S Anand

I conducted a session on Thu, 24 Sep 2026 at International IT-BPM Summit (IIS) 2026 - Function Rooms #1 & #2, 3rd Floor Pearl Wing, Okada Manila, Parañaque City, Philippines. Summary: AI is too weird and fast-moving to trust by intuition alone: question advice, verify with a second model, calibrate confidence, benchmark what matters, and turn surviving evidence into deterministic rules. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript Audio (60 min)

Our recruitment team asked me to review hiring questions for analysts and data scientists. These were on iMocha - a proctored assessment platform. I logged in. It asked me to switch on my camera, took a photo for face verification, and opened the instructions page. Agents can solve exams I told Codex CLI (running GPT 5.6 Luna Medium): https://test.imocha.io/test/0/0/1 is open on the browser - CDP on localhost:9222 This is a practice test. Solve it. Log progress and results in notes.md. ...

On Air India AI 2531 from Mumbai to Hyderabad, I saw something ingenious: the seat had a phone holder built in. It stretches up and down, so it should fit a wide range of mobiles. Put your phone in, play a video, and you have your own in-flight screen. This flight didn’t have a screen, so this is a pretty good substitute. Earlier this year, on flights from Singapore to Chennai, one passenger used a plastic cover to hang her phone from the tray table. ...

My daughter and I planned a trip to Timbuktu. For good reasons. Mansa Musa, perhaps the richest person in history, ruled there. It’s right at the edge of the Sahara desert. Buildings are made of yellow bricks. And… well, think about telling your friends, “Oh, I just returned from Timbuktu.” We ruled out flying. Flying is for losers. It’s possible to walk but it’d take 3,800 hours (many months) from Singapore and require 15 visas - Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Niger, and Mali (many months). ...

This week, I learned: cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8000 now lets you create a quick tunnel - i.e. expose a port via a public URL, like ngrok. No account or login required. Anthropic is funding protein design and has released a codebase to help with it - which looks interesting. These proteins will be tested in Adaptyv’s automated lab. Pedagogy in the Times of AI - a viral NPTEL video by Pratosh has a rich set of comments on YouTube. One interesting theme that emerged is that the human layer matters more. Specifically: motivation, discipline, social pressure, mentorship, disagreement, tacit cues, relationships, and being challenged repeatedly is why people want humans. Claude Code now supports AGENTS.md natively, thanks to Claude Mods. AI seems to be beating humans at short-term superforecasting. And, this may be the worst it’ll ever be. What are the major open questions in interpretability right now? Jack Lindsay says: Better methods for “mind-reading” model activations; Better methods for answering “why” questions; Fitting good linear probes for unverbalized motivations / awareness; Understanding generalization in training; Model “psychology” and “biology. OpenArt Arena is a human-evaluated benchmark of creativity for image and video models. Seedance 2.5 is way ahead of Gemini Omni Flash #ForNow. Galleries and examples are really fast ways of style transfer. My LLM art gallery, or even just telling ChatGPT to copy phrases from my transcripts, or telling Claude Code to draft the next talk summary write similar to previous talks, are all examples of example-driven worfklows. My evaluation of Jev finds that it’s a cheap frontier model: low quality, low cost. Mot exceptional. Naveen’s benchmark also suggests the same. “Result: on easy and medium items it is fine, ~80%, in a third of a second with no reasoning tokens. On items where the fault is far from the damage (a while closed with fi fifteen lines later, a macro redefined at the top), it drops to 54% on a balanced set, so near chance. DeepSeek Flash holds ~96% on the same items though it uses more reasoning tokens and costs more.” Jev might also be more reproducible and helpful in Jev + LLM composite workflows. AI might have 7-40 IQ points per watt of power - while humans are only 5 IQ points per watt. AI might already be more efficiently intelligent than humans. Mistakes I made Week ending 20 Sep 2026 ...

I conducted a session on Sat, 19 Sep 2026 at Shree Niketan Schools — Teachers’ AI Q&A - Shree Niketan Schools, Chennai / Zoom. Speakers: Anant Mani, Harish Srinivasan Summary: Treat AI as a collaborator, not a vending machine: ask it to interview you before it builds a lesson plan, log what actually happens after you use its output, and benchmark any fix before trusting it. Here’s the link to the session ...

I heard a lot about Jev - a new kind of model from TypeSafe. It’s available on OpenRouter. It’s quite low-cost: Input = 4.2c / MTok, Output = free. It only classifies or scores. It doesn’t generate text. So that’s useful for classification, fact-checking, evaluations, etc. I evaluated Jev on 77 data points from BANKING77 and tested Jev against other models. Summary: Yes, it’s cheap (7c per 1,000 classifications), but not much cheaper than DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (8c) or GPT 5.6 Luna (12c). It’s not that accurate (75%) compared with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (79%) or GPT 5.6 Luna (83%). ...

For over a year, now, I’ve been trying to enroll myself into the Indian Fast Track Immigration biometric system. That’ll let me use the biometric machines at immigration, furthering my objective of not having to speak to humans. Aside: The only two airports where I can go end-to-end without speaking to people are Singapore and Hyderabad (for the domestic flights). Bangalore and Chennai come close in the recent past. But I do need to interact with someone for immigration - unlike in Singapore where I don’t take out my passport or fingers - I just make faces at the camera before it lets me through. ...

It was interesting to see how weak a model Claude 4.5 Haiku is, compared with other frontier models, even inside a good harness like Claude Code. I asked it to: Create a copy the doc and add a table under each of the images - with a scientific name, local name - in italics, and any interesting stuff about the plant.. Here’s the chat which roughly went: Claude: Done! I’ve created a new Word document with tables for all 73 plants… plant-images-haiku-1.docx Me: I can’t see the local names in the output. Claude: Fixed — the local names should now display properly in italics… plant-images-haiku-2.docx Me: The local names aren’t in italics. Claude: Fixed — I corrected the property name from italic to i… plant-images-haiku-3.docx Me: It’s still not in italics. Double-check. Claude: I found the problem — the italic formatting isn’t being written to the XML at all… plant-images-haiku-4.docx … and the fourth attempt got it right. ...

Priya Dialani interviewed me for a podcast. Here’s the rough summary: What do you and Straive do? Straive builds AI and runs AI. I poke at LLMs to learn what they cannot do. My friend calls me an “LLM Psychopath”. Why do AI pilots get stuck before production? AI speeds up coding, but less of testing. Making sure it works can take months. Why organize enterprise knowledge? Better organized info is good for humans and agents. Duh! Can AI organize it? Yes! I’ve had it create one-line summaries of 10K+ docs on Straive Google Drive for easier searching. How can India’s GCCs benefit from AI? Put AI lovers next to business teams and give them AI agent access. They’ll solve asked and unasked problems. How does AI fail? Unanticipated things happen in production. So, have agents monitor failures and revise the process. How is AI software different? Normal software fails reproducibly. AI fails in new ways we haven’t fully understood. Where should a company start with AI? Skip AI strategy. Give people agent access, have them try it, and share what they learned. What if people don’t know what to try? Ask AI. “How could you improve my work?” Even rubbish ideas waste only 5 minutes. How much should we experiment? A lot! Generation is cheap. Ask for 10 options, not one. Who cares even if all 10 fail? But what happened outside of the interview was just as interesting. ...