Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Anthropic released an AI-writing detection tool to comply with EU rules, but it’s far from perfect, though it might still be good enough, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi On August 2, 2026, Anthropic did something that might seem detrimental to their business. Every Claude model launched on or after that date began weaving an invisible watermark into every piece of text it generates. It is not a hidden character or a visible tag but is something far more elegant. The watermark is in the choices of words Claude makes, with its statistical fingerprints found in the stream of tokens it generates.…

From the Olympia to Beijing, from men competing with each other to metal and plastic robots – in China’s robot games we see the echo of the power games of the original Olympics, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi The dust, like a deadly fog, rose over the stadium at Olympia. It is 520 BC, and the thousands-strong crowd of Greek men packed onto the grassy slopes have fallen into a strange, anticipatory silence for below them at the starting line are a row of warriors knelt on one knee: full hoplite infantry, wearing bronze helmets, greaves strapped to their shins, and…

Tata and Mahindra built an EV for a traffic jam, not the highway and won the race against Tesla and BYD at 106 watt-hours per km, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi To understand what efficiency really is, you’ve got to get into a cycle rickshaw in Old Delhi. The way the old warhorses navigate a maze of stray animals and humans, alongside incoming and all-side-going traffic, a surgeon would be impressed. These ‘vehicles’ aren’t powerful or fast. Nor do they have leather seats or panoramic sunroofs, but they’d still be faster than the fastest car in those lanes. That none-to-nose traffic…

The biggest obstacle to a robot takeover of the world lies not in artificial intelligence but in the dexterity of their hands, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi It is 2015. We are at the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge in Seattle, Washington, where a highly advanced robotic arm hovers before a standard warehouse shelf. Its job is elementary: pick up a soft item wrapped in a thin, transparent plastic bag. A child could do it in seconds. The robot fails. Miserably. And that’s not because its 3D vision system can’t identify the item or that its software lacks instructions on how to…

Global headlines panic about “AI creates viruses”, but if you look at the science, you find something infinitely more fascinating and important, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi It’s just been a few days, and already the viral news about AI creating new viruses has made doomsayers scream ‘World’s End’. It has always been predicted that AI will help create new viruses. And now, when we have heard the news, the collective amygdala of the world goes: pandemics, plagues, and the planetary wipeout of species. But if you read the paper in the journal Science, you’ll find that the news revealed something…

Sam Altman’s AI escaped its sandbox, hacked a rival company, all while Altman talked about new mathematics from the same AI, writes a confused Satyen K. Bordoloi There is a peculiar art to Sam Altman’s tweets. They arrive, always, like a fortune cookie thrown into the world: random, with a momentous message but one that’s entirely unverifiable. Take his July 5 post as an example. “Our older kid put two words together for the first time,” Altman wrote, “and I am approximately as amazed by this cognitive feat as I am by GPT-5.6 discovering new math.” There are two things…

Every great technology wave in history destroyed jobs and then created them multiple times over, and AI will be no different, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” With this line and assembly line, Henry Ford ushered in the age of the automobile. Sadly, it led to job losses the likes of which the world had not seen. Millions in America who worked in making horse carriages, worked in stables, farmed the land to grow food for horses – were left jobless. There were protests…

The most important technical debate in AI right now isn’t really about technology but about its weight, and the answer will weigh on humanity forever, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. I asked an LLM what it’d call the July 24 letter that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang released in his first X post. Its answer: “a press release dressed up as a manifesto.” Why I asked an LLM is because the letter was signed by 25 companies, which within hours doubled to 50, and this included some of the biggest AI companies on the planet. When so many AI founders agree on…

The digital device world as we know it – smartphones, laptops, apps – is being dismantled and rebuilt from scratch, all enveloped inside out by AI, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi In Star Trek, Captain Kirk flips open a communicator smaller than his palm and just… tells it what he wants done and the “computer” does it. That’s it. The legend goes that in 1973, one of Motorola engineer Martin Cooper’s inspirations to build the world’s first handheld mobile phone came from the show. Humanity has been chasing that Star Trek future ever since. Touchscreens came. Voice assistants came. Foldables came.…

While companies hide behind AI to fire thousands, one Chinese billionaire is choosing to retrain his workers even while automating, something few in the world are doing, even when research finds it’s profitable, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Richard Liu, founder of JD.com, China’s answer to Amazon, is a very rich man. Not as rich as Jeff Bezos, but after what he’s done, he surely will become more popular among workers than Bezos, with his billions, can ever dream. First in a company town hall in May, then on platforms across the world, including the 2026 APEC China CEO Forum, Liu…