VP - Marketing and Customer Experience, @Zoho. ❤️ India—SaaS—Coffee—Cooking—Poetry—Uttar Pradesh. Also: beaches, mountains, and villages. Your Zoho guy!
Delhi
Joined December 2007
- Tweets72.6K
- Following2.6K
- Followers18.3K
- Likes3.8K
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
My unfiltered thoughts on personal agents.
Grokbot has the best UI and it’s arguably the best overall. In a lot of ways they’re ahead. Their desktop app feels the best, and their multi-bot coordination is great: you can set a team lead and it passes tasks to the other bots. Grokbot also has the best “webhook” feature, which means you can easily turn outside events into triggers that start your agents. That speeds up background workflows like watching your email, Slack and more. It also has Cursor integration, so for bigger tasks Grokbot can spin up a Cursor cloud session with any model (until OpenAI cuts SpaceX off from their models, which I think will happen soon). Unfortunately, running frontier models through Cursor costs more than Claude or Codex. Still, they’re the only ones embracing a team of agents. It’s a really cool idea, but the more bots you have, the more time you spend managing and maintaining them. I’m starting to think one bot with different threads/channels is the right answer, which I’ll get to with Claude Duet.
dots by OpenAI is rough around the edges right now, but it’s probably the most powerful if you use Codex, which I do. dots can spin up Codex sessions in the cloud or locally on your computer. So if you have coding or video editing workflows that need your local files, this is very useful. Codex computer use is also the best in the world: your dot can spin up a local Codex session that fully controls your computer, as long as it’s on. Their real-time voice is incredible. If you have your email and work tools connected, try this: go on a walk with headphones in, ask the agent to summarize your emails, have it draft replies and read them back to you, then send them off. If I remember right, this is close to a workflow you (Tim) used to have with your VAs before AI. It’s my favorite use case for personal agents. The one downside is that you have to call your agent, and it’s an awful experience. It literally rings, and it’s annoying.
Muse by Meta is a toy. I’ve talked to a bunch of finance people I play poker with who all tried it and set up automations, and they all said it doesn’t reliably do what they want. It’s fast, and its user numbers will probably keep growing. But it’s basically free: you get a TON of usage without paying a dime. That’s NOT a trade I’m willing to make. An agent doing high-leverage tasks should be running at the Opus 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol level.
Claude Duet - is in early access, so unfortunately not everyone can use it yet. First things first, it runs on Opus 5.5, the best model in the world. I’ve only had access for 72 hours, but Duet feels different from the others. It’s not a personified agent like Grokbot, dot or Muse, which gives it a more professional vibe that I like. When you ask your Duet agent to do something, it spins up a task, which is a new chat thread. All your threads show up in a Tasks tab, so it’s easy to see everything Duet is working on or has finished. And instead of creating more agents (like Grokbot), you create channels, just like Slack (I can tell @anthropic is Slack-pilled). I have a content channel, a finances channel, etc., which keeps different kinds of tasks separate. The only other app I’ve seen do this is Buzz by @jack, and it’s a good experience. Their strong point is documents (artifacts). If you want decks, high-quality docs or design mockups, Opus just wins. Period. It’s not close right now. Their weak point is real-time voice. It’s the worst of the bunch and borderline unusable, though I think they only added it a few days ago.
Instinct lives in iMessage, has no app, and doesn’t do anything notable besides show you product suggestions you didn’t ask for. (Not ads, according to their team.)
My hot take:
The VM is overrated. SpaceX, OpenAI and Meta all talk about the VM your agent can use and feature it in their marketing. It’s not as useful as you’d think, because more and more websites block bots that visit their site on the cloud VM. All of these companies promise their agents can make payments, but most payments either take forever or get blocked altogether. SpaceX has a cool workaround with Grokbot that routes traffic through your computer so it uses your IP address. But I’d much rather the agent just USE my computer for the task, like dot does by handing it off to Codex. Also, i don't think normal people care about the virtual computer. If anything they get offended they have to "stream a computer".
The problem with personal agents: by the time you read this, pick one, and test it for 7 days, every one of them will have released 10 new features and the whole landscape will have changed. It’s nearly impossible to keep up.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
It’s a bloodbath in Bay Area. Thousands of layoffs, more to come.
Met a founder this morning who mentioned his AI tech is laying off 2000 call center workers.
Not sure if society is ready for such upheaval. Gut wrenching
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Seeing a lot of growing raw hatred against India, Indians, Hindus, Indian-Americans, etc. for no reason.
Would be happy to have anyone who feels that hatred quietly unfollow me. Simple. Clean. Thanks in advance.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Bad AQI from the neighbourhood. Delhi-Dehradun highway has high smog due to parali burning in and around Baghpat. But i guess news channels are not allowed to venture anywhere near haryana fields.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Flipkart’s board is in an incredibly tough situation right now:
> Leadership exodus: 10+ SVP & CXO level departures since April ‘26 (each with 5+ YOE at FK) incl their CPTO & CFO
> Bad acquisitions: ₹3.2k cr lost on Cleartrip alone over 5 yrs alone after spending ₹300cr to buy the company.
> Core E-Comm business has slowed down (growth is down to ~15% v/s 40% earlier) while it remains unprofitable (₹5k cr+ loss for FY26)
> War of attrition in Quick Commerce: FK was late, invested ₹5.5k cr to build Minutes; losing ₹400 cr per quarter.
> Disgruntled ex-employees: 20k of whom are expected to sign a petition for ESOP liquidity; this is after 5 events have distributed $1.38 bn back to employees.
Our country’s Internet crown jewel is in real trouble ⤵️
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Himachal’s finally getting its first snowfall of the season . It’s snowing in Lahaul Spiti and the upper areas of Himachal Pradesh. Winter is finally here guys 🏔️
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Other companies announce mass layoffs and it’s treated like just another day in tech.
Zoho skips appraisals to protect jobs, and suddenly everyone’s criticizing it.
As an ex-Zoho engineer, I’ve seen firsthand how much the company cares about its employees. Respect for choosing the harder path.
Sridhar has shared the difficult decision we have taken to skip appraisals this year, given the rising costs and uncertain outlook for the software industry. Every software business will be having this discussion and making difficult choices.
These are real-world situations where there is no single right answer. The decision depends on what we choose to prioritise. These are also decisions AI cannot make for us.
During COVID, we made a similar decision. We offered free licences to customers, even though it meant losing revenue. This time, we had to deal with the sharp increase in server costs. We discussed these options internally.
Lay off employees. While layoffs are common across businesses, we felt it wasn't the right choice when our business is still growing. We have over a million customers to support and products to keep improving. Cutting jobs could affect both employees & customers. Instead, we want to reduce costs by focusing on R&D to make our products and infrastructure more efficient.
Reduce other expenses. We have decided to cut our marketing spend and are looking at ways to improve efficiency across the business.
Increase prices. Customers are already dealing with rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty. So we don't want to add to their burden. We want to first do what is in our control before doing this.
Skip appraisal. This was a difficult decision, but we wanted to avoid layoffs and price increases. So we made this tough decision.
As a private company, we have to take care of our customers and employees. Publicly listed companies also have shareholder expectations to consider.
There is no one right decision in these situations. Ultimately, it comes down to what we choose to prioritise and how we balance the needs of our customers, employees and business for the long term.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Sridhar has shared the difficult decision we have taken to skip appraisals this year, given the rising costs and uncertain outlook for the software industry. Every software business will be having this discussion and making difficult choices.
These are real-world situations where there is no single right answer. The decision depends on what we choose to prioritise. These are also decisions AI cannot make for us.
During COVID, we made a similar decision. We offered free licences to customers, even though it meant losing revenue. This time, we had to deal with the sharp increase in server costs. We discussed these options internally.
Lay off employees. While layoffs are common across businesses, we felt it wasn't the right choice when our business is still growing. We have over a million customers to support and products to keep improving. Cutting jobs could affect both employees & customers. Instead, we want to reduce costs by focusing on R&D to make our products and infrastructure more efficient.
Reduce other expenses. We have decided to cut our marketing spend and are looking at ways to improve efficiency across the business.
Increase prices. Customers are already dealing with rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty. So we don't want to add to their burden. We want to first do what is in our control before doing this.
Skip appraisal. This was a difficult decision, but we wanted to avoid layoffs and price increases. So we made this tough decision.
As a private company, we have to take care of our customers and employees. Publicly listed companies also have shareholder expectations to consider.
There is no one right decision in these situations. Ultimately, it comes down to what we choose to prioritise and how we balance the needs of our customers, employees and business for the long term.
The business outlook for software is uncertain and AI has raised costs dramatically with a) massive 4-fold increase in server prices which we need for data centers b) AI usage increasing rapidly, leading to much higher expenses, which we are trying to control.
On top of that is the challenging geopolitical backdrop.
We have cut down on our marketing budget. We have also told our employees that we cannot have our usual pay increase this year. I have apolgized for not being able to avoid this.
We will work hard to avoid mass layoffs but the outlook for software jobs in general is grim. We have not been growing our employee count for 18 months now.
Most of our employees understand the situation. I am thankful to them.
We are in the middle of reinventing ourselves. The next 3-5 years will decide how our reinvention has worked. Please pray for us 🙏
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Marketing 101: An ad should sell a life people want for themselves.
No one wants to be this family.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Unfortunately, we are being blocked by certain oligarchs in order to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people. You can guess who they are …
This is a crime against the people of India!
India needs @Starlink 🇮🇳
• 11,256 of India’s listed villages still lacked 4G coverage as of May 2026.
• India had 1.093 billion internet subscriptions in March 2026, but only 440.87 million were rural. Rural subscription density was 48.31 per 100 people, compared with 126.80 in urban India.
• BharatNet had laid over 850,000 route-km of fibre and made about 221,000 Gram Panchayats service-ready. However, its Points of Presence were reported operational at only 80,472 Gram Panchayats in June 2026.
• Only 4.26% of India’s internet subscriptions were wired connections in March 2026. Starlink could give underserved communities another route to high-speed broadband.
• Starlink has already built 20 gateway sites in India, according to SpaceX Vice President of Starlink Business Operations Lauren Dreyer, speaking at India Mobile Congress today.
• Starlink says it has developed India-specific security controls designed to keep Indian user data within India.
• Its satellite network could bring high-speed internet to remote villages, mountains and islands where extending fibre or mobile networks is difficult.
• Better connectivity could help rural schools access online learning, clinics offer remote consultations and small businesses reach more customers. Starlink already supports education and healthcare in remote communities internationally.
• Portable Starlink terminals have supported disaster response around the world. They could give Indian emergency teams backup connectivity when floods, earthquakes or storms damage ground networks.
• Direct to Cell could also help ordinary 4G phones connect beyond tower coverage, subject to Indian approvals and mobile operator partnerships.
• The government itself identifies difficult terrain, low commercial viability and infrastructure constraints as reasons for remaining coverage gaps. This is exactly where Starlink could help India reach more people.
• India should complete the remaining clearances and spectrum allocation so Starlink can begin commercial service.
• SpaceX’s Vice President of Starlink Business Operations, Lauren Dreyer, said that Starlink is ready to help achieve Prime Minister Modi’s vision of 100% connectivity across India. She highlighted its potential to connect remote classrooms, support telemedicine and restore connectivity after disasters, adding, “With Starlink, people can get connected within minutes, not years.”
India’s hardest-to-reach communities deserve reliable internet too.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Amazon shutting down consumer agent access (now both Muse and Instinct) is both completely rational and a big mistake
They have plausible reasons:
1. Advertising accounts for ~10% of Amazon revenue, but an estimated 50-60% of operating profit because it's so high margin. People purchasing via agents = fewer consumer eyeballs to monetize
2. Amazon knows from experience how dangerous it is to give another platform a lever to ramp up / down your distribution 👀 They've done this to many retailers themselves
3. They are in a very good spot re: near-term defensibility - with ~250M Prime subs (who are habituated to buying on Amazon) + a massive logistics and distribution network that you can't vibe code
However, this logic is short-sighted (IMO). Agents are inevitable, especially for the kind of purchases people make on Amazon (low consideration, frequent, fairly urgent or recurring).
I don't think Amazon is going to come out with a first-class consumer agent on their own...and in the meantime, why anger your valuable users and make them even consider alternatives?
It's almost never a good idea to be on the wrong side of innovation. I'd much rather see them continue to greenlight agent traffic (it's pretty minimal now!) and work on adjusting to an agent-first world in the meantime.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
We are slowly removing coincidence out of our lives. We don't pick a restaurant before even checking the ratings. We don't hear music before the algorithm ever predicts we'll like it. We don't even take a route before maps removes the wrong turn. Barely meet someone even before checking their profile. And none of that is necessarily bad. But that's what makes it interesting because every tool nowadays removes every tiny bit of uncertainty, but uncertainty is where a lot of your favorite memories came from. The place you found by accident, the friend you met because the plans changed. The street you weren't supposed to be on that ended up having the best restaurant you've ever been to. We've optimized our life so well to the point where nothing unexpected ever has room to even happen and a life with no accidents is easier to manage, but it's just harder to remember.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
This was almost way too easy, @natfriedman @alexandr_wang 😮
I turned my Xteink eReader into an always-on Muse pocket display for Calliope (my Muse) to display itself and show status updates.
And this attaches with MagSafe to my phone, so I can always see relevant updates from Muse by just turning my phone around.
The setup flow in the Muse app was super smooth and you can just ask Muse to load or automate content on the display.
I genuinely love the hacker-friendly aspect of this. Well done.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
A salute to flydubai’s brave Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar. Stabbed and wounded, yet he stood his ground. With the courage of "Arjuna" in the face of danger and the resolve of "Hanuman" when duty called, he fought back, opened the cockpit door, and gave the passengers and crew the chance to prevent disaster. He helped save 174 lives.
Tonight, from the UAE to India to Israel, people are united in gratitude, wishing Captain Machchhar a swift and full recovery.
A hero to his passengers, to aviation, and to people everywhere.
Salute, Captain.
Praval Singh 🇮🇳 retweeted
Never forget the words the western press used for what happened in the cockpit.
