RT Deedy
The national high school exam of India, CBSE, has been Pwned!

This incompetent organization continues to deny the allegations against them. And a teenager has taken over their prod servers hosting the exam booklet scans of 2M test takers. They have just taken it down.

All they had to say is "can you help us fix the problem?" but their ego is too big to admit they were wrong.

Incompetence is one thing. The complete lack of accountability to the nation while your servers get catastrophically owned is another. Internet-scale embarrassment.nisarga: We were able to get full create, read, update and delete (CRUD) access & shell access to CBSE's prod servers (as mentioned in their circular https://archive.is/dGw1Q). This is disastrous. Proof archive is at https://archive.is/bPH2U.

Prod URL (might be taken down):

ChatGPT had 80% of global AI users six months ago. Today it’s 60%. Consumer AI is no longer a one-horse race. Here’s a break down.

In that time, Gemini grew from ~20% to ~50% of ChatGPT's unique users.
Claude grew from ~3% to ~20%.

In fact, Claude is the fastest growing website in the top 100 last quarter, followed by DeepSeek (#78, 105%) and Cricbuzz (#52, +69%).

Global website rankings:
– ChatGPT #5 (+11%QoQ)
– Gemini #15 (+27% QoQ)
– Claude #36 (+255% QoQ)

Active users:
Gemini has publicly reported 900M monthly active users and ChatGPT as 900M weekly active users. This number counts native desktop and mobile, so I (naively) use a multiple to scale up web traffic from SimilarWeb. This implies:
— ChatGPT: ~900M WAU, ~1.5B MAU
— Gemini: ~500M WAU, 900M MAU
— Claude: ~150-200M WAU, ~250-300M MAU

Geographically, Gemini has significantly caught up in non-English speaking countries, with 65-70% of ChatGPT in India, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Vietnam while Claude in particular ironically shows remarkable growth in China (!).

VCs often ask startups "What if Google decided to do this?" and usually it's the wrong question. But when Google does indeed decide to put the full force of a company behind something, they're formidable.

This market is starting to look a lot less "winner takes all" and a lot more like cloud market (AWS/Azure/GCP) or wireless market (Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile) with 3 dominant players: a triopoly.

This is painfully embarrassing.

The national board of education in India just generated an image on ChatGPT to “prove” that they’re secure after a 19yo showed you can edit marks of 2M test takers on their platform.

That is after trying to deny they got hacked using a domain they didn’t own (to prove it, they bought by the domain and redirected it to the blog post about the hack).

Then they claimed (falsely) that no production data was on those servers that was immediately proven false.

These are levels of incompetence we have never seen. The fate of 2M+ students a year rests in these hands. Pathetic.
CBSE HQ: #CBSE #OSM

When I first joined Menlo, Modal was the #1 early stage company I wanted to invest in. Back then, they were just a ~$100M company.

Finally, 2 years later, it’s an honor to finally partner with Erik, Akshat and team.

As an engineer myself, I’ve never found an easier ways to scalably run all AI infra workloads (training, inference, sandbox, etc) across some of the best AI companies in the world: Anthropic, Meta, Suno, Doordash, Applied Compute, Cognition.

Fun fact: Modal is one of the only companies where both founders are IOI gold medalists (2003 Sweden and 2014 India) and one of the most efficient startups in terms of revenue / employeeErik Bernhardsson: Today we're announcing our Series C funding: $355M at a $4.65B valuation, led by some great investors @generalcatalyst and @Redpoint.

We've had insane growth in the last year, but we're still very early. So proud of the team and what we have built so far!

RT Deedy
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but $50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

RT Deedy
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but $50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

RT Deedy
This is the single best read on World Models and one of the most important reads in AI.

$10B has flowed into "world models" in the last 18mos, from Yann LeCun to FeiFei Li. The promise is, like LLMs, world models will provide the data it takes to scale robotics foundation models, and solve robotics.

..but the word has been abused to mean one of many things.

This post unpacks:
– What 5 traits makes a world model?
– How do the different approaches stack up?
– What is it used for within and beyond robotics?
– Where is the opportunity?
– Citations to research, news and blog posts

Companies / products in the space include:
– BigCo products: Google Genie, Tesla Optimus, Nvidia DreamDojo, DreamZero, Microsoft Muse
– Pure world model: AMI Labs, World Labs, Runway, Rhoda, Decart, Spaitial, Odyssey, Embo, Dream Labs, OneWorld
– Robot foundation model cos: Skild, Physical Intelligence, Figure, Mind

Very likely one of the seminal technologies of the next decade.

RT Deedy
This is the single best read on World Models and one of the most important reads in AI.

$10B has flowed into "world models" in the last 18mos, from Yann LeCun to FeiFei Li. The promise is, like LLMs, world models will provide the data it takes to scale robotics foundation models, and solve robotics.

..but the word has been abused to mean one of many things.

This post unpacks:
– What 5 traits makes a world model?
– How do the different approaches stack up?
– What is it used for within and beyond robotics?
– Where is the opportunity?
– Citations to research, news and blog posts

Companies / products in the space include:
– BigCo products: Google Genie, Tesla Optimus, Nvidia DreamDojo, DreamZero, Microsoft Muse
– Pure world model: AMI Labs, World Labs, Runway, Rhoda, Decart, Spaitial, Odyssey, Embo, Dream Labs, OneWorld
– Robot foundation model cos: Skild, Physical Intelligence, Figure, Mind

Very likely one of the seminal technologies of the next decade.

RT Deedy
Things every AI app startup says today to justify their defensibility:

1. We support multiple models. Our customers do not want to lock in to one vendor.
2. We have a data moat. We post-train open-source models to be much better and cheaper than closed-source.
3. We do deep integrations to help our harness use our "context graph" and build custom workflows.

In the best case, this is actually true. In many cases, it is hilariously false.

Things every AI app startup says today to justify their defensibility:

1. We support multiple models. Our customers do not want to lock in to one vendor.
2. We have a data moat. We post-train open-source models to be much better and cheaper than closed-source.
3. We do deep integrations to help our harness use our "context graph" and build custom workflows.

In the best case, this is actually true. In many cases, it is hilariously false.

RT Deedy
Things every AI app startup says today to justify their defensibility:

1. We support multiple models. Our customers do not want to lock in to one vendor.
2. We have a data moat. We post-train open-source models to be much better and cheaper than closed-source.
3. We do deep integrations to help our harness use our "context graph" and build custom workflows.

In the best case, this is actually true. In many cases, it is hilariously false.