Aravind Srinivas

India is not just catching up in the AI race; we're innovating and leading in ways that are uniquely ours. The Economic Times recently highlighted how our approach to Generative AI goes beyond just Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing the specific challenges and opportunities within our diverse market. Rahul Agarwalla, Managing Partner at SenseAI Ventures, shared his invaluable insights into this AI revolution. His leadership and vision are truly driving innovation in the field, and it's an honour to be part of this journey with him. For anyone interested in the developments in AI and how India is making its mark on the global stage, this is a must-read.

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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Our recent hiring post brought in over 500 applications, including a fantastic response from IIT candidates and other top talent across the country. We’re thrilled by the interest in joining our mission to shape the future of robotics and AI! But here’s what we’re really looking for: beyond resumes, we want to see portfolios that showcase your passion and hands-on experience. Whether you’ve developed robots, crafted AI models, or led impactful projects, a portfolio is the best way for us to understand your skills, creativity, and problem-solving approach. Why does a portfolio matter? • It shows us how you translate ideas into reality. • It highlights your technical abilities and real-world experience. • It’s a chance to make your application stand out with tangible proof of your work. If you have a portfolio website, even better! It gives you an edge by providing us with a detailed view of your contributions and projects. To everyone who has applied or plans to – thank you! We’re excited to learn more about your work and how you can contribute to our journey of innovation at I HUB ROBOTICS 🇮🇳🦾 #Hiring #RoboticsCareers #AIInnovation #PortfolioMatters #FutureOfTech #IHUBRobotics #HiringNow #NowHiring #TechJobs #AIJobs #RoboticsCareers #JoinOurTeam #ApplyNow #IHUBRobotics #FutureOfTech

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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I am always amazed when someone discovers whitespace in B2B SaaS that is eligible for pre-seed funding. It's interesting to see that Chiratae Ventures led Pre-Seed round for Pepsales. Pepsales is trying to help B2B SaaS companies improve their sales by creating personalized product demos using AI and ML. The pain point they are trying to address is that most demos don't impress buyers because they tend to be generic and one-size-fits-all. Congrats Ajay Singh and Abhinandan Sahgal! Source: INC42, Entrackr, VCCircle #VentureCapital #B2BSaas

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I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode with Shiva Singh Sangwan. We discussed the evolution of Humba Ventures & Susa Ventures; tips for raising and building a fund; how to improve investment sourcing & picking; the role of luck in investing, and so on. https://lnkd.in/eiqsStej

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Here's why prompt engineering is one of today's most valuable skills. VentureBeat recently published an article by Deven Panchal of AT&T Labs. I applaud Deven for his vision. He says, "A well-crafted prompt can significantly impact the quality and relevance of the output of LLMs." So many are refusing to accept this. Mainly because prompting uses natural language. They are misguided, assuming AI can expertly prompt for them. Even if it can someday (which I doubt), it can’t today. The closest thing is SmartGPT 2.0, which still can’t compete with an expert prompt engineer. I recommend learning and practicing prompt engineering. 🟢 If you don't know where to learn, comment "START" and I'll point you in the right direction. --------------------------------------------- See comments for a link to the full article. 🔗 Follow 🔔Mark Fulton for more on #AI #Prompts #AIAgents

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✨ Chet Kapoor ✨ is quite the Silicon Valley legend. Three-time founder and currently the CEO of DataStax his wisdom for founders is incredibly spot-on ✅ and timeless ⏰ ! In this most recent and probably best-ever episode of The Enterprise GTM podcast, Chet discusses what it takes to build enduring tech companies. Some 🎤 soundbites 🎤 from our conversation: 👩‍🏫 The quality of people influences the outcome of your startup the most. 🔥 You do not need smart people who sit around and pontificate. ☄ Momentum is everything. Never underestimate it. 🌟 Having complete clarity of thought at any given time is very important--who are you doing this for, and how will it change their lives? 🌈 One of the best ways to create a large company is to create a parade or join one. ☝ Know who you are. There's a high likelihood that the company will become more like who you are rather than who you want to be. 🛑 Don't make the mistake of hiring sales execs too soon. Be extra cautious about partnerships. 📣 Tune in to hear about what he has to say about AI startups getting started today, the future of the data layer, the evolving importance of data roles (data science, data engineering), and so much more! #devtool #founder #startup #data #ai https://lnkd.in/gW-58nvE

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https://lnkd.in/esZgE24d Seven years ago I gave this talk at IIT Kanpur. Back then it seemed inevitable that we would have self-driving cars by now, and some predictions I made were wrong. Overall, though, I think this talk has aged reasonably well. Little did I know back then that the reference to the 2016 MaxSAT I gave would spark the creation of a new company, InsideOpt. The Seeker Solver that we sell is based on the technology outlined, and it is changing the optimization landscape. On the social implications, we since edited a special issue of the AI Magazine on the social disruption that AI brings. More work is needed. We need to have a wide societal discourse on how we are going to share the increasing wealth that AI brings to the world. #insideopt.com

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I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

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There's a common belief that scaling 3 dimensions - model size, training compute and size of the dataset will lead us to AGI. But, this is an oversimplified view of reality. Read an interesting piece on #AISnakeOil from Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan that critiques the widespread belief and provides a wonderful explanation. While scaling has improved model predictability, the real value lies in unexpected capabilities that appear as models grow. They term it as - the "Emergent Abilities" of the model. Undoubtedly, until now scaling up has led to remarkable improvements in the predictability of responses. While this is interesting from a technical standpoint, it might not necessarily be what end users care about. Maybe what really matters is the unexpected capabilities that models acquire as they grow in size. Another misconception is the role of synthetic data. While it’s often considered as a solution to the data scarcity problem, it’s primarily used to fill specific gaps or enhance domain-specific tasks, not to increase the overall volume of training data. In summary, the future of AI and LLM development isn’t about endless scaling. It’s about smarter, more efficient use of resources to unlock the best outcomes. Apologies for the long post but I found it super interesting. What are your thoughts? You can read the complete article here 👇

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NVIDIA's Jensen said "ChatGPT democratized computing, Llama2 democratized generative AI" ...and now Llama3 is the next level 🔥 It's fascinating to watch Meta's strategic moves. With Llama3, they prioritized training on a massive 15T token dataset to pack all into a lean 70B param model, instead of building a massive model. This allows Llama 3 to match trillion+ parameter models like GPT-4, but at 1/10th the compute, storage and inference costs! 💰 This technique was published by Google DeepMind a few years ago https://lnkd.in/gx7VU8aA Meta is not a dark horse in AI anymore. They might be the top dog. https://lnkd.in/gRRJYuxt #llama2 #llama3 #llm #chatgpt #gpt4 #ai #ml

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Look forward to evaluating and working with this bright smart bunch of IIT Madras folks on 20 October 2024 on solving AI applied to Fintech/Trade Finance/AI applied to use cases around domestic MSME's!

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Enjoyable. As a Product Manager, you should obsess over that concept.   Yesterday, I chatted with my friend Abhishek Sinha, a senior product leader at NVIDIA, and ex Cohere and Amazon Web Services (AWS).   In front of 40+ Surge founders, we went deep into all things product management. Some insights worth sharing:   👉 “What is a developer?” - it’s important to go deep and specific on your ICP. For example, you can’t just say that your ICP is a developer. What is that? Frontend? Back-end? Data? In SME? Or Enterprise? There are 20+ different type of developers, each with different needs and motivations. Be specific. 👉 All about motivations- definition of personas and segments should not be done based on superficial demographics. Rather, understand the WHY? Understand the motivations, deeply. Why are they using your product? What drives them? Group them based on the WHY. 👉 60% rule. Product Management is not just about drafting PRD’s and project managing build & launch. It’s all about customers. Working backwards. Those motivations? You can only understand them when you spend at least 60% of you time speaking with customers. Anything less, and you’ll miss stuff. 👉 Storytelling is everything - a product can only succeed when the narrative is strong. Communication is key and product marketing should be joined at the hip and part of all key customer conversations. Again, work backwards from the customer and develop clear messaging and value prop, optimized for your different channels.   Which brings us back to enjoyable. That value proposition? It can only be about 3 things: faster, cheaper, more enjoyable. That last one is not the same as ‘easy-to-use’. Some products are not easy, but so unique, so powerful, so rich that they can be hugely enjoyable.   So aim for that. Aim for enjoyable. cc. Peak XV Partners Anuj Sahai Muharrem Derinkök Jon Woods Pieter-Paul Walraven Jascha Zittel Elliott Gibb Nellie Wartoft James Han Carla Penn-Kahn Nitish Tiwari Ajain Vivek

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I met my co-founder Kushal through a cold reachout on LinkedIn. This was back when I was at AWS working in the VC and startup vertical. I was always interested in VC and was reaching out to build my network. At that time I couldn’t have guessed that a reach out would lead to All In Capital Cut to two and a half years later- we’ve backed 50+ companies and are only just getting started. The kind of synergy that Kushal Bhagia and I have is difficult to find. I often tell people that if they put us in separate rooms and ask us the same question, they’ll get identical answers. It’s one thing to have a co-founder you can count on, but having someone with the same fundamentals is a game changer. This is not just beneficial for the smooth working of our fund but also very important for the founders we invest in. When you work with us you don’t get 1 person who believes in your idea and the other onboard as a silent partner. You get 2 people working with conviction and alignment, resulting in double the effort and double the support. Point being, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. The answer will be “no” till you ask, so what’s the worst that can happen. And if it isn’t, it might just change your life. Or as Wayne Gretzky put it: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. #cofounder #team

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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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SolarSquare Energy is the largest installer and operator of distributed solar assets in India, and has become one of my favorite case studies of *nailing* product-market fit within the Lowercarbon Capital portfolio. This week, they announced a $40M Series B funding round led by our friends over at Lightspeed - it's go time, chalo! India is the world's fastest growing residential solar market, with more roofs and more sun than just about anywhere on the planet. There's a whole lot of room to run - only 1M homes have been solarized to date out of the 50M ready to install. Add that up, and we see a $100B prize up for grabs by the end of the decade. The jalebi on top? The Indian government has strategically accelerated this industry by rolling out subsidies, reducing permitting friction, and enshrining net metering as a legal right. Solar Square is in the right place at the right time. Huge congrats to Shreya Mishra, Neeraj Jain, Nikhil Nahar, and the entire team. If anyone is looking to join the next Indian unicorn at the center of the global energy transition, look no further. #tech #climatetech #climate #energy #energytransition #solar #electrification #india #emergingmarkets

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