AI/Machine Learning, Bharat and Bhartiya IT Industry

[Amber G.]

x-post from Math dhaga:

^^^ The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is taking place this week in Bath, UK (originally scheduled for Kiev, Ukraine). The two 4.5-hour exams are on Tuesday and Wednesday, with results to follow in a few days. The closing ceremony is on July 21, 2024. As usual, I'm excited to review the problems this year. (As usual, will get to day's problems after the exam is over and students can share the problems).

Another very interesting aspect for me:

The 2024 IMO features a $10 million AIMO Prize for an AI to win an IMO gold medal, technical advised is Po-Shen Loh (prof at CMU - IMO gold medalist, known/mentored him (and his family - all *very* accomplished mathematicians) since he was in high-school ). Google Deep Mind and AlphaGeometry are participating, making this a thrilling math + AI showdown! It's exciting to see how the world's brightest high school students will fare against the latest AI systems.

Notably, even Terry Tao (Field Medalist and one of the top mathematician in the world) is enthusiastic about the integration of AI systems into research mathematics and is encouraging the community to embrace this disruption.

[Vayutuvan]

Po-Shen Loh is a silver medalist. Nevertheless an achievement at an early age.

(more in the Math thread ...)

[Amber G.]

Po-Shen Loh is a silver medalist. Nevertheless an achievement at an early age.

(more in the Math thread ...)

Let us not nitpick... smile. I know the Loh family quite well and may have confused him with his brother Po-Ru Loh (2 golds+silver - with whom I got confused) . He and his siblings - sister Po-Ling Loh all did extremely well in the math field, with many gold medals and top places in prestigious competitions). Po Shen Loh, as the oldest brother, was a 'hero' to his siblings. He has been the official leader/coach of the US IMO team for the last few years (a very prestigious post) and the whole family are among the well-known American mathematicians.

---
I recently attended two very interesting AI lectures .. one from MIT high energy physics professor (and how they are using it) and second from Terry Tao (In math).. very impressive..

[Amber G.]

The AI Mathematical Olympiad Progress Prize 1 (first progress prize) has finished and congratulations to Team Numina on their win!

[sanman]

Will Indians get fleeced by an over-hyped AI bubble?

[sanman]

Elon Musk's Tesla is coming out with an upgraded newer generation of its Optimus humanoid robot, which will cost $20K:

[bala]

Artificial Intelligence & India ,Rajiv Malhotra, Bhavish Aggarwal & TVG Krishnamurthy at Ola HQ



Sage words by Rajiv Malhotra who is a modern day Bharat Rishi. We take modern western systems as the Gold Standard, but the data from India and its processing is done in Videshi lands. The bias and intolerance of non-western nations by US large companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, etc., is eating up any innovations elsewhere. Bharat is now #1 in software, #1 in chip design, #1 GCC (global competency centers) but sadly the India talent pool is working for other masters. Short term thinking no long term thinking, need to assert Bharat way of life and dictate terms and conditions. Hopefully there is slow realization, some like Bhavish Aggarwal of OLA are aware and making a step in a new direction. Hope others follow. We can give up on dudes like Narayan Murthy and other collaborators with BIF forces.

[sanman]

India needs to focus on ASICs -- that's where the future of AI is heading
They took over crypto mining because they're more energy-efficient, and will offer similar benefits for AI:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/09/l ... ore-197809

[sanman]

This company Etched is developing the next big performance advantage in AI, and we need to pay attention to these things, because this is where the future is headed:

https://www.etched.com/

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/etched- ... in-ai.html

[Amber G.]

The program below was conceptualized and put together by Rajeev Srinivasa
He interviews Prof Vidyasagar (Distinguished Professor at IIT Hyderabad, SUTRA author) & Dr Abhishek Pur (radiation oncologist) on Generative AI, its current status and future prospects. I hope you enjoy it.
YouTube]

[sanman]

The program below was conceptualized and put together by Rajeev Srinivasa
He interviews Prof Vidyasagar (Distinguished Professor at IIT Hyderabad, SUTRA author) & Dr Abhishek Pur (radiation oncologist) on Generative AI, its current status and future prospects. I hope you enjoy it.

I've been part of Rajeev's blog since he started it. Generative AI is about capturing the distribution of properties in the data you're training on, so that you can generate output based on that distribution. The latest and greatest approach is in Diffusion Models, which are able to accurately represent & recreate data across the full span of that distribution.

[Amber G.]

This year's Physics Nobel is for fundamentals for AI:
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

[Vayutuvan]

I think this is going too far. Not deserving of a Nobel Prize in Physics.

[S_Madhukar]

Wasn’t Hinton warning about AGI when he resigned from Google ? Must be to soften his stance

[Amber G.]

^^ No, he (and Hopfield - see the link I posted in physics dhaga) are still warning.

Meanwhile this years Chemistry Nobel (Baker, Hassabis and Jumper for work on proteins - building blocks of life)
- Baker developed tools to create new proteins
- Google Deep Mind scientists Hassabis and Jumper used AI to predict protein structures.

More of this in physics dhaga: viewtopic.php?p=2631279#p2631279

BTW the video from Princeton, (link in physics dhaga) is good.. recommend watching it.

[Cyrano]

This is something I always suspected. That is why we need gigantic processing power for what passes for AI right now

[sanjaykumar]

The problem with deep mind alpha fold is that it is based on empiricism and not first principles.

As thousands of proton sequences are know and hundreds of crystallography and NMR data sets available, it is a bit like autistic neural processing.


I propose asking alpha fold to predict protein structure of a novel protein. It can even be an arbitrary primary sequence of amino acids, albeit with some known helical or other secondary structure AND run the prediction again after allosteric binding. Or amino acids side chain modification ( with a chemical reagent).

This may have been done, I have not done a literature search.

[Vayutuvan]

@sanjaykumar ji, exactly. It is all dart throwing. There was some great research done by Prof. Peter Wolynes in this vein. He was using (directed) statistical mechanical methods to "explore the energy landscape" of tertiary structure of proteins. Back in the 1990s, he was supposed to have solved 40% of the the problem. Since I am not a biophysicist, I have no idea what 40% means. AI is doing the same very slowly and not even correctly, IMHO.

I lived through the AI winter. Even though I started my PhD to do AI/ML/NLP, providentially it so happened that I figured out I didn't have the requisite Mathematical Logic background. So I shifted to theoretical CS and Algorithms. Just around that time, Japan went on a wild goose chase of 10 years of AI/Logic Programming/ML. They missed the Internet revolution. Soon after 1994 timeframe, AI fell out of favor and we had an AI winter till LLMs came along. I doubt this time around too the CS folks are going to succeed. Wait for another long AI winter, IMHO.

[Vayutuvan]

As thousands of proton sequences are know and hundreds of crystallography and NMR data sets available, it is a bit like autistic neural processing.

Aren't crystallography results are primary structure only? Because the protein has to amorphous before it is subjected to Crystallographic studies? What about NMR? Can NMR find secondary structure? My roommate and his girlfriend both were in biophysics - friend was doing protein folding (tertiary structure prediction) and his GF was doing crystallograhy and NMR.

[sanjaykumar]

Crystallography has been the traditional method for tertiary structure determination.

NMR relies on nuclear overhauser effects, long range effects that probe a proton’s three dimensional chemical space and contributes to tertiary structure deduction.

True artificial intelligence would be when it can answer why Alpha Fold works, given current state of knowledge.

[Cyrano]

2 indian origin researchers

[sanjaykumar]

BTW Vayutuvan, that was an interesting vignette about your experience with AI and how Japan floundered in the field.

[Amber G.]

Infosys Prize2024 in Engineering & Computer Science is awarded to Prof. Shyam Gollakota for his impactful research and technology translation spanning multiple engineering domains in societally relevant areas such as smart-phone based affordable healthcare tools for low- and middle-income countries, battery-free computing and communication, and augmentation of human auditory sensing with artificial intelligence.

[ernest]

In a recent podcast, Sabeer Bhatia mentioned that his company that could have been India's whatsapp was shut down by TRAI.
We would have at least one big component of SM that would be under our control. But the bureaucracy with its stupid enforcement of laws made sure that we remain dependent on the west for the cutting edge in most technologies. Now, we have to contend with their overreach and subversion of democratic processes. Chinese companies with support from their bureaucracy created Wechat. A lot of Indian companies in the drone sector were hamstrung by lack of policy and blanket bans, then half-measure policies. China went ahead and created DJI.

We have to shield Indian companies from absurd application of laws and extortion from the bureaucracy/political class. Also legal reforms need to be expedited.

Does iSpirit / NASSCOM have any regulatory reform white paper / website?

On Sabeer's company:
https://youtu.be/ArRPFpnHjxo?si=wKX1nNd-o_8Ahm52 he mentions it around 32min mark

He launched it in 2011
https://gadgetsnow.indiatimes.com/compu ... 832994.cms

[Vayutuvan]

ISn't whatsapp itself an Indian company bought by FB back in 2014 or so?

[williams]

In a recent podcast, Sabeer Bhatia mentioned that his company that could have been India's whatsapp was shut down by TRAI.
We would have at least one big component of SM that would be under our control. But the bureaucracy with its stupid enforcement of laws made sure that we remain dependent on the west for the cutting edge in most technologies. Now, we have to contend with their overreach and subversion of democratic processes. Chinese companies with support from their bureaucracy created Wechat. A lot of Indian companies in the drone sector were hamstrung by lack of policy and blanket bans, then half-measure policies. China went ahead and created DJI.

We have to shield Indian companies from absurd application of laws and extortion from the bureaucracy/political class. Also legal reforms need to be expedited.

Does iSpirit / NASSCOM have any regulatory reform white paper / website?

On Sabeer's company:
https://youtu.be/ArRPFpnHjxo?si=wKX1nNd-o_8Ahm52 he mentions it around 32min mark

He launched it in 2011
https://gadgetsnow.indiatimes.com/compu ... 832994.cms

We need to attract more technocrats in the civil service regime. They are the ones who sets policy that our Neta sign off and there is a deep lack of such knowledge in there.

[ernest]

We need to attract more technocrats in the civil service regime. They are the ones who sets policy that our Neta sign off and there is a deep lack of such knowledge in there.

True. Not really possible with traditional civil services. I remember even CSAT was rolled back to being a qualifying paper after introduction in UPSC in 2013 after protests. Add the ever increasing reservation and voting around govt jobs, and it is near impossible to change the govt hiring trajectory at mass level.

The viable way has been through bodies like NPCI/UIDAI with strong industrial collaboration and lateral hiring. But this is at only the near apex level. Politics has made it difficult, but hopefully govt continues to push in this direction. Hopefully, there is a solution to mass hiring of technocrats in govt services with environment enabling better performance and freedom.

[Yagnasri]

One mango man request:

As a mango man who finds it challenging to use MS Word, is there any free material suitable fro a person like me, available to read and understand all these AI/ML/data things?

[sanman]

One mango man request:

As a mango man who finds it challenging to use MS Word, is there any free material suitable fro a person like me, available to read and understand all these AI/ML/data things?

Here's a simple introductory lesson:

[ernest]

One mango man request:

As a mango man who finds it challenging to use MS Word, is there any free material suitable fro a person like me, available to read and understand all these AI/ML/data things?

I think it would be better for you to start sampling some youtube tutorials (there's a ton), and choose something that connects well with your background. Here is one example playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... F_7q2GfuJF

There are a lot of great blogs too that you can follow. One such is https://machinelearningmastery.com/blog/
With time, you'll develop some basic understanding, then choose the area that you want to go deeper into, and find resources for it. DM me if you have more questions.

[Yagnasri]

Thank you very much.