Zero Shot

Welcome back to Zero Shot, The Ken’s weekly discussion where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin go beyond the headlines to probe the major shake-ups in artificial intelligence.

This week, Brady notices how media producers and creators emphasising how their work is “made by humans”.  This type of disclaimer looks like the beginning of a bifurcation of content into AI-generated output and “handcrafted” media. Take a few steps further and there are consequences for education, contractual agreements, and legal disputes.

Rohin looked at Perplexity’s snapback after Amazon sued it over making agentic shopping available via the Comet browser, enabling automation that places orders on behalf of users. For consumers, the question to consider is: would you hand over your credentials to an AI agent and let it represent you, while you shoulder all legal liability for its actions?

Finally, Praveen presented AI’s first major use case in the Global South. Tools and platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Adalat AI are speeding up research, stenography, and other tasks in the legal arena, making it possible for court proceedings to move faster. India isn’t alone in this; court systems in other parts of the world such as Brazil and China are using artificial intelligence in their own ways too.

Zero Shot’s cover art is generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans.

We appreciate your critiques, suggestions, and ideas. Send them to [email protected], or write in just to say hi. 

If you’d like to sponsor Zero Shot, let’s talk.

Additional Reading

Pluribus: “This show was made by humans”
https://bsky.app/profile/thespaceshipper.com/post/3m54is34d5c2l

Rosalía on Lux: “It’s all human—very much human”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/arts/music/rosalia-lux-interview.html

This year’s Coca-Cola holiday ad exposes one of the biggest problems with AI-generated video
https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-ai-holiday-ad-glitches-highlight-ai-shortcomings-2025-11

Chinese court again rules AI-generated images are eligible for copyright protection
https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2025/03/chinese-court-again-rules-there-is-copyright-in-ai-generated-images/

Bullying is not innovation
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/bullying-is-not-innovation

Norway tests show Chinese-made electric buses can be halted remotely by manufacturer
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/norway-tests-chinese-made-electric-bus-yutong-halted-remotely-5448366

4,000 Indian courts have done away with typing. An AI revolution is on
https://theprint.in/ground-reports/4000-indian-courts-have-done-away-with-typing-an-ai-revolution-is-on/2770297/

Petition in Supreme Court says GenAI in judiciary may lead to fake case laws
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/petition-in-supreme-court-says-genai-in-judiciary-may-cause-hallucinations-lead-to-fake-case-laws/article70262821.ece

Welcome back to Zero Shot, The Ken’s weekly podcast where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin riff off each other’s commentary about the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence.

This week, Praveen covers the accomplishments of Xania Monet, the first AI-powered artist to debut on an airplay chart. Xania is among at least six AI artists to be included on Billboard rankings, and she’s the creation of a real-life songwriter who used Suno (and human assistance) to create her songs. Find out what this means for the streaming business and creative expression.

Brady explains how the dominance of the Magnificent 7—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—in the current stock market echoes the Nifty Fifty on the New York Stock Exchange in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well for those firms half a century ago. Whether you believe there’s currently an AI bubble, it’s still worth knowing what happened before.

Finally, Rohin posits that Big AI is in its “zero f***s given” era. Investment in private AI companies is now being framed as “play or lose”. Opting out is stigmatised. The consequences could be severe.

Plus: Send us your setup for a long/short strategy as a skeptical investor who is hedging against the AI bubble popping. We’ll feature the interesting, unexpected, counterintuitive ideas in the next episode.

The content of this podcast is not investment advice. Always do your own research.

Share your critiques, suggestions, and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected]. If you’d like to sponsor Zero Shot, let’s talk.

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Additional Reading & Listening

How many AI artists have debuted on Billboard’s charts?
https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-charts/

“How Was I Supposed to Know?” by Xania Monet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opuDZYJuAz0 

Ways of Seeing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing 

What is “involution”, China's race-to-the-bottom competition trend?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-is-involution-chinas-race-to-the-bottom-competition-trend-2025-09-14/ 

Sam Altman shuts down question about how OpenAI can commit to spending $1.4 trillion while earning billions: 'Enough'
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-defends-openai-trillion-spending-2025-11 

How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuels its multibillion-dollar rise
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/31/technology/openai-fundraising-deals.html 

Welcome to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin tackle the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence for The Ken.

This week, Brady conjectures that AI adoption by enterprises hasn’t been a failure, even though many billions of dollars have been spent on generative AI pilot projects with zero return. Instead of thinking of AI as a productivity multiplier or “virtual colleague”, it can also be viewed as a forcing function for company leadership to clear out rot and settle organisational debt. 

Next, guess whose salaries are falling because of AI? Praveen contrasts how paycheques are shrinking by as much as 40% in India for engineering and data roles, while their counterparts in the US are getting pay bumps. He makes the point that this remedies one type of distortion, but also that value capture in AI is tough at the application level (for now).

Finally, Rohin expresses his fondness for NotebookLM, which has transformed the way he and some other members of The Ken work. 

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

Send us your critiques, suggestions, and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected]. If you’d like to sponsor Zero Shot, let’s talk.

Additional Reading:

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025
https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf 

Median tech pay in India declines sharply, US hits new highs
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/median-tech-pay-in-india-declines-sharply-us-hits-new-highs-report/articleshow/124856820.cms

India’s startup workplaces confront the rise of the ‘unhireables’
https://the-ken.com/story/indias-startup-workplaces-confront-the-rise-of-the-unhireables/ 

The YouTube Tip of the Google Spear
https://stratechery.com/2025/the-youtube-tip-of-the-google-spear/ 

​​Youtube just ate TV. It’s only getting started
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-impact-tv-sports-late-night-comedy-shows-1236400353/ 

Polish top-performing language for complex AI tasks
https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/10/26/polish-top-performing-language-for-complex-ai-language-tasks-finds-study/

NotebookLM
https://notebooklm.google 

Welcome to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin tackle the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence for The Ken.

This week, Brady looked at the narrative collapse in how US tech executives react to AI development in China. Compliments that previously carried a sense of talking down at “losing” competitors are being replaced by a sense of urgency and alarm. It’s becoming clear that the US saw the race as about hardware and compute, while China was focusing on efficiency and architecture. Those two diverging views created vastly different approaches to creating this new technology.

Rohin examined how India has been running after Nvidia’s GPUs, but needs to build its own datasets. It’s a consequence of the IndiaAI mission’s roots—accumulating hardware that is readily available for training and inference (as long as you can pay). Besides the rapid depreciation of GPUs, there’s another snag: if data isn’t treated as a sovereign national asset, then India isn’t taking advantage of its most significant and sustainable advantage.

Finally, Praveen shared his thoughts on what’s really stopping AI from “learning”, based on Andrej Karpathy’s interpretation. Large language models can’t reflect, have memory that functions like the opposite of humans’, and don’t have a shared culture that provides a way to pass down knowledge. Most importantly, even the most powerful current models cognitively resemble young children.

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

Send us your critiques, suggestions, and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected].

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Additional Reading:

Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/

The missing bullet holes and Abraham Wald

https://medium.com/@christian.dobbert/the-missing-bullet-holes-and-abraham-wald-25e68d7a870f

‘Shoestring’ R&D budgets force India to rely on Chinese tech, says steel tycoon

https://www.ft.com/content/3acd4408-9637-4a4a-9649-7456e1705e79

India risks losing cultural relevance in the AI era

https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/india-risks-losing-cultural-relevance-in-the-ai-era/

IndiaAI Mission: Dataset Over GPUs

https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/indiaai-mission-dataset-over-gpus

Welcome to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin comment on the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence for The Ken.

This week, Brady unpacks how two popular agents for software engineering represent opposing visions of working with AI. Claude Code’s more human-like way of engaging gives users a vastly different experience from the “all business, all the time” approach in OpenAI Codex. Find out how this divergence reflects Anthropic and OpenAI’s different goals.

Also narrating how the two companies are locking horns, Praveen talked about OpenAI going after government partnerships and consumer adoption in India, while Anthropic is pursuing contracts with enterprises and startups. Anthropic, in particular, has been on a charm offensive in the country, but one public event led to backlash.

Rohin picked up a listener’s suggestion to explore whether OpenAI can weaponise its 800 million active users and Apps SDK to become a distribution channel for everyone else. Listen to the hosts analyse the situation from different perspectives.

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

Send us your critiques and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected]. 

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Fancy yourself joining the Zero Shot team?

Brady, Praveen, and Rohin are looking for a researcher-producer to join Zero Shot. You must be super interested in AI, business, and tech. You need to be incredibly intellectually agile. You should be comfortable working with all three of us, each with our own interests and idiosyncrasies. You would help us research, schedule, produce, and even publish columns and podcasts. You should forecast the puck even better than us.

We’re looking for young and ambitious people with 1–3 years of experience. Write to [email protected] with a note introducing yourself and why we should email you back for a conversation. If you don’t hear from us, it’s because we weren’t convinced.

The role will be full-time and based in Bengaluru.

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Bonus Reading:

Inside Nandan Nilekani’s exclusive Koramangala dinner for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
https://www.moneycontrol.com/artificial-intelligence/inside-nandan-nilekani-s-exclusive-koramangala-dinner-for-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-article-13611458.html 

Vibe engineering
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/

“Maybe this could be the topic of your next zero-shot?”
https://x.com/lazy_proc/status/1975808361917784168

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
https://www.wired.com/2008/03/how-apple-got-everything-right-by-doing-everything-wrong/

OpenAI offers free ChatGPT licences. Schools see hidden costs
https://the-ken.com/story/openai-offers-free-chatgpt-licences-schools-see-hidden-costs/

Radhika Dani's post
https://x.com/theproductwoman/status/1976235987736092963

"It would have been a different story saying that it was a game of luck to get in but that wasn’t the case here"
https://x.com/zaidmukaddam/status/1977061060525129827

"This guy's so bored he's watching Cricket at the Anthropic Accel event in BLR."
https://x.com/1littlecoder/status/1977002078490042375

Welcome to Zero Shot, The Ken’s podcast where Rohin, Praveen, and Brady connect from Bengaluru and Hong Kong to cover the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence. 

This week, Brady discussed how even though Claude Sonnet 4.5 caught attention by autonomously building an application similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams in 30 hours, an overlooked aspect of the model’s rollout was the way it works with and creates documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It isn’t far-fetched to expect Anthropic wooing users in non-tech roles—people whose toolkit comprises Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and therefore have to live with Copilot—giving Microsoft a run for its money,

Praveen covered how vibe coding may be losing its shimmer, since these platforms’ annual recurring revenue and web traffic are in a nosedive. One reason could be the changes in pricing, which was a response to counter power users who are getting way more out of their subscriptions than any service provider had anticipated.

Finally, Rohin muses about Perplexity’s strategy of giving away its Pro subscription for free via telco partnerships around the world. Perplexity needs to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to use their models. It pays telcos to distribute its product. And it now pays publishers through a revenue-share scheme. But who’s paying for a Perplexity Pro subscription (aside from Brady), and what is the company’s endgame?

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

Send us critiques and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected] 

*

Fancy yourself joining the Zero Shot team?

Praveen, Brady, and Rohin are looking for a researcher-producer to join Zero Shot. You’d have to be super interested in AI, business, and tech. You’d need to be incredibly intellectually agile. You should be comfortable working with all three of us, each with our own interests and idiosyncrasies. You’d be expected to help us research, schedule, produce, and even publish columns and podcasts. You’d need to forecast the puck even better than us.

We’re looking for young and ambitious people with 1–3 years of experience. Write to [email protected] with a note introducing yourself and why we should email you back for a conversation. If you don’t hear from us, it’s because we weren’t convinced.

The role will be full-time and based in Bengaluru.

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Bonus Reading:

Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5 in latest bid for AI agents and coding supremacy

The Rise and Fall of Clippy: From Microsoft’s Bold Vision to Internet Legend

AI vibe coding tools may be going from boom to bust, new data shows. Here's why.

Perplexity launches AI subscription revenue-share scheme for publishers 

Clip from My Best Friend's Wedding 

Welcome to Zero Shot, The Ken’s podcast where Praveen, Brady, and Rohin connect from Bengaluru and Hong Kong to dive into the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence.

In this episode, the hosts attempt to figure out whether AI companies can truly differentiate their products when interfaces look identical, and whether the launch of OpenAI’s Pulse feed and Perplexity Search API matter to these strategies.

Hear about how AI is moving off the screen and into physical space via humanoid robots. This isn’t the development of just another product category; it’s a solution to a demographic time bomb.

Find out about world models, which are supposed to help artificial intelligence understand and interact with the physical world. They’re meant to lead to the next big breakthrough in AI—going from “book smart” to “street smart”—but the road ahead is long.

Finally, financial commitments in the AI sector are staggering and depend on immensely optimistic revenue projections. Hear how wild the numbers are.

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

If you want to send us critiques, ideas, or just want to say hi, write us at [email protected].

*****

Fancy yourself joining the Zero Shot team?

Praveen, Brady, and Rohin are looking for a researcher-producer to join Zero Shot. You’d have to be super interested in AI, business, and tech. You’d need to be incredibly intellectually agile. You should be comfortable working with all three of us, each with our own interests and idiosyncrasies. You’d be expected to help us research, schedule, produce, and even publish columns and podcasts. You’d need to forecast the puck even better than us.

We’re looking for young and ambitious people with 1–3 years of experience. Write to [email protected] with a note introducing yourself and why we should email you back for a conversation. If you don’t hear from us, it’s because we weren’t convinced.

The role will be full-time and based in Bengaluru.

*****

Bonus Reading:

There Are More Robots Working in China Than the Rest of the World Combined
China has embarked on a campaign to use more robots in its factories, transforming its manufacturing industries and becoming the dominant maker

What Are ‘World Models’? The Key to the Next Big AI Leap
To develop knowledge beyond text and videos, AIs must have realistic virtual playgrounds where they can make mistakes and learn

AI groups bet on world models in race for ‘superintelligence’
Google DeepMind, Meta and Nvidia are developing systems that aim to better understand the physical world

Debt Is Fueling the Next Wave of the AI Boom
For aspiring AI players like Oracle, much rides on debt and hope

Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?
Tech companies pour hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny; echoes of dot-com bubble

$2 trillion in new revenue needed to fund AI’s scaling trend 
Bain & Company’s 6th annual Global Technology Report

The AI boom is unsustainable unless tech spending goes ‘parabolic,’ 
Deutsche Bank warns: ‘This is highly unlikely’

Welcome to the first episode of Zero Shot, The Ken’s podcast on artificial intelligence.

Hosts Brady, Praveen, and Rohin connect from Hong Kong and Bengaluru—braving a typhoon—to dive into the big ideas shaping the world of AI.

In this debut episode, the hosts explore the provocative analogy of whether the world’s biggest AI companies are using the colonial playbook to enter markets like India, and whether India risks becoming a “DAU factory”.

The conversation covers a report by Anthropic that reveals some surprising facts about high- and low-adoption countries.

They also break down the latest revelations about the deal for Tiktok’s US operations.

Wondering about the brontosaurus with black and white stripes? Click play to find out what he’s called and why he is Zero Shot’s mascot.

This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.

If you liked this podcast, share it with anyone who might also enjoy it. To get in touch with the hosts, write them at [email protected]. 

Disclaimer: Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in The Ken.

Bonus Reading:

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — The AI Raj: How tech giants are recolonizing power
https://thebulletin.org/2025/09/the-ai-raj-how-tech-giants-are-recolonizing-power/

The Economist — AI is erupting in India
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/09/17/ai-is-erupting-in-india

The Ken — India goes from free internet to free AI
https://the-ken.com/columns/zero-shot/india-goes-from-free-internet-to-free-ai/

The Guardian — The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-free-basics-india-zuckerberg

Financial Times — EU to block Big Tech from new financial data sharing system
https://www.ft.com/content/6596876f-c831-482c-878c-78c1499ef543

India Today — India picks 8 firms, including IIT Bombay, to build a massive 1 trillion parameter AI model
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/india-picks-8-firms-including-iit-bombay-to-build-a-massive-1-trillion-parametre-ai-model-2789824-2025-09-19

Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption
https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-september-2025-report

Wall Street Journal — Deal to Keep TikTok in US Is Near. These Are the Details.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-deal-us-china-details-b383abe4 

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.