Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Susan Wojcicki slipped away into the night, a quiet departure for a woman who gave millions a voice through YouTube. As Satyen K. Bordoloi pieces together her extraordinary life, he’s struck by the stark contrast between her public legacy and her private existence. In September 1998, a newlywed Susan Wojcicki, working at Intel, crossed paths with two Stanford PhD students. A shared passion for technology, ignited by her Stanford upbringing, created an instant connection. The students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were searching for a workspace to nurture their nascent search engine. Struggling to make ends meet in their newly…

The discovery of an ancient artefact in Africa, throws into the bin how old we thought we were, opening the door to some exciting new ideas about our species writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. “Our whole universe was in a hot, dense stateThen nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, waitThe earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to droolNeanderthals developed toolsWe built a wall (we built the pyramids)Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteriesThat all started with the big bang (bang)” This intro song to the series The Big Bang Theory is one of the briefest explanations of our origins. But…

With Strawberry, OpenAI aims to complete their GenAI ‘Quadrinity,’ writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines what it could mean for Artificial Intelligence specifically, and the world generally. For AI doomsayers of the Terminator and Matrix variety, the very combination of the words Artificial and Intelligence signifies a level of logic and reasoning ability found only in humans. Those who either code AI or study it beyond anthropomorphic fears know that even when AI manages to do a surprising quantity of tasks, basic tasks that even a toddler can do elude it. Training AI to achieve human-level reasoning is thus…

Companies are realizing that the cost of cloud computing could outweigh the benefits, leading many to migrate to localized servers, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. Faced with a financial crunch, Elon Musk did what only he could: : pulled the plug on a backup cloud server of Twitter in Sacramento to save $100 million. Since then, I’ve noticed my Twitter getting glitchy, but the savings it has brought about in the company justify it for Musk. Something not entirely different is happening across the world when it comes to cloud computing. As per this BBC report, US-based 37signals, which has millions…

Within just two months of the first text-to-video tool being launched to the public, high-quality ads and short films are already being made on AI. Satyen K. Bordoloi scopes the field and argues that with AI filmmaking, we are at the next Lumière brothers’ moment. On March 22, 1895, the Lumière Brothers showed the world the first ‘moving images’. They travelled the world showcasing their invention. A few years later, short films began to be made and shown using the technology, and about two decades later, feature-length films entered the zeitgeist. Could the Lumière brothers ever have even imagined that…

Scientists have reversed advanced heart failure in animals using gene therapy, giving hope to what many believe will happen soon: living 120 to 150 productive years, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Ray Kurzweil, the world’s most renowned futurist, has made accurate predictions about technology more times than most. He foresaw the triumph of computers over humans in chess, the exponential increase in computational power inversely proportional to cost, and the global exchange of information via what we now know as the internet. Among his many predictions, two are yet to materialize: singularity by 2045 and immortality by 2030. At 76, Kurzweil…

An AI has been put on the ballot in the UK; two more are out there. What does this mean for politics and AI, and could we have an AI President or PM soon, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi. Those of us who report on AI, especially the trend of anthropomorphisation of AI, saw this coming. That it came under 2 years of generative AI bursting into the world, is quick. In the soon-to-be-held elections in the UK, a candidate has put his own AI avatar in as a candidate on the ballot. Though it sounds like a gimmick, this could…

Like AI today, Metaverse and Crypto were hyped a few years ago but didn’t live up to it. Satyen K. Bordoloi scrutinises AI to see if it has, or can. Two years ago, buoyed on successfully defeating a pandemic, the world was riding high on two technologies: Metaverse and Cryptocurrencies. The number of online and offline publications dedicated to crypto had never been seen for any technology as every Tom, Wick and Sally claimed crypto would change the world. The Metaverse so enthused Facebook, that they renamed themselves Meta and have spent above $46 billion while generating just $6 billion.…

Apple joined the AI bandwagon by integrating OpenAI’s offering in their operating system, but is it the right approach, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi as he analyses if this is the iAI we’ve all been waiting for. On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. However, a day earlier he had overseen the launch of Siri, which Jobs wanted to be more than a voice on all Apple products. What is a voice without a brain? But as I have argued earlier, Jobs was hedging his bets on developing AI to go with Siri. Siri was always supposed to be…

The cliché that the world needs more power, finds original solutions; some border on the fantastic, others – absurd, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Talking of the world needing more energy, we only think of consumer devices – laptops, mobiles, tablets etc. What we don’t realise is that, increasingly, all these devices run on things that run on systems hundreds to thousands of miles away. Endless data farms today house everything from data centers for your photos and documents to the information that’s guiding you out of a traffic jam via a mapping app. This backend, from data servers and farms…