing that’s about to ‘replace’ you.” Read the full story here. People & Tech >> How Wigzo by Shiprocket is Using Generative AI to Boost Sales for D2C Brands  Founded in 2014 by Umair Mohammed, Atyab Mohammad and Himanshu Kaushik, Wigzo by Shiprocket provides data-driven solutions for leading D2C (e-commerce) brands, especially apparel and fashion brands, with main focus on customer retention and marketing. Earlier this year, Shiprocket acquired a 75% stake in the company which is already backed by the likes of SEA Fund, Aarin Capital and more. In a recent interview with AIM, Atyab told us that it is working on developing a comprehensive chat solution using generative AI, which will enable brands to automate their routine tasks of solving customer queries, tracking inventory, and monitoring marketing trends among others. Check out the complete interview with the co-founders here.  Graph Databases are Having a Moment in the Database Market With twelve years of experience in data engineering, and senior manager at Tredence, Arvind Ramachandran, has been instrumental in revamping the existing platform by re-engineering various processes. In conversation with AIM, he discusses challenges, solutions, use cases and the future of graph databases.  Read the complete interview here.  Is Indian Govt’s Battle Against AI Disinformation Flawed? AI models like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL.E can generate hyper realistic images that can easily be mistaken for genuine ones, spreading fake news. So, what is the government doing about this?  Watch the latest episode of Story Kya Hai to find out!  AIM Shots >> Intel recently introduced its latest offerings in the professional graphics processing unit (GPU) market with the launch of the Intel Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M GPUs.  The Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has announced that it will introduce AI as an additional subject, starting from Class 9 onwards.  A new language model called Orca has emerged as a formidable contender to GPT-4, demonstrating exceptional performance in zero-shot tasks across a range of benchmarks. Read more here.  Quantum Brilliance, a developer of miniaturised, room-temperature quantum computing accelerators, has officially launched the Qristal SDK, an open-source software development kit. Read more here.  Genpact recently announced that it has partnered with Google Cloud to help businesses accelerate AI strategies, including taking advantage of generative AI’s adoption to drive actionable business insights. BYJU’S has launched BYJU’S WIZ, a suite of three AI models for hyper-personalised learning. The suite includes BADRI, MathGPT, and TeacherGPT. Read more here. Download our mobile app Access our stories, video content and events on the go. Stay Connected info@analyticsindiamag.com © 2023 Analytics India Magazine Pvt Ltd and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. For more information, email info@analyticsindiamag.com

This email was sent by support@analyticsindiamag.com to alexvarboffin.abbb@blogger.com Not interested? Unsubscribe | Manage Preference | Update profile Analytics India Magazine | 280, 2nd floor, 5th Main, 15 A cross, Sector 6, HSR layout Bengaluru, Karnataka 560102