Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

A new chatbot outperforms doctoral researchers at literature reviews, and could end up being the secret weapon science has been waiting for, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi PhD students have it tough. No matter how bright they are, they have to drown years not just into research, but in a sea of thousands of scientific papers, oscillating between dreams and dread. Part of the job involves conducting a literature review, as students spend weeks meticulously combing through existing research for their dissertations. But, often, they discover they missed something, like a crucial paper published in a journal they’ve never heard of,…

Forget spyder-cam in a cricket match because AI is making the impossibility of an infinite-cam possible, helping us see a single shot from an endless barrage of angles, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi The spyder-cam, when it was introduced in cricket, gave fans a view to die for. The camera was literally in the players’ faces, taking us so close that it made us love the game even more. Yet I remember my irritation when an opposition player’s ball was caught by one of ours, but the catch was invalidated because they had touched the spyder-cam cable on its way up…

Forget poetry writing, DeepSeek, the real Chinese AI revolution does backflips, and is headed for homes across the world, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Remember that viral video of a robot playing table tennis with unnerving precision and grace, and winning a point? That one was fake; it was just a robot juxtaposed over a human. However, just two and a half years later, we are at the cusp of that near-parlour trick deep-faked by an AI video tool, turning real. And I didn’t believe it at all when I first saw it. Right on the first day of the India…

As Anthropic accuses Chinese companies of distillation, people direct them towards their own billions of dollars worth lawsuit for stealing entire libraries, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi There is never a boring day in the world of AI. Right on the tails of the fun and fiascos at the India AI Impact Summit that kept the world hooked for a week comes another right on cue. This time, Galgotias takes a back seat as Anthropic takes centre stage. On the 23rd, the company best known for its Claude AI model posted a lengthy blog post and an X thread accusing three…

They are the mothers of our species, but in not being allowed to be mothers of AI, will have an adverse effect on the world, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi AI is just a computer with intelligence: it’s not supposed to discriminate as humans do. Yet, over a decade ago, when Amazon engineers developed an experimental AI tool for recruiting, the system penalised resumes that had words like “women’s” (such as “women’s chess club captain” or “women’s basketball team”), downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, and consistently favoured male candidates. Despite attempts to correct this bias, Amazon eventually abandoned the project…

Starting today, social media platforms will have just three hours to remove unlawful content or risk losing their legal shield. Is this a masterstroke for online safety or the death knell for digital freedom? asks Satyen K. Bordoloi. When Rashmika Mandanna’s deepfake video went viral on social media at the end of 2023, the nation went into a tizzy. People spoke out. The authorities moved to arrest the creator. And the zeitgeist was against such violations. But just 2 years later, as AI tech has improved dramatically, I see on Instagram, deepfakes of almost every female Indian actress, doing all…

SpaceX and xAI want to lift entire data centres off Earth and into orbit, doing it easier fantasised than done, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Those born before the Internet era think that “data in the cloud” literally means your data rests somewhere in the sky. So far, it was a joke. But if Elon Musk and a few others have it their way, your data would actually live even beyond the clouds, up in the sky. By merging his rocket company, SpaceX, and his AI venture, xAI, Elon Musk wants to enter sci-fi territory: he wants to build a constellation…

Within days of release, Clawdbot became a sensation, delivering both the promise of productivity and a security nightmare, while giving a glimpse of our agent-run future writes Satyen K. Bordoloi This seems like it could become a January AI tradition for the world: a new AI tool launches, spreads faster than a pandemic, and grabs our collective imaginations. Last January, DeepSeek’s efficiency sent US stock markets plunging into a nose-dive. This year, that honour has fallen to an agentic AI system that many are calling the best personal assistant so far. It can do everything from booking your flight and…

Generative AI is often villainised as something that will dumb people down. But new tools from AI companies are doing just the opposite, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi The 1990s were an exciting time to be a teenager. New studies and advances in learning were teaching us, kids, how to learn better. One of the key findings was the use of Mind Maps, which you used to create visual maps of a topic to better understand and remember it. The idea was that engaging the mind’s visual part would make learning better and faster. 30 years later, generative AI companies seem…

South Korea’s AI Basic Act can be looked at as both a bold first step in AI governance and also a move that could stifle AI development, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi In a hugely polarised world that we live in, if there is one thing about which there is near-perfect agreement, it is that everyone, besides the tech-bros of the world, wants AI to be regulated. Yet every attempt to do so has failed. Until now. Because, recently South Korea became the first country to pass a comprehensive law to regulate AI. On January 22, a law came into force…