Mint: “India must invest in outcome-oriented education to align the supply of skills with demand and achieve its development goals. We only have a couple of decades to make the most of a youth bulge in our demographic profile.”
Gary Marcus: “Pure scaling simply isn’t the path to AGI. It turns out that attention, the key component in LLMs, and the focus of the justly famous Transformer paper, is not fact “all you need”. All I am saying is give neurosymbolic AI with explicit world models a chance. Only once we have systems that can reason about enduring representations of the world, including but not to limited to abstract symbolic ones, will we have a genuine shot at AGI.”
Mint: “Fifty years of Sholay have passed yet much of the film’s dialogue still resonates with movie lovers, feeling as fresh as if it was heard yesterday. What makes for successful film dialogue? Lines that provide information while also suggesting the temperament of the characters. Dialogue can carry poetic weight, be replete with clever repartee, roll out unexpected punchlines, and carry forward the narrative. Alongside actors’ performances, dialogue creates a deeper connection between story and viewer.”
Ninan argues for a Meiji Restoration in India: “On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay with two steam ships and two sloops with sails. He refused when ordered to move to Nagasaki, the port allowed for foreign ships. Likewise, he would not allow local officials to board his ships, insisting that he had a message from the United States (US) President for the Japanese emperor. Perry’s bullying forced Japan to open up on trade, to allow US ships to refuel in Japanese ports, and make other concessions. More importantly, it made Japan (which had only wooden sailing ships) realise the superiority of Western technology. There was confusion and disagreement over what was to be done. There were people who argued against change, some suggested throwing out all foreigners. Eventually, the forces of change won and more than a decade later, under the new and young emperor Meiji, the country launched on root-and-branch reform — of the feudal system, land ownership, the education system, and the military, among other changes. The shogunate gave way to what was to become known as the Meiji Restoration, which began in 1867. Within a generation, Japan became an industrial power and defeated stronger Chinese forces in battle.”
