Zero Shot

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Technology
Updated weekly

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.

5 hr ago

Shakun Batra and ad director Kobayashi on AI in films, the importance of craft

First came hesitation. Naturally, given both guests are filmmakers. But once the threshold was crossed, there was no looking back. For Shakun Batra — director of Kapoor & Sons, Gehraiyaan, and Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu — the tipping point was a traffic jam shot that cost one-tenth of what they'd built on set. For Kobayashi, it was a car commercial that he hadn’t attempted before. Shakun went on to build an AI division at his production house Jouska Films and collaborate with Google to make a small film using Veo 3. Kobayashi built Bait Society, an AI-native production company, from scratch. One augmented an existing practice. One rebuilt entirely. We assumed these were diverging paths. But at the core, both are simply people who love using technology to make things they'd love to see. In this episode of Zero Shot, we get into who gets credit when AI is in the pipeline, what happens to the crews and guilds being left behind, and why craft and voice still matter. We also go into the writing process in the AI age, the limits of the tools, and what it actually takes to make a feature film with AI today. Both agree on one thing: production is getting easier. The bar for storytelling is going higher. Tune in! ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! ____ Additional material: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2439708/ https://www.baitsociety.ai/kobayashi-reel

59 min
17 Jun

Uber and Meta have said no to toxenmaxxing. Make way for 'yieldmaxxing'

If you have been paying attention, something has been happening within tech companies. And it has to do with tokens. But not what you think. After killing its AI leaderboard, Meta announced a new platform to track AI usage and spending. Microsoft has started cancelling the Claude Code licenses of its employees. Uber said it ran out of its token budget for 2026. And then came the latest news of Anthropic disabling Fable 5's access following the US government's directive. These four developments signal a shift underway. For the past year, the game was tokenmaxxing: use as much AI as possible, as often as possible, on everything. Enterprises are now asking whether this obsession was worth it. We are giving that question a name: "yieldmaxxing". Our thesis is simple. The big challenge now is this: how we will use AI safely and reliably without lock-ins and exploding bills, while remaining strategically nimble? To figure out what the token burn and its aftermath looks like, we have Gaurav Mishra on this episode of Zero Shot. Gaurav worked across many companies we are talking about. He was at Yahoo, Meta, and headed product for Uber AI. He is now the CEO of Proshort, an AI-powered contextual sales platform. Tune in! ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! ____ Recommended Reading: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-ai-costs-spike-company-225410935.html https://www.projectflux.ai/p/blown-by-april-why-uber-s-3-4-billion-r-d-budget-could-not-hold-the-line-on-ai-coding-spend https://www.thestreet.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-sends-shocking-message-to-employees

1hr 2min
10 Jun

Physical AI is a Mexican standoff. Who walks away as the winner?

Think of an action or crime film. At some point, when all of the different threads and plots converge, you witness a high-stakes scene. Three characters are locked in a fight. You don’t know who emerges a winner. This is what is loosely called a Mexican standoff. Apply this analogy to physical AI. There are currently three players in the game. America has BigTech and big models that only seem to be getting bigger. China has actual manufacturing capabilities and a sharp-minded executional focus on hardware. And then there are places like India and Nigeria that provide the data for some of these robots, especially “humanoids”. In this episode of Zero Shot, host Praveen Gopal Krishnan talks to The Ken reporter Sakshi Sadashiv who wrote about the mushrooming gig economy around data collection to create robots that perform human tasks. We are also joined by Pramod Ghadge, the co-founder of Unbox Robotics, an Indian company that has deployed 700 robots across nine countries for a specific use-case: warehouses. Each has a take on who wins. But more importantly, this episode takes you inside the growing Physical AI market. Tune in! Additional Material: AI product differentiation, living with robots, world models, and extreme leverage Tesla and Figure AI are building robots to act like humans. Indian workers are teaching them how The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here https://unboxrobotics.com/

1hr 9min
3 Jun • The Ken Premium Only

Lossfunk is the third space for Indian AI, beyond industry and academia

After 15 years of building Wingify, Paras Chopra spent some time deliberating about his next stint. For years, he had chased the 0 to 1 journey of building something from the ground up and watching it grow. He wanted that again. But he knew it had to be different. There would be no product. Forget that, he decided the next project would barely have any commercial inclination. Instead, he chased his curiosity as a child passionate about science. That’s how Lossfunk, a “cosy home” for “independent researchers” was born. Paras describes Lossfunk as the place where everyone — from undergrads to PHDs to just inquisitive people— ask foundational questions on AI away from the pressures that burden academia and labs attached to big tech companies. In this episode of Zero Shot, Paras gets into the journey of Lossfunk and talks about its motivations and principles. Now, a lot of the questions Lossfunk is asking might not result in a flashy new product that changes consumer behaviour. They might just become a research paper. Or two. For Paras, that's completeley alright because building a “research attitude” may fully be the point.____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! ____ Additional ResourcesLossfunkhttps://lossfunk.com Inverted Passionhttps://invertedpassion.com Esoteric programming languageshttps://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin Manifesto for doing good science in AIhttps://letters.lossfunk.com/p/manifesto-for-doing-good-science Particle Feverhttps://particlefever.com/

1hr 1min
27 May • The Ken Premium Only

HCL invests in Sarvam and goes down the 5-layer AI cake

For decades, Indian IT grew and grew some more based on the labor arbitrage model: deploy engineers from Bangalore at one-sixth the cost of an American engineer, bill, repeat. The industry perfected the art of selling "services" instead of building and owning technology. But AI has quickly made the engineer a commodity. The big question now is how IT services will pivot and reinvent. A step in that direction was seen recently, when news spread that HCLTech looks all set to invest $150M into Sarvam and lead its latest funding round. But what exactly is HCL buying and what is Sarvam selling? That's the crux of this episode of Zero Shot. Host Rohin Dharmakumar is joined by Abhishek Pathak, the lead IT analyst at Motilal Oswal and Kashyap Kompella, the founder of RPA2AI Research, who has spent 25 years across AI strategy, M&A advisory, and industry analysis. While both agree the investment signals a shift from applications, they debate the core tensions and questions surrounding this deal. Tune in and hear them unpack the move that could define the shape IT services will take going forward. ____ Additional material: https://x.com/nathanclark_/status/2056947354654355849?s=20 ( https://x.com/nathanclark_/status/2056947354654355849?s=20 )https://the-ken.com/story/google-meta-are-building-huge-data-centres-in-vizag-nobody-told-the-power-grid ( https://the-ken.com/story/google-meta-are-building-huge-data-centres-in-vizag-nobody-told-the-power-grid )https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/hcltech-to-lead-300-million-sarvam-ai-round-with-150-million-bet-at-1-5-billion-valuation-13918719.html ( https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/hcltech-to-lead-300-million-sarvam-ai-round-with-150-million-bet-at-1-5-billion-valuation-13918719.html ) https://rpa2ai.com/about/team/ ( https://rpa2ai.com/about/team/ )https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-pathak-841a3494 ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-pathak-841a3494/ )https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-5-layer-cake/ ( https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-5-layer-cake/ )____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

1hr 5min
20 May • The Ken Premium Only

'The application layer is dead': SpotDraft's Shashank Bijapur on why System of Record is the real moat

Another day and another Anthropic announcement has spurred conversation. This time, it is Claude for Legal services. On May 12, Anthropic unveiled 20+ new "MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry runs on". Think Westlaw, LexisNexis, DocuSign. Alongside this, it announced 12 "new plugins tailored to specific legal work". With every new Anthropic announcement, we typically ask two questions on Zero Shot. Are actual workflows impacted? And what does this do to companies building in similar spaces? In our latest episode, we sat down with Shashank Bijapur, the co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, to find out more. SpotDraft works on contracts, a crucial component of a lawyer's workflow that Anthropic wants to augment. But Shashank is not worried. He calls Claude the UPI layer. What you build on top of it is "heavily defensible," he adds. But what exactly is SpotDraft building that enables it to work with Claude as opposed to being pressured by its entry into the legal tech stack? Tune in! ____ Additional material: An AI System Built by Litigators, for Litigators https://law-disrupted.fm/ai-system-built-by-litigators/ ( https://law-disrupted.fm/ai-system-built-by-litigators/ ) Claude for the legal industry https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry ( https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry ) Mike OSS https://mikeoss.com/ ( https://mikeoss.com/ ) ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

1hr 6min
13 May • The Ken Premium Only

Anthropic's agents are your new finance professionals. They don’t offer investment advice

On May 5, Anthropic released 10 financial services agents. The company said they "pair best" with Claude Opus 4.7, a "state-of-the-art" model that leads the industry on financial agent benchmarks. And the hype followed. The media called the agents a threat to Wall Street. The reality is more complicated. In today’s episode of Zero Shot, hosts Brady Ng and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Musheer Ahmed, founder of FinStep Asia and ex-trader, and Sharath Chandra, founder of EmpowerEdge Ventures, to make sense of what actually changed. The conversation covers why financial services keeps attracting AI investment, why the 10 agents are more useful to junior analysts than to the industry at large, and why trust remains the real bottleneck in finance. They also get into data residency, the regulatory moat protecting incumbent banks, and what happens to a service like the Bloomberg terminal. Tune in! ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!____ Additional Resources Who watches the AI watching your money?https://the-ken.com/kaching/who-watches-the-ai-watching-your-money/ ( https://the-ken.com/kaching/who-watches-the-ai-watching-your-money/ ) Anthropic releases new AI agents for financial services firmshttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-releases-new-ai-agents-for-financial-services-firms-e2829b37 ( https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-releases-new-ai-agents-for-financial-services-firms-e2829b37 ) Anthropic unveils AI agents for financial services taskshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3RLgeUiUXY ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3RLgeUiUXY ) AI for financial serviceshttps://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents ( https://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents )

43 min
6 May • The Ken Premium Only

The AI wearable market is full of dead devices. NeoSapien thinks India can turn the tide

What is the market for AI wearables? And what does they do that a phone already doesn’t? These were the two main questions we asked Dhananjay Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of NeoSapien, a startup that makes an AI-powered pendant that “transcribes in real time, summarises what matters, and reminds you to follow through”. He calls it a “productivity tool” that will change how we interact with devices. But the AI wearable market is tricky. Remember Humane? The AI pin company? It raised $230 million, shipped fewer than 10,000 devices, and permanently bricked every single one of them on February 28, 2025. And Rabbit, the other AI wearable startup that made a big splash, sold 100,000 units and watched 95% of its users disappear within five months. And yet here is Dhananjay who is building a pendant in Bengaluru, telling us India can win the global AI wearable race. And the product, he says, will be used by regular people: small business owners, real estate agents, and even journalists. Tune in! ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic productions. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! Recommended Reading: NeoSapien ( https://neosapien.xyz/ )What Anthropic’s Mythos can hack in hours, Indian banks take months to fix ( https://the-ken.com/story/what-anthropics-mythos-can-hack-in-hours-indian-banks-take-months-to-fix/?utm_source=web&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=con_1_unit_4 )Note taking app Plaud ( https://www.plaud.ai/?srsltid=AfmBOorWLfKt-_WfuLZUxxrLVnxa4lhwSydMEAWNGP5SSm3_BwASi2Wj )Can a Note-Taking AI Bracelet Really Make You More Productive? I Tested One to Find Out. ( https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/plaud-notepin-s-review/ )

50 min

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