Malhar Manek

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on the atlas — 56

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Whether India becomes an AI power will not be decided by most of the discussions at the Summit. It will be decided by whether someone in a state capital fixes the electricity pricing structure that makes data center power uneconomical, whether the PLI compliance architecture gets simplified enough for firms to actually claim the subsidy, whether the next generation of researchers stays or leaves, whether foreign venture capital is welcomed. Boring, iterative, state-level, ministry-by-ministry reform. The kind that never makes the curtain raiser.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The government identifies a genuine need, commits real money and political capital, and the project stalls somewhere unglamorous that nobody in Delhi was paying attention to. The soil under the fab. The compliance process around the subsidy. The balance sheet of the electricity distributor. The tax ruling that arrives ten years after the investment. These are not AI problems.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The pattern is now familiar. A new foundational model appears, benchmarks improve, commentators declare that everything will change. And then the model has to be deployed inside an actual enterprise, with actual liability exposure, actual regulatory constraints, actual legacy databases, and thousands of special cases that no training run anticipated.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
A venture fund does not require quarterly compliance reports or project proposals evaluated by committee. It does not take equity in exchange for cloud credits. It does not impose conditions about which datasets must be used or whether models must serve “national importance.” It writes a check, takes a board seat, and helps, or at the very least, lets the founders build. In a field where the technology changes every six months, the flexibility differential between government and private funding is the binding constraint.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
Mistral raised €385 million in a Series A without a government committee evaluating whether its project served national importance. Anthropic raised $450 million Series C led by Spark Capital with Google without surrendering equity to a federal agency. These companies could do this because private capital markets in the US and Europe function with tax certainty. Investors know how exits will be taxed, treaty structures are respected, and gains are not retrospectively reclassified.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
When New Delhi pushes cost-reflective pricing and a state promises free power, free power wins.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
State governments compete to offer free or cheap electricity to farmers and households. This is not a policy quirk. It is how elections are won.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
Reliable electricity, industrial-grade water, and rational and certain tax policy, low friction land markets, are not AI and semiconductor problems. They are problems that affect every manufacturing sector in India, and they have been problems for decades. No amount of subsidy engineering will produce a manufacturing ecosystem on top of broken infrastructure.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
Dholera, even once the soil is sorted, will produce chips at 28nm to 110nm process nodes. These are mature nodes, useful for automotive and IoT but irrelevant to frontier AI, which runs on 3nm and 5nm silicon. India has no facility planned, announced, or remotely plausible for the chips that actually train large language models.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The problem is not that firms do not want the subsidies. It is that the compliance machinery required to claim them is itself the barrier. Disbursements require quarterly review reports, project certifications, No-Lien Account management, and inter-departmental coordination that frequently breaks down. Even Samsung got tangled in the paperwork. MSMEs and startups have little chance. The government identifies a problem, creates an incentive, and then wraps it in procedural requirements so heavy that firms cannot access it. Raising the budget does nothing if the bottleneck is the application for…
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
When political incentives determine where factories go, instead of engineers and entrepreneurs, you get buildings on soil that cannot hold them.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
Last year, Tata Electronics discovered that the soil at its semiconductor fab site in Dholera, Gujarat, was too soft. The ₹91,000 crore ($10.11 billion) facility, the first large-scale chip fabrication plant under the flagship of the India Semiconductor Mission, had to be redesigned from the foundations up. The land was reclaimed. The soil was clay-heavy, saline, silty. It could not support a precision manufacturing facility that requires near-zero vibration. Tata brought in Fugro and two other geotechnical firms. Construction on the revised design began months late.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
India has a pattern of showing up in domains where it was written off. It produced vaccines at scale, and exported them to the global south, when Western pharmaceutical companies said it couldn’t be done and struggled with their own distribution channels in developed countries. India’s space program reached Mars for less than the production budget of a Hollywood film about Mars. Constraints force ingenuity. Small budgets force focus.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
South Korea picked five teams to build a national foundation model by 2027. Saudi Arabia created HUMAIN, a state effort to build Arabic multimodal models. The UAE partnered with Microsoft and OpenAI and declared it would become the world’s first AI-native government by 2027. Singapore and Japan started open-sourcing local-language models. The logic was the same everywhere. If your government runs on someone else’s AI, your government runs at someone else’s discretion.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The French government and private sector backed Mistral and attracted data center investment from the UAE. Macron called it the “third way.” Not American, not Chinese. The point was never to beat GPT. It was to avoid permanent dependence on it.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
It states that entities deploying AI systems should be accountable for the decisions of those systems regardless of the level of autonomy. You deployed it, you own the outcome.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
A three-hour takedown window, down from thirty-six, is aggressive by any global standard, and it applies upon receipt of a government order, not just a court order. For platforms operating at the scale of YouTube or Instagram, this compresses the window for review, legal assessment, and action to something close to automated compliance, which raises its own risks around over-removal.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
Do not regulate the technology itself, govern its applications through the regulators who already understand those domains.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
It is almost as if the experts on these committees had to hide their light-touch instincts underneath the rhetorical scaffolding that Indian policy documents require to be taken seriously.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The national framework heavily borrowed the RBI’s architecture.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
China took the authoritarian-efficiency route. Regulate fast, regulate specifically, and make sure the state retains control over what models can say and do. The US, characteristically, has been light touch at the federal level, leaving governance to a patchwork of executive orders, state laws, and vibes.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
How do you govern a technology that changes faster than your committee can meet?
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
India has led the global south across a range of issues, from helping various countries conduct fair elections (most recently Bhutan, I think), to vaccine diplomacy during Covid, to exporting India’s digital public infrastructure to African countries.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
MeitY is unlike most Indian government departments, in that it is more an investment promoter than regulator.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
The AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi is structured like a good Indian wedding buffet, which is to say, it tries to be everything at once.
India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn
I remember, on maybe the first or second night at Clarion, one of my classmates mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis3 and then started to explain what it was, and I said, “Oh, I know what that is.” And he said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s heard of that before.” That sort of thing happened to us constantly.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
a good explanation can be a beautiful thing. So I am interested in clarity, in helping a reader to understand concepts, in both technical writing and fiction writing. The techniques involved are radically different, but my goals are similar, in that in both cases I’m trying to get an idea across, and I think a lot about what’s the best way to do that.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
I very much admire the sentences of John Crowley. I wish I could write sentences like his, but I know I’m not going to be able to.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
“You can make a life as a writer without making a living as a writer.”
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
“Where did you get the idea for this story?,” which may or may not be the most interesting thing to ask about the story. A story note can be a way to have that conversation. It may not be the precise response to “How did you get the idea?,” but it’s a way to answer the reader if they knew what the best question to ask was.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
These issues are not purely abstract or intellectual, and science fiction stories offer a way to make you genuinely invested in the outcome of a thought experiment.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
A lot of philosophical issues can seem really abstract and remote when philosophers describe them, so that can lead people to think that these questions have no bearing on their lives in any way, shape, or form.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
Greg Egan’s stories become harder to understand because he often winds up pursuing ideas to a level of abstraction that most readers probably can’t follow. It’s like taking a class or listening to a lecture and the lecture builds on its initial ideas, so you’re following along but it becomes more taxing, and eventually it reaches a point where you sort of fall by the wayside and only a few people can understand what the lecturer is saying all the way up till the end.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
One of the ideas I wanted to explore in the story is the difference in time scale between raising a person, or even owning a pet, and the rapid technological obsolescence that we’ve grown accustomed to
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about what is the best way to tell any given story.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
What Chiang prefers to discuss is the art of science fiction. Technology is a deep interest of his—“I can talk about AI all day long,” he confessed in half apology—but even more so, Chiang is interested in the ways society and culture respond to tech
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
he attended the famed Clarion Workshop in 1989 to study science fiction, which he described to me as “a life-changing event.”
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
he once turned down a Hugo nomination because he considered the work unfinished.
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
his father is an engineering professor, his mother was a librarian
An Interview with Ted Chiang - Believer Magazine
The cost of Claude Pro or ChatGPT is $20 dollars a month, while a Max subscription is $200 dollars respectively. The median US knowledge worker costs ~350-500 dollars a day fully loaded. An agent that handles even a fraction of their workflow a day at ~6-7 dollars is a 10-30x ROI not including improvement in intelligence.
Claude Code is the Inflection Point
The tributes to Manmohan Singh often boil down to his brilliance and decency. But, what many miss is his ability and power to build collaborative networks. Singh understood that lasting change comes not from solitary genius, but from creating ecosystems of excellence that outlast any individual. In placing talent above ideology, expertise above authority, and mentorship above credit, he developed a model of institutional change that ensured that for the next thirty years RBI governors, CEAs, and the top minds in economic policy were handpicked by him.
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
Nilekani himself is also one of the great talent scouts of our time, inducting excellent engineers, businessmen, scientists and lawyers into India’s tech policy network.
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
Other than being outsider-insiders, good scouts tend to be keen observers and good listeners.
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
Arvind Virmani, who had completed his doctorate under Kenneth Arrow at Harvard
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
Talent scouts are odd. They operate on the margins—insiders, yet also outsiders.
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
He had occupied every top technocratic position, yet his childhood as an outsider shaped him differently—he systematically worked to create pathways for others like him.
Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout
With that said, memory is only part of what it means to understand. Is it possible to build powerful environments which enable deeper forms of understanding? That enable people to take action in new ways, to grow their sense of agency and of ability to contribute?
Quantum computing for the very curious
Frankly, I believe it would accelerate human progress if all the deepest ideas of our civilization were available in a form like this.
Quantum computing for the very curious
It’s that the laws of physics determine what kind of computations can be done. And yet the kind of computations which can be done seem to be powerful enough to describe the laws of physics. And that description can then be used to (efficiently!) simulate any physical system
Quantum computing for the very curious
It’s a good problem – and, so far as I know, largely unexplored – to think about sets of laws of physics in which such a universal machine is not possible. That might sound pointless – why imagine other possible universes? Yet exploring such radical counterfactuals is often an excellent strategy for better understanding our own universe.
Quantum computing for the very curious