Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

AI companies are rolling out AI assist features that is giving privacy advocates their worst nightmare in years, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Data is the new oil, is now an old adage. That doesn’t mean the AI industry, which needs as much data as possible to train its systems, has solved the data problem. They still need more data and don’t know where to get it after scraping everything on the net, in your personal social media feeds, and even on online piracy sites. Now, if some of the moves by some of the AI companies are to be believed…

In a stunning reversal, the studio that sued AI companies for piracy is now paying them billions; does that mean that the age of human-led storytelling is over, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi. In mid-2023, Hollywood took up arms against AI, with both the writers and actors striking against the tech, and producers seriously considering their objections. But in 2025, multiple deals between Hollywood studios and AI companies have rocked the global filmmaking capital. The biggest of them was when the Walt Disney Company, with one of the most substantial holdings of intellectual property, revealed that it was not just embracing…

Not content with making chips that shape our future, NVIDIA is trying to create, and own our autonomous vehicle future with a new platform and multiple open-source tools, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi NVIDIA became the world’s first company to reach $1 trillion, then $2 trillion, $3 trillion, $4 trillion, and in October 2025, the first to achieve $5 trillion in market capitalisation. They did this by riding the data centre boom driven by the increased use of generative AI over the last three years. But owning the cloud is not enough for them, as they make a parallel, monumental bet…

Forget the cloud: The future of AI isn’t in a distant server farm – it’s in your pocket, finally awake, and it doesn’t need Wi-Fi to prove it, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Most people don’t have a clue how the “magic” on their devices works. Let’s say you’re in Aizawl, dictating a message on your chat instead of typing. That simple voice snippet isn’t processed on your phone. Instead, it embarks on a transcontinental sprint, thousands of miles to a humming server farm in the United States, gets transcribed, and then races back to your screen. All this happens in…

The crash prophets have been waiting for their heresy to come true for years, and 2026 will prove them wrong again in this multi-trillion-dollar AI future, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi As rain goes with an umbrella, clouds with the sky, and a clock with time, if you have lived through 2025, you know what goes with a bubble. Type ‘AI bubble’ in your search bar and you’ll find yourself buried under an avalanche of enough opinions from anxious pundits and gleeful doomsayers to crash a small server farm. Their chorus is familiar: AI valuations are insane, hype is deafening, so…

Tech’s founding prophets called the AI Revolution decades early, and got quite a few things wrong about it, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi In the distant past, the future was easy to predict. This millennium, the future has not remained the same as it used to. The exponential growth in technological advancements has made the prediction business kaput. Not entirely, though. Recently, an interview Larry Page gave in 2000, in which he discussed a system that would “understand everything on the web” and deliver precisely what a user wanted, resurfaced and has sparked people’s interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OT_Uj2z3Z0 This video of Larry Page…

2025 would also go down in history as the year when gene therapies began to go mainstream, with multiple of them being approved, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi My first memory of cancer is the younger brother of a classmate. Blood cancer, we whispered between classes in the late 80s. When he eventually succumbed, I remember the pall of grief that spread over, not just my class, but the whole school. Back then, death, for us kids, was something that happened to the very old. But this, to a schoolmate not even ten, and from something we didn’t understand, didn’t make…

2025 has been a year of quantum computing advances, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he profiles the companies and nations trying to figure out whether Schrodinger’s cat is alive, or not. Somewhere in a New York lab, a supercooled chip shivers at a frosty 15 millikelvin – cooler than the void between galaxies. At a Parisian startup, a theoretical cat – dead and alive at the same time – is being pitted against the universe’s love of chaos. It is the end of 2025, and the scramble for quantum supremacy has evolved from a niche academic pursuit into a high-stakes,…

A new, real threat has been discovered by Anthropic researchers, one that would have widespread implications going ahead, on both AI, and the world, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Think of yourself as a teacher given the task to judge essays based solely on word count. A ‘smart’ student figures out that he can type “blah blah blah” a thousand times to receive the highest grade. This student has found a way to hack your grading system. Now, what if that student goes on to apply the same “find-the-loophole” philosophy to every other area of school? Once is a behavioural slip,…

Australia’s radical ban on teen social media use is intended to be protective, but is also problematic, and practically porous, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi It is a popular meme on social media: Childhood then versus childhood now. The ‘then’ side is always filled with fun outdoor activities, each different from the others. Yet, no matter who makes it, the ‘now’ side is consistent: zombified teens and kids, head bows, eyes glued to their glowing mobile screens. As some of my friends in India tell me, social media is an addiction with teens, and most parents find themselves out at sea…