Bharat Gen is sovereign backed science
Structured as a grant funded non-profit
Science is never ever a bubble
For the first time in the history of mankind, we are at the edge of a disruption, the like of which we have not seen before. Technology has created ai which is now way more powerful than human intelligence.
The only thing it lacks is consciousness.
Other than that scale up now I s only about pumping in more money, building better chips and building capacity. This is all organic stuff. It is no different from the internet. And for investors, the internet was a bubble. But for the average user it was disruptive.
The Internet delivered or rather exceeded on every single promise. The smartphone is really a phone with internet. And smartphones deliver ai to the common man.
Internet was a bubble for investors. But it is niether a scam nor bad science. It is transformative technology. But nothing is instantaneous. Science takes time. Money accelerates science. And bubbles draw money very quickly. Bubbles do not taper. They burst.
Anytime invented Internet video way back in 1999. It raised close to USD 100m. Investors included all the Hollywood studios. But it took twenty years for Netflix to commercialise it successfully. It also took Fraunhofer thirty years to develop mp3 and mp4 compression. But then Anytime also created Dune Entertainment Fund and Dune went on to produce Avatar and Life of Pi. Both had a distinct Indian angle. Anytime Pictures itself morphoned into a r&d company based in India. Their media arm conceived of some incredible brand names from Howdy Modi to IIT Alumni Council to Digital India (and the Digital India Fund).
Anytime actually invented what we now call foundational ai models or LLM and Large image models. That is how Life of Pi was made way back in 2009 with a non-existent tiger. It had no heroine and a IIT batchmates son as the hero. Consumer ai services still struggle to deliver “Life of Pi” quality videos. The journey from Life of Pi to the 5.5 trillion parameter Google Gemini has taken fifteen years and maybe USD 250 Billion.
So science is niether instantaneous nor cheap. Ai will transform our life. It won’t happen overnight and it won’t happen without money. If investor euphoria takes over sanity – it will be a investor bubble. But not for progress.
But scientific progress is never a bubble. Just like UIUC & Vikram Adve made the ubiquitous mobile app, IIT Bombay will make a new generation of ai happen. It may not make a better 10 trillion parameter foundational model. But it will do things that solve real problems.
Yesterday I got to use the Ayurveda Revisited Ai which complements the Ayurveda Revisited book which is part of the IIT Alumni Council series on Amazon.
It fundamentally alters how we navigate and consume content. The ai lets you pull out relevant material from the book. And also helps you to research across all ayurveda books. And where required compare with modern science.
