Gemini @GoogleDeepMind | Engineering leader / Have done 7 seasons of IPL (Live Cricket) Streaming, 40M+ CCU | Ex-JioCinema | Ex Disney+Hotstar | Ex Hackerrank
Mumbai, India
Joined November 2009
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- Following130
- Followers1.9K
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Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Wrapped up a great evening in Bangalore yesterday.
45+ operators and founders. Drinks, dinner, and honest conversations about the leap from operator to founder.
The recurring theme: find the right problem before you're too deep to see it clearly.
Always a good sign when the energy stays high with no agenda and no slides.
@aakrit @177pc
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Crossed 1 billion images Nano Banana Pro images in @GeminiApp! The pro community is moving fast. This model has been out for 53 days.
Come for the potassium, stay for more. :)
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
@republic @ANI @WIONews @firstpost @palkisu @RealArnab_ @JaipurDialogues @dtbyaadi Plz Save India before its too late! Itlay banned PFA chemical factory, caused 4000 + death from cancer! Kids birth defects! @CMOMaharashtra apni aatma se sauda mat karo! Is factory ko roko! 🙏🏻😥
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Breaking : Arnab Goswami now slams NDTV for not standing with its reporter who Kailash Vijayvargiya abused on Camera.
He is saying NDTV didn’t even play the footage, if it was my reporter, i would have started a campaign.
Multiverse of Madness 😭
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Top feature request unlocked!
You can now attach a notebook made in @NotebookLM right inside @GeminiApp! Starting on the web, mobile next year. We just snuck this one in!
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
A heartbreaking post by former BPCL CFO Sivakumar has shaken Bengaluru’s conscience. After losing his only daughter to a brain hemorrhage, he was forced to pay bribes at every step — from the ambulance driver and police to the crematorium and BBMP. Even in grief, the system exploited him.
This is what @INCKarnataka rule has done to Karnataka — created a culture of corruption so deep that officials no longer fear consequences or feel shame. They behave as if they own the city, not serve it. Civil servants have turned into extortionists, and citizens are left helpless, humiliated, and angry.
This rot is not accidental — it is the result of political patronage, moral decay, and complete collapse of accountability. The Congress government must take full responsibility for enabling such a broken system.
It’s high time we push for serious policy reforms to enforce integrity, transparency, and dignity in public service. Every official involved in this incident must face a thorough enquiry and strict punishment. No citizen should ever have to endure such cruelty from the very institutions meant to serve them.
#CongressFailsKarnataka
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
It's 4:43am PT on a Thursday, and it's launch time on
@GeminiApp!
So excited and thankful for our partnership with Reliance - we've just start rolling out FREE Google AI Pro plans across India for eligible Jio customers! (total value ₹35,100)
Grab it in the MyJio app or here: jio.com/google-gemini-offer
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
If a dog bites — kill it.
If a bull hits — kill it.
If pigeons spread disease — stop feeding them, let them die.
But if a luxury car owner runs over someone — silence.
If someone misbehaves with a girl — silence.
#humanity #straydogs #voiceforvoiceless
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
20,000 people died from drunk driving- ban alcohol for everyone?
1856 people died from pothole accidents- jail all the municipal workers and politicians?
Why punish 10 lakh dogs for vanishingly few dog bite cases? Why this collective punishment on all dogs? Is this permissible under law and justice?
Animal lovers help identify and relocate aggressive dogs. We sterilise and vaccinate dogs with our own money. We run shelters because government doesn’t.
Government does god knows what with its funds for animal sterilisation!
Instead of coming down on rogue municipalities that don’t implement existing laws and mechanisms, judges decided to ignore previous Supreme Court judgments and statutes, and passed an unimplementable diktat that will unimaginable suffering and chaos.
They didn’t even bother to try to constitute a larger bench to overrule earlier judgements. Because dogs cannot protest?
The state of Indian judicial system.
I am sure this will not stand. As long as 10% people in this country has love and compassion in their hearts, they will protect the voiceless souls.
This judgement will go down as black history. An overwhelming over reach where judges dictated policy they don’t understand and didn’t bother to hear both sides.
The right thing to do: set up those shelters first. Then let’s talk about relocation.
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
What capacity planning looks like when your service is at a massive scales: at the point where peak load can overload ISPs in your region (eg in certain cities!)
From @theprogrammerin who architected the live-streaming service that broke the world record in 2023
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
One of the best parts of working at JioCinema was that I got to work closely with people like @theprogrammerin - learnt so much more in 2 years about how to keep things radically simple in order to scale.
He embodies that old Microsoft saying about principal engineers "creating simple solutions for complex problems".
Happy to see him be featured on my favourite podcast with @GergelyOrosz :)
In May 2023, a live streaming world record was set with 32 million concurrent viewers watching the finale of the IPL cricket game. How was this system built?
@theprogrammerin was the architect behind this system, and he walks us through how live streaming at scale works, how the system was built and tested, and other interesting learnings.
Watch or listen:
• YouTube: youtu.be/qXJ3S3T3xJY
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4vH…
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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• @WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS workos.com/
• @coderabbitai — Cut code review time and bugs in half coderabbit.ai/ (use the code PRAGMATIC to get one month free)
• @augmentcode — AI coding assistant that pro engineering teams love augmentcode.com/pragmatic
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Three of my biggest takeaways:
1. The architecture behind live streaming systems is surprisingly logical.
In the episode, Ashutosh explains how the live streaming system works, starting from the physical cameras on-site, through the production control room (PCR), streams being sliced-and-diced, and the HLS protocol (HTTP Live Streaming) used.
2. There are a LOT of tradeoffs you can play with when live streaming!
The tradeoffs between server load, latency, server resources vs client caching are hard decisions to make. Want to reduce the server load? Serve longer chunks to clients, resulting in fewer requests per minute, per client… at the expense of clients potentially lagging more behind. This is just one of many possible decisions to make.
3. “Game day” is such a neat load testing concept.
The team at Jio would simulate “game day” load months before the event. They did tell teams when the load test will start: but did not share anything else! Preparing for a “Game day” test is a lot of work, but it can pay off to find parts of the system that shutter under extreme load.
See more takeaways and a summary here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
Thanks Ashutosh for all these behind-the-scene details!
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
In May 2023, a live streaming world record was set with 32 million concurrent viewers watching the finale of the IPL cricket game. How was this system built?
@theprogrammerin was the architect behind this system, and he walks us through how live streaming at scale works, how the system was built and tested, and other interesting learnings.
Watch or listen:
• YouTube: youtu.be/qXJ3S3T3xJY
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4vH…
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
---
Brought to you by our wonderful sponsors:
• @WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS workos.com/
• @coderabbitai — Cut code review time and bugs in half coderabbit.ai/ (use the code PRAGMATIC to get one month free)
• @augmentcode — AI coding assistant that pro engineering teams love augmentcode.com/pragmatic
---
Three of my biggest takeaways:
1. The architecture behind live streaming systems is surprisingly logical.
In the episode, Ashutosh explains how the live streaming system works, starting from the physical cameras on-site, through the production control room (PCR), streams being sliced-and-diced, and the HLS protocol (HTTP Live Streaming) used.
2. There are a LOT of tradeoffs you can play with when live streaming!
The tradeoffs between server load, latency, server resources vs client caching are hard decisions to make. Want to reduce the server load? Serve longer chunks to clients, resulting in fewer requests per minute, per client… at the expense of clients potentially lagging more behind. This is just one of many possible decisions to make.
3. “Game day” is such a neat load testing concept.
The team at Jio would simulate “game day” load months before the event. They did tell teams when the load test will start: but did not share anything else! Preparing for a “Game day” test is a lot of work, but it can pay off to find parts of the system that shutter under extreme load.
See more takeaways and a summary here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
Thanks Ashutosh for all these behind-the-scene details!
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Netflix actually crashed and got stuck buffering often while livestreaming Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul.
I wasn't expecting this, but I wasn't extremely surprised either.
Livestreaming and recorded content are wildly different in terms of how it is engineered. Netflix's decade+ of experience is in streaming movies. They leverage some incredible edge-caching techniques via their OpenConnect. They not only cache at edge CDNs, they even let ISPs partner in this program and download a cache of top Netflix content into their servers, so when users of that ISP stream movies, it goes from the ISP to the consumer within that network but isn't a net ingress for the ISP (reducing their cost).
All of this optimisation goes out of the door when you're real-time livestreaming. And that's the reason world over, media companies are split between those who do entertainment (recorded content, like Netflix, Hulu, Max, Prime) and those who do News and Sports (Sky, Fox, ESPN)
In fact in India, Hotstar and JioCinema are very very unique in doing *both* entertainment as well as live sports and news at a really big scale.
Only other platform which does both recorded and live at massive scale without hiccups is obviously YouTube (we take Google for granted but this is a crazy company in terms of what they do at scale). The only caveat with Google is that they do not need to implement DRM or stream security as they do free streaming and no one tried to *pirate* their content.
And this is why actually live streaming to 50M+ scale is actually considered a major feat of engineering by the people who actually understand how this industry works, unlike a lot of tech *influencers* just say "oh it is all CDN" 😅
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
This #TATAIPL2024 season, my favourite feature has got to be the cricket scores on #iPhone using live events! Nothing works at scale out of the box for our audience demands, so we had to make our own tweaks. Read all about It here - from the blog - linkedin.com/posts/jiocinema…
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Dive into transformative cloud tech and edge computing, and how they are being harnessed to enhance the OTT experience. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from industry expert Mohamed Bilal, @Akamai and Ashutosh Agrawal, @viacom18! Join us now! jotform.com/240278066140451/…
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Waiting for the hawkers and food stall to start appearing on the left lane of the MTHL.
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
The new law against Hit & Run… Very well explained by this Good Policeman. Also if the fear is being beaten or lynched at the spot of accident why not just drive down to the nearest police chowkie and narrate the incident instead of running away.
Ashutosh Agrawal retweeted
Fundamentally, LLMs mostly provide/include the core application-building logic which is very different from say cloud which is abstracted APIs to access infrastructure
This changes a lot of things technically w/ a whole lot of implications: certain things become commodities, certain whitespaces emerge & certain new things become possible that seemed previously impossible
Some of the changes in the tech stack include:
1/ Testing: Testing with Gen AI models is more complex than traditional software testing. It must account for the inherent unpredictability and non-determinism of AI outcomes. This involves:
Data diversity: Ensuring the test data covers a wide range of scenarios, including edge cases.
Behavioral testing: Observing how the model reacts to different inputs, focusing on ethical and unbiased responses.
Performance testing: Evaluating the model’s response time and resource usage under various conditions.
2/ Versioning: As AI models evolve, version control becomes crucial. Each version may behave differently, impacting the application’s functionality.
Model tracking: Keeping track of which model version was used for specific outcomes or decisions.
Backward compatibility: Ensuring newer model versions don't break existing application functionality.
3/ Training: Training Gen AI models requires careful consideration, especially when tailored to specific applications.
Data selection and preprocessing: Choosing the right training data and preparing it effectively.
Model fine-tuning: Adjusting model parameters to suit the specific needs of the application.
Monitoring and retraining: Continuously monitoring model performance and retraining as needed with new data.
4/ Support: Ongoing support for AI-powered applications involves:
User feedback integration: Regularly updating the model based on user interactions and feedback.
Ethical and compliance monitoring: Ensuring the model adheres to ethical standards and regulatory requirements.
Continual learning and updating: Keeping the model current with the latest data and trends.
I'm sure I'd have missed certain things but this was largely top of my mind as @aakrit & I were discussing this the other day.