Ai can redefine how video content is created. Twenty five years ago, IIT Alumnus Pawan Kumar created a company called Jadooworks. It was a subsidiary of vmoksha.
Pawan was a visionary like few others. He was the first manager of the computer centre at IIT Kanpur. His deputy was Narayan Murthy. Pawan went on to create the export business of a proprietorship firm called Tata Consultancy Services with FC Kohli. Narayan Murthy went to to found Infosys. Pawan then led IBM Global Services and this gave rise to the BpO and IT Services industry in India. He then became the founder Chairman of PanIIT Alumni in 2003 and I had the good fortune of working with him as Chair of the membership committee for the first alumni conclave in 2004.
Jadoo Works wanted to exactly what Ai has managed to do in the clip below. Jadoo Works had three divisions – the first was a computerised telephone operator that spoke in 23 languages. In 2006 it went live and took millions of calls for Tata Teleservices. The second was an animation studio which did work on movies like Kung Fu Panda. The third was an OCR system which could digitise documents and automatically correct exam sheets. Even today, a good twenty years later – ai is addressing these use cases. The issue then was not technology. It was business case. The issue still is not technology.
What has changed is the kind of funding moving in. So much so that the business case does not matter. Today an automated voice attendant still costs more than a human one in India. The reason why jobs are going is not ai. But the need to divert all the money available to ai.
This money has to be moved out of somewhere to become available for ai. And it is leaving places which provide livelihood to go to fund places which may replace livelihood. This is the money lining up the vaults of Nvidia.
The world may change. In future. But it hasn’t as yet. Of course chatgpt is a good search engine. But it takes away the boundary between sponsored content and page ranked search. It even hallucinates.
But coming back to the video clip and the video business.
Computer gaming or interactive gaming is where Nvidia came from. It was supposed to kill movies. It is Netflix and not gaming which is giving the theatres something they hate. Empty seats. And empty seats don’t eat popcorn or drink Coke. And Netflix doesn’t pay per view. Nor does any other OTT.
The first movie to be made by ai was way back in 2008-09. It was called “Life of Pi”. And it was mostly made in India. An IIT peers son – Suraj Sarma – played the lead. The movie had no heroine. And the tiger was ai generated.
Ai is not new. When Prof Jyoti Joglekar became the recipient of the first distinguished fellow award of IIT Alumni Council in 2000 – she had been teaching ai for twenty years. Her software helped Chandrayaan land. When Swami Suryanil 🙏🏻 started the task force on consciousness in ai – he had just celebrated 35 years of completing his PhD in ai.
Ai is not new.
