Put a charge on everything. Cost instils discipline.

Netanyahu has decided to accept the Iranian deal. Security officials are despondent and see it as a disaster. Ynet brings some high level quotes from them: 1) A senior Israeli official said "Nobody is happy with this. We understand it is not good for us, and that it harms Israeli interests. What is troubling is that Israel cannot influence it. Its voice is not being heard." 2) The anger at Trump is palpable.: "Trump screwed us, we took the hit. We're no longer in the loop and can't really influence anything." 3) Israelis fear Iran will be economically revived: "They've blown money on the Iranians, who are getting everything they want. They'll build a missile corps, and we'll have to pour money into interceptors." Israel sees oil revenue flowing back into the exact capabilities the war was meant to degrade. 4) They don't believe a deal will adequately deal with the nuclear issue: "The real test of the deal is removing the uranium and destroying it. If that doesn't happen, the sense of a bad deal will turn into something more concrete." 5) They fear this will embolden Iran: "Iran has smelled that it can achieve things by force, and it will use that against its neighbors and against us." 6) The deepest worry is not military. It is perception. After months of direct fire, Iran is seen across the region as the side that took the pressure and did not fold: "the regional working assumption will be that it was signed under Iranian pressure and American capitulation, rather than the reverse." Israel is concerned that Iran will be stronger, the US will be weaker and that the future for it will be bleak in the region. This war has been a disaster for Israel.

Compute: We were the first team in India to train at scale. We trained the sovereign models at the scale of ~3400 H100s. We are now putting serious capital behind the next step. India's first Blackwell cluster is now online and used by us, and we are building momentum towards operating 10s of megawatts in compute on Indian soil by 2027. Models: With Sarvam 105B, India's first sovereign model built from scratch, we showed that highly capable models can be trained here, independently. More importantly, the capability is now compounding across data, training, evaluation, systems, alignment, and deployment intuition. And we are scaling up to trillion-parameter class models, with larger runs built for coding, agents, and security. A coding model is coming soon... Inference: We already host our own models, with third party usage tripling in the last three months. We are soon taking live a production-grade token factory with the price, throughput, latency, reliability, and governance that banks, governments, enterprises, startups, and developers need for real systems. Products: Our products are now reaching India scale. Voice was our first wedge. It powers millions of interactions per day, doubling in the last three months, while we continue to optimise costs. Like voice, another modality at scale in India is documents, and we are hitting exponential growth of our new document intelligence product. Our fully managed agents product is live with enterprises and is being launched for all next month. Deployment: Most of the value in AI is unlocked in the last mile. We learned that by doing it across engagements in enterprises, government, and strategic sectors. Now we are turning that learning into a platform that allows every organisation to hill climb on its own use cases - whether it is building an agent, customising the harness, creating the data/tool backbone, or finetuning the model on custom data. Talent: Serious researchers are joining us across pretraining and RL, including people who have done meaningful work at the frontier. We are also starting our San Francisco office as the conduit for frontier AI ambition for India first, then the world.

A gentleman I was talking to was the CTO of one the biggest enterprises in India. When asked why isn't there cutting edge innovation from his firm when they have deep pockets & global contacts, his answer was a simple - "If we can't immediately monetize it, my boss is not interested". The Indian industries need to relook their approach on R&D and focus on developing deep tech.

The "sovereign AI is real" moment is here. Nation-states will soon start needing citizenship and/or security clearances to work on the next SOTA models the way they do for defense, space, nuclear tech. It is only a matter of time. Talent wars here will be crazy.

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.

🚨 BREAKING: England’s team equipment has been stolen including players’ boots/shoes, training gear, coaching staff equipment, balls and uniforms. The England camp is now working with police to find the stolen items or replace them quickly so the team can train as planned. [Daily Mail] #WorldCupwithMicky #ThreeLions #FIFAWorldCup

Please share with your friends in US to spend 1 year doing research in India with complete support.

The Thucydides phrase about the strong and the weak is an expression of crude fatalism rather than a guide to the world’s much more complicated reality, said Singaporean academic Bilahari Kausikan. If it were true, he quipped, a small country like Singapore would have been swallowed by its neighbors a long time ago. “All countries do have agency, even if they are in dire circumstances. But whether you have the wit to recognize your agency and the capability to exercise it, these are different matters.” wsj.com/world/the-worlds-gre…

Always a pleasure to meet Hon Sunil Handunneththi, Minister of Industry & Entrepreneurship Development in 🇱🇰 . Discussed his ongoing efforts and possible collaborations in shaping the new opportunities in the industrial sphere in Sri Lanka. We also discussed various ongoing initiatives to develop a stronger supply chain relationship between 🇮🇳 & 🇱🇰.

Privileged to reconnect with the former NSA under whom I had the honor of serving from 2010 to 2014 as the first military officer to join the National Security Council Secretariat. Visited along with Dr. Uttam Sinha, who presented his books (which the former NSA had already read!). My main focus was gathering insights on his grandfather, the legendary KPS Menon, who played a monumental role as Chairman of the UN Commission overseeing the elections in Korea. Deeply honored that he also gave me a blurb for my upcoming book on the Indias conquered but not defeated civilisation, releasing later year! He remains one of the few exceptional leaders I’ve served under—someone whose leadership recognizes true potential and extracts the absolute best from a person, irrespective of service lines.

His integrity will see him through. This is good news

Do Indians lack civic sense? It would seem so, given the rash of recent events. How true is this characterisation? An examination of the deeper issues at work.

Akash Prakash's grim prognosis for India is important not because there is anything new in it — many of us have been saying this — but that a senior market voice is saying it too. It isn't easy for OPM wallas (to use @kaul_vivek's term) to do such plainspeak.

Everyone in India knows that

Team India Today signs off from #SPIEF2026. President Putin, thank you for the opportunity. St. Petersburg, thank you for being such a good host. Dasvidaniya 🙂 @IndiaToday @aajtak @ITGGlobal

As the Cockroach protest ends, I must say I am amazed at the professional handling of the same by the Delhi Police personnel and others. Did not let the situation escalate, body cameras and own photographers plus full security given to each so called ‘leaders’ individually at the protest site.

I agree with every word @ShekharGupta has written - Indian cities are unliveable and they are greatest destroyers of the Indian brand. They are badly managed, ironically against the poor, the middle class and the rich (who don’t get the quality they deserve for taxes they pay).