Founder/CTO @Tradespace_io. Former Co-Founder Doorman acquired by @realboxbot. Advisor Boxbot. Co-Founder Loqly. Former IBM. Geo-politics #immigrant
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2008
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Pinned Tweet
With my own doubts about long-term WFH, I am going to pin this tweet, easy to revisit couple of years (or sooner) from now. This is only one of the reasons for my doubts, there’s the human/social aspect as well.
Kapil Israni retweeted
Take a moment to appreciate the incredible detail on this lathe-turned pillar in India. I’d give almost anything to go back in time and see how this was made.
Kapil Israni retweeted
Andrej Karpathy:
“A 1B model can be much more effective than most current LLMs.
90% of current models waste a ton of capacity and money on remembering stuff that doesn’t matter.”
here is his 5 core thesis about Small LLM’s:
1. the intelligence was never the knowledge. Strip the memorized internet, keep the reasoning. What’s left is the cognitive core, and it’s small.
2. the core might fit in ~1B params. Maybe less. “Plenty of room at the bottom.” We’ve been paying for a library when we needed a brain.
3. size stopped being the bottleneck. What makes an agent work is the tools it can call and how tight the feedback loop is, not parameter count.
4. intelligence lives in the system, not the weights. A raw LLM is a CPU with no OS. Small core + good harness > giant model alone.
5. you can own it. A model on your hardware is one no one can rate-limit, price-hike, or deprecate on you.
in 12 months the gap between teams shipping on-device and teams paying per-token frontier bills won’t be capability.
TwIL an 8.8B model at 90%+ of frontier isn’t a benchmark flex.
It’s the thesis Karpathy’s been repeating all year, made real.
study more on this below ↓
Modest intelligence is arriving faster than most people realize.
Today, we're open-sourcing TwIL-8B.
Just 8.8 billion parameters, yet approaching frontier-model scores on several difficult benchmarks:
• 93% of frontier performance on coding
• 92% on instruction following
• 90% on contest mathematics
All from a model small enough to run on your own hardware.
But the benchmarks aren't the most important part of this announcement.
For years, the AI industry has focused on building the most capable model, regardless of the cost required to run it.
I believe that equation is changing.
The next era of AI will be defined by the cost of completing work. Not simply the intelligence of the model, but how efficiently that intelligence can accomplish the task.
If a model with 8 billion parameters can reliably complete the same work as one with hundreds of billions, why pay for the larger model?
As smaller models become more capable, intelligence becomes something we can distribute, specialize, and run across the hardware we already own.
That's the future we're building at @thewebAI
TwIL-8B is available today. Open weights.
And this is just the first of several announcements we're making today.
HF Link: huggingface.co/webAI-Officia…
8.8B param model, with 93% of frontier performance on coding. Sign me up.
Modest intelligence is arriving faster than most people realize.
Today, we're open-sourcing TwIL-8B.
Just 8.8 billion parameters, yet approaching frontier-model scores on several difficult benchmarks:
• 93% of frontier performance on coding
• 92% on instruction following
• 90% on contest mathematics
All from a model small enough to run on your own hardware.
But the benchmarks aren't the most important part of this announcement.
For years, the AI industry has focused on building the most capable model, regardless of the cost required to run it.
I believe that equation is changing.
The next era of AI will be defined by the cost of completing work. Not simply the intelligence of the model, but how efficiently that intelligence can accomplish the task.
If a model with 8 billion parameters can reliably complete the same work as one with hundreds of billions, why pay for the larger model?
As smaller models become more capable, intelligence becomes something we can distribute, specialize, and run across the hardware we already own.
That's the future we're building at @thewebAI
TwIL-8B is available today. Open weights.
And this is just the first of several announcements we're making today.
HF Link: huggingface.co/webAI-Officia…
Kapil Israni retweeted
The growth in India and Bangladesh is staggering. In real PPP per capita terms, growing faster than 2010s China. If this rare continues, India will be Mexico/Brazil/Thailand level in about a decade. Utterly transformative.
India saw about 496 million people lifted out of poverty between 2011 and 2023 in one of the world’s fastest declines in this metric, the World Bank said, although the gains remain uneven. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Kapil Israni retweeted
What's incredible is that India has managed to reduce poverty by a huge amount while also reducing inequality!
Spent 5 minutes on iPhone Duo at the Apple Store. Here’s my take-
- it seems unfinished, lacks the perfection you associate with Apple
- the folded screen brings back memories of iPhone of early years, with small form factor
- the unfolded screen is where it gets interesting - the possibility of new experiences that apps need to build. not a fan of matte finish
- damn the duo is heavy
Overall it is the future, and will make current portrait form factor phones feel antiquated. But not today.
Kapil Israni retweeted
I don't think people realise how big a deal this is.
If you have cancer, or somebody you know has cancer, there is a company in Hyderabad that wants to build a personalised cancer vaccine for you.
Try approaching any big pharma company and asking for a personal vaccine. If they even reply to your email, this is the response you'll get: we don't do that here.
PopVax, on the other hand, takes your tumour sequencing data (or a sequence you've designed), designs candidate neoantigen vaccine sequences with their AI pipeline, produces the mRNA, encapsulates it in their LNP formulation, fills vials, and runs QC, all in 8 to 10 weeks. They’re publicly committing to capacity for 100+ of these over the next 12 months and asking people to email them their cancer type/stage and sequencing details.
What a time to be alive.
Kapil Israni retweeted
The most exciting time to be alive in the last 2000 years!
I don't think people realise how big a deal this is.
If you have cancer, or somebody you know has cancer, there is a company in Hyderabad that wants to build a personalised cancer vaccine for you.
Try approaching any big pharma company and asking for a personal vaccine. If they even reply to your email, this is the response you'll get: we don't do that here.
PopVax, on the other hand, takes your tumour sequencing data (or a sequence you've designed), designs candidate neoantigen vaccine sequences with their AI pipeline, produces the mRNA, encapsulates it in their LNP formulation, fills vials, and runs QC, all in 8 to 10 weeks. They’re publicly committing to capacity for 100+ of these over the next 12 months and asking people to email them their cancer type/stage and sequencing details.
What a time to be alive.
This is so cool. Finally a cloud in the clouds.
Kapil Israni retweeted
Half a billion Indians moved above the lower-middle poverty line.
according to world bank, India’s extreme poverty down more than 10x!
And it begins
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
Story telling matters. When it comes to design AI can put things together, but it lacks the story, it lacks character.
Lack of competence in politics is a global crisis. Though I think the landscape will look different in a decade. With AI taking over cognitive jobs, you will see more talent coming back to public service, and policy making.
