Zero Shot

Welcome back to Zero Shot, where Praveen, Brady, and Rohin discuss the biggest moves in artificial intelligence.This week, Brady mulls over the possibility of running a one-human unicorn—an idea whose most vocal proponent is Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. He references the second season of Shell Game, a podcast where the host is experimenting with building a startup involving AI agent co-founders and colleagues. This brings about larger ethical and philosophical questions, such as whether humans always need to maintain a sense of community and companionship when they’re tackling big goals.Rohin points to Suno’s $250 million fundraise and the platform’s strategy to create, engage, and monetise in the long run. Besides, when it comes to music that is generated from prompts, ownership and intellectual property remain a concern. Suno is positioned as a platform where users can visit and discover new music, which brings to mind Sora, OpenAI’s app for generating short videos. The question is whether users will see Suno as a trusted place that hosts engaging, unique music.Finally, Praveen visits Ilya Sutskever’s appearance on Dwarkesh Podcast. Sutskever was the chief scientist and a co-founder of OpenAI, and makes the point that there is enough compute to prove out almost any idea involving artificial intelligence. This type of work doesn’t require the largest amount of compute, so “we are no longer in the age of scaling; we’re back in the age of research.”Zero Shot’s cover art is generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans.If you have suggestions, critiques, or fresh ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at zeroshot@the-ken.com, or just drop us a note to say hi.Additional ReadingTega Brain’s Slop Evaderhttps://tegabrain.com/Slop-Evader Low-background steelhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel The Plasticene era: Current uncertainties in estimates of the hazards posed by tiny plastic particles on soils and terrestrial invertebrateshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724023957 OpenAI takes stake in Thrive Holdings in latest circular dealhttps://www.ft.com/content/53e2003e-c5c0-42a1-937a-eaea77ac4d41 Accenture dubs 800,000 staff ‘reinventors’ amid shift to AIhttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/01/accenture-rebrands-staff-reinventors-ai-artificial-intelligence ‘Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of my whole drive’https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6/google_antigravity_just_deleted_the_contents_of/ Shell Game, Season 2https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762 James Watson and Edward O. Wilson: An Intellectual Ententehttps://www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente A.F. Steadman reads the prologue of Skandar and the Unicorn Thiefhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmzH_IcYWQY Suno creates an entire Spotify catalog’s worth of music every two weeks, says investor pitch deck for $250M fundraisehttps://www.billboard.com/pro/suno-creates-spotify-catalog-music-two-weeks-pitch-deck/ Silicon Valley has more companies than ideas – Illya Sutskeverhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNq0PWHIgOw Jack Dorsey funds diVine, a Vine reboot that includes Vine's video archive | TechCrunchhttps://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/ 

Welcome back to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin offer their perspectives on the latest developments in artificial intelligence.This week, Praveen describes how Perplexity aborted its Campus Partner Programme in India after allegations of fraud surfaced. In a bid to drum up usage for its Comet browser, Perplexity had rolled out a referral-for-pay system, enticing students to convince others to download the AI browser… except they may have been legions of bots. If living, breathing people can’t be convinced to use Comet, then what does that say about it as a product?Rohin dived into the successes of Nvidia, which is the most successful “shovel seller” among companies in the AI sector. Advanced sales of its Blackwell and Rubin chips over the next 14 months, for instance, have reached $500 billion. But given how Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are now able to train state-of-the-art language models, the lustre around Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) has faded just a bit.Finally, Brady unpacks the rollout of Gemini 3 by Google, which has compelled even OpenAI’s Sam Altman to pause and acknowledge that it’s a threat to everyone else. Gemini 3 excels at visual tasks, and it’s part of the architecture that makes Google’s new integrated development environment Antigravity stand out. Not only does Google have this advanced language model, but also the trust of enterprise and retail users—setting it apart from other companies such as OpenAI. Zero Shot’s cover art is generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans.If you have fresh ideas, critiques, or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a note at zeroshot@the-ken.com, or just write to us to say hi.Additional Reading‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as data centres keep the city hooked on coalhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/24/mumbai-datacentres-coal-air-pollution ‘AI eats the world’, November 2025https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mountshttps://www.ft.com/content/abfe9741-f438-4ed6-a673-075ec177dc62 ‘Perplexity cancels Campus Partner Programme in India after widespread fraud’https://www.theleftshift.com/perplexity-cancels-campus-partner-programme-in-india-after-widespread-fraud/ ‘Earn thousands as a Campus Partner’ of Perplexityhttps://x.com/sherlock_ux/status/1980849775382786069?s=20 ‘Perplexity has cancelled its Campus Partner Programme in India following allegations of fraud tied to its referral system’https://x.com/arsh_goyal/status/1985255590038524346?s=20 The algorithm that detected a $610 billion fraud: How machine intelligence exposed the AI industry’s circular financing schemehttps://substack.com/home/post/p-179453867 Nvidia’s ‘I’m not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memohttps://www.theverge.com/business/828047/nvidia-enron-conspiracy-accounting ‘Made by humans’, Perplexity says the quiet part out loud, AI in courtroomshttps://the-ken.com/podcasts/zero-shot/made-by-humans-perplexity-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-ai-in-courtrooms/ ChatGPT Go's free year turns Indian markets into its biggest test bedhttps://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/chatgpt-go-s-free-year-turns-indian-markets-into-its-biggest-test-bed-125112401042_1.html “Attention is all you need”https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 Altman Memo Forecasts ‘Rough Vibes’ Due to Resurgent Googlehttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ceo-braces-possible-economic-headwinds-catching-resurgent-google 

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.