Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Rapid deployment of AI in scientific pursuits is creating an assembly line of discoveries that is revolutionising the world, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. “The assembly line is a revolutionary manufacturing process that transformed production methods during the Industrial Revolution,” ChatGPT began. “It involves a product moving along a conveyor belt or track, with workers or machines at each station performing specific tasks to gradually assemble the final product. “This method significantly increased efficiency, reduced costs, and enabled mass production.” As this article discusses two seemingly disparate subjects—Assembly Line (AL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—I thought it’d be interesting to let one…

In a world where robots fold laundry, is it too disconcerting to have one come for Olympics gold, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi In 2023, a reel showing a robot crushing a human at table tennis got 114 million views. The video was a deepfake. But hold onto your circuit boards because 2025 is about to serve up something even better. We’re entering an era where robots won’t just be Amazon’s warehouse workers; they’ll cook dinner for you, tuck your child to bed, and maybe actually become your ping-pong buddies. With major tech companies from Boston to Beijing rolling out household…

We no longer need to have mere Robot Dreams as robots with AI are truly becoming our dream machines, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Remember when we all lost our minds watching Boston Dynamics’ Spot dance to BTS? Well, hold onto your hats because 2025 is about to make that look like a wind-up toy. The robot revolution isn’t coming – it’s already here, and it’s way cooler (and less dystopian) than sci-fi would have us believe. As Dr. Alfred Lanning said in I, Robot, “There have always been ghosts in the machine.” But now, those ghosts, as AI, are making…

AI has a big problem – data shortage, and it could quickly gobble up innovation, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines the solutions being cooked in the pressure cookers called AI companies Data is the new oil, they said, so they scraped websites old and new. Then they came for Reddit threads, Facebook Posts and Twitter feeds. When that wasn’t enough, they even took YouTube videos, e-books and newspapers. To do what: create ‘big data’ to train bigger AI. But guess what, despite burning fossil fuels for hundreds of years, we haven’t yet run out. But data to train,…

Following the phenomenal progress of AI in 2024, the general public is likely to enter 2025 with a sense of yawning boredom towards AI. And that is just as it should be, thinks Satyen K. Bordoloi. On February 15, OpenAI announced its text-to-video model, Sora, along with some impressive videos. The world was in awe of the video quality. In mid-June, Luma and Kuaishou Technology launched DreamMachine and Kling, respectively, prompting a social media frenzy as people uploaded videos created using these models. However, there was no significant buzz when Google launched Veo 2 on December 17 with mindbogglingly surreal…

AI hallucinations have been the bane of every generative AI company, but after major scientific breakthroughs, an increasing chorus of scholars are rooting for it, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. In the world of humans, hallucinations are said to be responsible for some of the greatest works of inspiration, leading to great art and science. The concept of microdosing on hallucinogens is known among scientists and artists alike. However, as one of my viral articles for Sify attests, generative AI companies want to have nothing to do with hallucinations. Yet, a rising chorus of voices is beginning to argue that it…

The embargo on advanced chips imposed by the US on China has proven to be a blessing in disguise for AI development there, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. Filmmaking changed forever in the first half of June 2024. On the 10th of that month, Kuaishou Technology announced Kling—a free text-to-video creation AI program. Though OpenAI had announced and teased Sora on February 15th, most of the videos they showcased were enhanced by VFX, and it wouldn’t be released for another 10 months. People only began to create stunning AI videos via Kling and DreamMachine, launched by Luma on June 12th. Whenever…

NVIDIA has again supercharged the AI landscape with their latest JONaS chip. But why do we need AI-specific chips in the first place, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi. Earlier this year, a generative AI startup I worked for faced a common dilemma: a shortage of AI chips. Ideally, we should have had several running on an in-house server, but even securing AI chip time as a Software as a Service (SaaS) at a reasonable rate was a struggle. These chips, building blocks of the future and each with more transistors than the total produced in the world during the 1970s, have…

Much tomfoolery and chicanery is going on in reporting what Google’s new quantum chip, Willow, can do. Satyen K. Bordoloi attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff. Google’s recent announcement of their Willow quantum computing chip has, to put it mildly, made the world go bonkers. And why wouldn’t it? Google claims in its blog/press release/announcement that “Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.” Mind blown, right? But what does this…

Google has unintentionally been sawing off the branch it sits on, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi, as he profiles the future of search and advertising in the age of AI. Since its advent, the Internet has been a slave to our patience. In 1999, when I first started using the internet search, I heard of people finding their soulmates while waiting for pages to load. Google revolutionized this experience with its lightning-fast searches, making impatience the new norm and dominating both the search and ad markets. Today, though, Google’s search and advertising businesses are on shaky ground, facing challenges from a…