Product Guy. Thinker. Tinkerer. Founder at https://xitter.gq/t.co/TrfpU82weP
Helsinki, Finland
Joined June 2010
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Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Call center jobs grew ~4% annually for 15 years
Now they’re shrinking 4% annually
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/this-week-in-cha…
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
People want Jarvis.
Or an AI version of Alfred.
They want Jarvis/Alfred to handle all mundane details in their life, and we are nearing that.
Right now, they have localized chat and decent agents that still struggle with basics but are on the trajectory.
This is one of the biggest barriers to adoption for consumer agents.
Most everyday people look at a blank text box and have no idea what they can even ask AI to do. Agents should be proactively suggesting tasks based on your context.
So well articulated from @gdb 👇
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
The Chinese president stood on a stage in Shanghai and laid out China's entire AI playbook in one speech.
It was his first-ever in-person appearance at the World AI Conference. I went through the whole thing and pulled out everything that matters.
- he opened with his signature maxim that great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world.
- he said AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation.
- he reaffirmed China's commitment to open source AI in the name of openness and shared benefit.
- he warned against overstretching the concept of national security in AI, where one country puts its own security above everyone else's.
- he said China opposes the emergence of new historical injustices in AI, one of the strongest-worded lines in the speech.
- he pledged 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years, naming ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the SCO, and BRICS.
- he committed to giving 30 countries access to a Chinese AI weather system that provides early disaster warnings.
- a day before the speech, 29 countries signed the agreement creating a new World AI Cooperation Organization headquartered in Shanghai.
strip away the politics and one thing stands out to me. he didn't pitch benchmarks or chatbots. he pitched AI as infrastructure, weather warnings for countries that lose thousands of lives to storms they never saw coming, and training programs for regions the AI boom has skipped.
meanwhile most of the Western AI conversation revolves around which lab ships the next frontier model.
I don't care who wins the race. I care whether the computing power reaches the people who need it.
The full speech is below, and it's worth your time.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
The benefits of GLP-1 drugs extend far beyond weight loss, especially in a country like India.
Given India’s high burden of metabolic disease, wider adoption as these drugs become more affordable and go off patent could trigger a significant wave of usage and significant second order effects.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Subscription plans are massively subsidized.
And by massively, I mean absurdly:
Claude Max 20x: $200/month, with usage reportedly worth around $8,000
ChatGPT Pro 20x: $200/month, with usage reportedly worth around $14,000
Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
LIQUIDITY: Bill Maris on Broken VC Math and Google's Secret Weapon Against OpenAI and Anthropic
(0:00) Bill Maris joins the Besties!
(0:33) Four critical lessons from a career in technology
(5:58) Building Google Ventures with data and machine learning
(9:51) Why small VC funds beat big ones on average
(14:36) OpenAI's valuation problem and the coming AI price war
(19:09) AI is at the "Atari Stage": what comes next?
(25:23) VC's broken incentives and the future of deep tech
Thanks to our partners for making this possible!
EY (@EYnews) - Agentic AI is introducing a new investment discipline. As AI shifts to consumption-based models, EY connects spend to enterprise value.
ey.com/en_us/insights/ai/age…
NYSE (@NYSE) - Thank you to our partner, the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE.
nyse.com
Plaud (@PLAUDAI) - Never miss a moment. Plaud, our official wearable AI note-taking partner at All-In Liquidity Summit, captured every insight.
plaud.ai
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Is Anthropic altering model performance to force costly upgrades? Chapter Co-Founder and CEO @CobiBGantz outlines a shift his team recently noticed:
"Anthropic has kind of taken a page out of the Apple playbook, where they have...decreased the quality of the prior models right before they launched the new model, so that the new model feels better."
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
From "System of Record" to "System of Intelligence"
In the next decade, you want to own the system of intelligence that pulls from the system of record, becomes the user’s one-stop shop for gaining context and taking action, and turns the SoR into something that’s primarily consumed at the API layer.
The reasoning layer that sits above the database is where a new generation of companies is being built, and it’s where the majority of the next decade’s enterprise value of GTM software will end up.
Full piece from a16z's Gio Ahern, Steph Zhang, and Alex Immerman: a16z.news/p/from-system-of-r…
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity.
This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
we're starting rollout of GPT-5.5-Cyber, a frontier cybersecurity model, to critical cyber defenders in the next few days.
we will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for cyber; we want to rapidly help secure companies/infrastructure.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Our approach to hiring is a little different.
We value slope over credentials, judgment over polish, and real work over interviews.
Here’s what the process looks like:
linear.app/now/how-we-hire-a…
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude.
Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
An under-discussed, unfortunate aspect of rapidly rising up the PM & Eng ladders in tier 1 tech companies is that it tends to correlate with more closed mindedness, hierarchical thinking, career envy, new fears, and a constant sense of unease. The art changes the artist.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
We have made the hard decision to shut down bluelearn and return 70% of the capital we raised back to investors.
Bluelearn has been a very unusual startup. Shreyans and I started it back in 3rd year of college as a Telegram group that suddenly grew to 10,000 members, and soon, we went on to build India's largest student community of over 250,000 members. Our mission was to create an online university that levelled the playing field and allowed students studying in tier-2,3 colleges to access opportunities to learn, network, earn and get exposure similar to students at a BITS or an IIT.
We hired a team energised by the same mission, and raised ~$4Mn from some incredible VCs like 100X, Titan, Elevation, and Lightspeed and angels. In the following 3 years, we helped 1000s of students get internships and land jobs, start their own startups, find co-founders, make friends on the internet, and built a wholesome community. As a team, witnessing the impact of what we built was wonderful.
However, we realised that building a venture-scale business with bluelearn was tough. We had been very conservative with capital, allowing us to return 70% of the capital we raised back to investors.
Shout out to our team: Shreyans and I are super proud of the team we were able to build and share this journey with. Our team had college dropouts, stand-up comedians, podcasters, and some of the most incredible people I've met in my life. They all worked super hard to make sure that students across India got access to equal opportunities to learn, network and earn. I'd watch out for what Bluelearn's alumni get up to next.
My co-founder Shreyans has to be the best thing that happened to me at BITS Goa. He's helped me become a better person and, most importantly, was there during my lowest times. Kenan and Vinit have been there for me since the Goa times and I’ve seen them evolve and become best at their craft.
I am grateful and have immense respect for all the incredible VCs and angels who took a bet on two college kids. They gave us an incredible launchpad and have always been supportive.
Finally, I'd encourage more people to start up and build in India, for India and for the world. We need more people to take risks and try out ideas that seem absurd. It's okay if you fail. I'm excited to share that a few of my teammates at bluelearn have gone on to found their own startups.
Bluelearn was an impactful chapter, but it is time to move on to our next one.
Ashwin Rajan retweeted
Gemini 1.5 Pro's 1,000,000+ token context length is incredible.
I got early access and spent my Saturday night running tests.
Here are 6 impressive capabilities I found:
