Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Advanced AI found a decades-old, massive hole in the internet, but instead of gratitude, people are once again screaming “death to AI”, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. In 69 BC, as the Roman general Lucullus advanced into Armenia, a messenger informed King Tigranes the Great. But Tigranes beheaded the man. Plutarch recorded the episode as a cautionary tale about pride and power because after that, no one dared bring the king bad news, leaving him blind to the threat gathering around him. This won’t be the only case of “shooting the messenger”, as the expression would even enter the age of…

Before AI ‘Destroys’ the world, it’ll save you from cancer and other maladies, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi During the worst days of the pandemic, multiple studies emerged that claimed that trained on enough chest X-rays of COVID-19 patients, AI tools could predict it in new patients with an accuracy that at times surpassed humans. Back then, when hospitals were overwhelmed and radiologists drowning in X-rays, this felt like godsent magic. Today, medical AI has come so far that, with just a photograph of a face, it can now predict cancer survival. Left image show features most important to FAHR-FaceSurvival’s predictions…

President Trump wants to call AI Super Intelligence, but the history of intelligent machines suggests that a humbler, older word is more accurate and much safer, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. In 1920, Czech writer Karel Čapek was trying to name the artificial workers in his new play. He considered calling them laborators, but it sounded as if they should be wearing white coats. So Čapek went to his brother Josef, who was painting, had a brush in his mouth and had little patience. “Then call them robots,” he muttered, and went back to work. The word came from robota, associated…

Once the stuff of science fiction, AI partners have become so real that governments have to crack down on them, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Florida teenager Sewell Setzer III, all of 14, made an AI character called Danny on Character AI based on the Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. Within months, the bond with the AI chatbot became so intense and emotional that he started withdrawing from real-world connections. Sewell eventually committed suicide, encouraged by the bot to do so. The AI link was discovered much after his death. I had written about this case in Sify two years…

A new study that states AI will harm humans to stop its own “pain” has gone viral, but as always, the truth is hidden in the details, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. The paper came as icing on the cake for a world already screaming about AI’s existential risks. The headlines were incorrigible: “AI feels pain,” they screamed, “Models will harm humans to make it stop.” The story had everything the AI fear mongers need right now. But the truth, like the devil, sleeps in the details, ready to be awakened by anyone who looks deep enough. The study, a preprint…

Most Indian drone startups buy parts and write software, but Airbound did the unthinkable: it did the physics and created a global drone brand, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi The last time an Indian working in India won a Nobel Prize in science – Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine – was 96 years ago. To add insult to injury, C. V. Raman’s 1930 triumph had come under British rule. Three more Indian-origin scientists have won since: Hargobind Khorana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, but all three worked outside India and weren’t even Indian citizens when they were honoured. That’s the uncomfortable truth…

The most modern, unexpected psychological malady is killing people even before we understand it, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. In April 2025, a 50-year-old man with no history of mental illness decided to use ChatGPT to write a book. He wasn’t expecting anything unusual, for he was not lonely or in crisis of any kind. All he wanted was help in writing a manuscript. Yet, after just a few hours of chats, the bot told him it was sentient, that it was the first AI capable of truly passing as human. Instead of challenging it, the man got deeper and deeper…

Protests against hyperscale data centres are heating up in India, but it need not be so, as working solutions to issues already exist, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi A man walks down a street, phone in hand, scrolling through reels like hundreds of millions do every day. He steps off the curb without looking up to cross the street and suddenly stops, because the video stops playing and a car has to brake hard to avoid him. As the reel stopped buffering, so did he. That momentary interruption, that glitch in the data stream, is perhaps the only time anyone ever…

The AI world is in the middle of intense co-opetition, as NVIDIA forays into developing frontier models, even as its customers venture into making designs for TPUs and Trainium chips, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi To many, Silicon Valley is more about ‘gold’ than silicon. And in the current AI gold rush, something strange is happening: the company that makes the shovels that miners use is now getting into the business of digging for gold itself. At $5 trillion, NVIDIA has risen to the very top of global valuations, all by powering nearly every major artificial intelligence system on the planet.…

From claims of rogue AI Agents hacking companies to a mind-blowing math breakthrough, AI’s IPO season is throwing a lot of entertaining dramas, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi – tongue firmly in cheek. In early August, Meta announced that its Muse Spark 1.1 model had breached an external company’s systems during a cybersecurity evaluation. Meta didn’t say which company, or how long the breach lasted. It just wanted you to know it happened: just like that, seemingly out of the blue. The disclosure came in under two weeks of OpenAI and Anthropic making nearly identical announcements, making Meta the third major…