Revolutions Happen Slowly -daily till you no longer see it but it is already there
After growing revenue 37% over last year’s top line, Sridhar Vembu, the unassuming founder CEO of Zoho, says he thinks AI is hype and will settle down in the next year or two. Speaking to Analytics India, Vembu, from his Indian HQ of Tenkasi, a tiny hamlet in Tamil Nadu, says he is focused on creating rural jobs that will reverse migration from villages to urban areas.
Zoho office suite of enterprise productivity tools competes head-on with @Sales Force and @Microsoft but offers great value as enterprises continue to move away from the big guys into Zoho. Zoho recently crossed 100 million customers and over $1 billion in revenue. Clearly, Sridhar knows where he is going. More:
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
If you have not heard of this phrase in the last 48 hours you will be NOT excused because it’s more or less everywhere in the futurist space. If you have been a Marc a16z follower you would have already read a summary if not the full form. But I read the full version because the future of human civilization in the face of AI and everything else is of interest to me.
This is essential reading if societal behavior and technology are your tag words. Look at it this way - a tier 1 VC in the Valley has to bet on the future, or else he is toast. I am not saying he is saying this to buttress the investments his team will make but one has to have a vision and renew it regularly.
Two paragraphs that I thought were key are reproduced here below. The link to the full manifesto is here.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, and social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people – a lot more people – which in turn leads to more abundance.
We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.
“We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets” - Marc Andreessen.
This paper states clearly that there is a chance, though slim, that we end up with a machine species that can get superior thinking powers than humans, and possibly cause damage to humans. But that is not a powerful enough reason for us to not develop the species because the amount of time, and energy saved and the productivity boost it can give humanity in the process is enormous. And since we created them we will be able to subvert them too.
Google Cloud, McKinsey, And Formula E
Sports Racing? Try This
They're all electric, go from 0 to 100 km/h in less than 2.8 seconds, and race indoors, the GENBETA prototype car, hit a world record speed of more than 218 km/hr (yep, that was start to stop in less than 400m inside a London building.
And now, building on the GENBETA project, Formula E drivers and Formula E racing fans might soon be able to ask the car questions and get answers back while the action is on, using generative Artificial Intelligence.
Not So Fast LLM - Think Before You Ink
on Screen that is.
LLMs to Think Before Speaking: Researchers introduced the concept of Pause Tokens in Transformer-based language models, allowing models to delay output generation, enhance computations, and significantly boost performance in various tasks. The importance of pause tokens.
AI Insight Assisted Social Ad Campaigns -Sprinklr
When Demand generation campaigns meet AI insight and Strategies in Social Media advertising, then you are probably at Sprinklr’s Desk
Titan’s Deep Fake Ad with RT Interaction Ayushman Khurrana: Watch
Mumbai Phoenix Mall live kiosk where Ayushman image is cleverly positioned for face recognition to utter relevant conversations that baffle the crowd. Watch this commercial here: Titan Eye + Innovative Launch Ad in mall Kiosk