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At a discussion we held in June last year, someone threw the cat among the pigeons by saying that Open Sourcing AI is like giving everyone a nuclear bomb. It’s not a point of view I agree with, given the enablement that generative AI tools provide, but it is a complex issue, with a spectrum of benefits and challenges.

1. Democratization vs. Monopolization: Open-source AI democratizes access to AI capabilities and spurs innovation, but can also expose AI models to misuse and security vulnerabilities. Closed-source AI safeguards against misuse and protects commercial intellectual property, but it risks concentrating power within high-resource organizations, leading to potential monopolistic consequences. The question arises: How can we strike a balance here?
2. Security Considerations: Open-source AI, while promoting innovation, presents challenges in patching vulnerabilities, leaving the AI system potentially unsecured. Conversely, closed-source AI allows for identified vulnerabilities to be fixed and safety features to be implemented. The question: How can we ensure the security of AI systems while promoting innovation?
3. Bias and Performance Disparities: Open-source AI enables the study of risks that can reduce bias and disparate performance for marginalized populations. Essentially, these systems get stress-tested. However, the question remains: How can we ensure that closed-source AI doesn’t inadvertently perpetuate bias and performance disparities?
4. Future Capabilities: Closed-source AI safeguards against potentially harmful future capabilities. The question then becomes: How can we ensure that open-source AI doesn’t inadvertently lead to the misuse in the future?

The balance between open-source and closed-source AI will continue to be a point of contention, and frankly, we need open-source AI to democratise access, enable development of tools that proprietary AI tools choose not to focus on because of lack of commercial viability. The challenge lies in finding mechanisms for ensuring beneficial usage of AI, and preventing harmful use cases.

Perhaps the only thing more complex than AI itself is deciding how to govern it…

Wrt Netflix removing Annapoornani, why are we even surprised? This is the rule of the mob, and we’ve seen this before when theaters used to be attacked in India, for films that, at times, people hadn’t even watched, but came along because everyone loves a riot. As someone who had once participated in one once told me, beheti ganga mein haath dho liye.

It’s the duty of the law to protect freedom of expression, but more often than not, actions taken to enforce “public order” works in favor of mobs. There appears to be nothing illegal about the movie.

There also isn’t a law for censoring online content yet, but I expect that India will soon have one, especially with the draft Broadcast Law in place.

The IT Rules exist, and there are “self regulatory organisations” that have gone beyond what the IT rules even mandate… but the problem with the IT Rules 2021 is that they create a legal structure for regulating online streaming without the backing of a law. Essentially, they’re not legally valid, and news organisations, which are also covered under these rules, have challenged them in court.

What we’re also seeing is the expected capitulation of streaming services, but that was to be expected: they haven’t challenged the rules in court and they’re unlikely to push back against any kind of bullying or censorship, even though there is no law in India that allows such censorship of streaming services, which are essentially private viewing.

It’s no surprise that Netflix has taken the movie down. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do this again in the future, or if others also follow suit.

When we organised our first conference #NAMA — and that was the only one we did — it was almost in defiance. For a tiny little team like ours (4 or 5 people then), the idea of running editorial and then organising a large conference, was scary. We knew all potential speakers and all potential speakers knew us. We had never figured out costs for a large conference, never negotiated with a hotel. We had done small events where we had left it to the sponsors to pay the venue directly, and we took a management fee. So it was all new. It was all scary.

How we made that happen is a story for another day, and I’ll tell it sometime, but in my mind it wouldn’t have happened if Vijay Shekhar Sharma hadn’t gone out of his way to come and see me in CP, and help me clear my head and literally made a plan and an agenda on the fly. Vijay is a yaaro ka yaar, as they say, and he came through for me that day.

In the middle of all of this chaos, I wanted to define an identity for MediaNama’s conference: for it to be an annual conference on the lines of the D Conference (which, for me, was a benchmark), and for it to be something that people remembered us for. The name that I had been thinking about for years was “Converge”. It represented the fact that we wanted to be a conference were people come together, and convergence is a telecom+internet phrase. I had an intern design a futuristic logo as well, in 2009. But somehow, it didn’t quite fit for me. There were several conferences globally called converge or convergence, and then there is an Indian conference called “Convergence India”. Finally we zoomed in on NAMA. People referred to MediaNama has Nama in conversations, and the first person I remember calling it Nama in a conversation with me was Sameer Pitalwalla, another old friend in the space. But what made this different. I also thought that we needed a visual symbol, and looked to incorporate the hashtag. At that time, MediaNama’s primary focus was tech, and not tech policy, so we thought we could extend the brand. So the conference was called #NAMA, and if we ever did something on the video industry, that would be VIDEO#NAMA, or on music, would be MUSIC#NAMA. I had some of these domain names, so building independent brands wouldn’t be bad idea. We never did this.

But back to the design, I wanted a design that would stand out. My first plan was a repeated hashtag. So I pinged a designer friend, paid an initial amount, and filled out a long brief within a day about what we wanted. Then she went AWOL. After a few days I got awful designs that in no way reflected how I thought about it. By the time I got through with this designer, we had lost 10-12 days, had 20 days to go for the conference, and with a small team, with mostly me trying to figure out speakers, sponsors, designs, speaker gifts, and much more, without what I wanted as an iconic design in place, I thought it was all falling apart. That evening, after I politely told the designer that we would go elsewhere and she can keep the deposit, I called up another designer friend: Himanshu Khanna of Sparklin.

30 min after my call with Himanshu, I got a lovely, calming email from Deepikah, who led design there then, telling me that she’s got it covered. A few days later, we met at a hotel to discuss it, and she already had 3 options of design that I liked. The backdrop was a bright yellow, with repeated hashes of white, offwhite and yellow. Another had a yellow background with strange pipes of sorts all across the design. The third had a yellow background with all sorts of internet centric emoticons combined.

I looked at all three, and I liked what they brought to vibe of the design. Much to Deepikah’s shock, I asked her to combine the three. I wanted chaos and unpredictability in the design. I didn’t want the basic boiler plate designs. Like an intricate piece of art, I wanted that people to spot something new every time they looked at it, or every part of it that they looked at. Something, that even if people saw without the logo, they’d know its ours.

It’s something that I will always be thankful to Himanshu and Sparklin for: they didn’t just save us at a time when we were left in the lurch, they also gave us a design that I personally love. To me it’s art.

We’ve done several MediaNama events since, and the design, at least offline, has remained the same. It’s been difficult to make this design work over a period of time, for venues of different sizes, because of the lack of repeatability.

So we’re simplifying it now…there’s enough chaos in our lives already, isn’t it? 🙂 I just wanted to leave this here, as a matter of record. I still love this design.

A question we ask in the editorial team is: is this news? Within that question lies another one: is this new? When a news organisation reports, the focus is often on what’s the latest. It’s what defines what news channels report, what makes the front page of a newspaper, and the home page of a news website.

This is perhaps because people attach a great premium on what is news. Reuters was built around the idea of reporting the news faster than anyone else. The Bloomberg terminal does this too. Short, sharp. New. The short news business does this too.

Two things: Firstly, there’s a significant premium that people attach to what is new. They have a need to know something before anyone else. It moves markets. There’s money there. It’s a favor someone can trade: you tell someone something important that they didn’t know about, and there’s perceived value in the fact that you provided them with some new information.

The problem here is that the value of many things that are new is limited: what works is the dopamine effect it causes, and people then have an addiction to staying on top of everything. The problem for publications is that what is new brings commodified audiences, and the news gets commodified very quickly as well. The new-ness has a transient lifecycle, a very low shelf life. So because people keep chasing what’s new, publications have to keep chasing it too.

Not enough people value what’s deep.