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@ActivateSignal • 1,424 subscribers
India needs its own institutions that just don’t participate in AI — they shape it.
Videos
Meesho never built a chatbot. Not once. Vidit explains why on Signal Dialogues: chat isn’t native to how India’s next 500M users shop, so Meesho bet on voice instead a harder problem, but the right one. The results so far: 75% of orders now come from AI recommendations, not search. 70%+ of customer support is AI-handled. Internal "pods" are being restructured so specialists build agents centrally while generalist “builders” ship faster using them with a 1-year goal of a fully autonomous software development lifecycle. Vidit is refreshingly honest about what hasn’t scaled yet and why patience beats hype in consumer AI. Meesho Vidit Aatrey Aakrit Vaish
Activate10,532 views • 26 days ago
Manish Gupta, Senior Director at Google DeepMind India, sits down with Aakrit Vaish and Pratyush Choudhury at Mumbai Tech Week for a rare on-record conversation about the frontier AI research happening out of Bangalore. Gupta makes a pointed case against the narrative that India lacks AI research talent: a team of roughly 75 researchers, a third of them fresh out of college, producing work on par with the best in the world and feeding directly into Gemini. The conversation goes deep on what DeepMind India actually builds, why Gemini is considered the most efficient model on the planet, and what India needs to become a research leader rather than a fast follower. In this conversation, they go deep on: 0:00 Intro: Manish Gupta of DeepMind India at Mumbai Tech Week 1:23 What DeepMind India does, and why it's a "mystery" 1:59 The three roles: languages, efficiency, continual learning 2:19 The Haryanvi demo at Google I/O and the cultural playbook 2:38 Making models efficient: from mobile to servers 3:25 Matryoshka transformers and why nested models win 4:20 Why Gemini is the most efficient model on the planet 5:11 Continual learning: using Gemini to improve Gemini 5:50 Google's India plans: consumers, agents, enterprise, government 7:44 Government officials live-coding with AI Studio and NotebookLM 8:30 The India AI talent debate and how the team is structured 10:25 Why India lacks courage and R&D investment, not talent 11:16 DeepMind's global labs and India's outsized impact 13:15 On-device AI: Gemma 3n and 4n 14:08 The headline: 75 world-class researchers in Bangalore 14:58 25 of the 75 are fresh out of college If you're a founder, builder or researcher thinking about AI, frontier models, or India's place in global AI research, this one's for you. Aakrit Vaish Pratyush Choudhury (PC) Google DeepMind Google India Manish Gupta
Activate14,136 views • 2 months ago
We've been big fans of Drishti Grover and TheBottomLine Podcast , so we were excited to collaborate with her on this conversation. Beyond the podcast itself, we spent time whiteboarding ideas, debating where value will accrue across the AI stack, and discussing what it takes to build enduring AI companies from India. We covered: • Opportunities across the AI stack • AI-native products and distribution • Founder evaluation at the earliest stages • Building AI companies in India • Venture returns, exits, and outcomes Aakrit Vaish Pratyush Choudhury (PC) Soaib Grewal
Activate10,333 views • 2 months ago
In Signal Dialogues #04, we explore what it takes to build the foundational layer of voice AI from the ground up. Karan Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, sits down with Aakrit Vaish to unpack the bet behind one of the most ambitious infrastructure plays in AI. Karan and his co-founders came out of Stanford's AI Lab, where Albert Gu (now Cartesia's Chief Scientist) co-authored Mamba and pioneered State Space Models, the architecture they believe will define the next generation of real-time, interactive AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA with over $120M raised, Cartesia is building voice models engineered for real-time latency and efficiency at scale. If you're a founder, researcher or builder thinking about voice, infrastructure or the next architectural shift in AI, this one's for you. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:46 - What Cartesia Does: Interactive AI Models 03:24 - Founding Story: From Stanford PhDs to Cartesia 04:03 - The Unique Insight: Efficiency and Beyond Transformers 09:07 - Voice Company, Neolab, or Big Lab? 14:57 - State Space Models and Algorithmic Innovation 26:04 - The Four Big Bets in Interactive AI 30:24 - Products, Customers, and Going Full-Stack 41:44 - The BPO Disruption: India's Call Center Future 54:17 - Competition, Moats, and the Long Game Karan Goel Aakrit Vaish Cartesia
Activate12,489 views • 3 months ago
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