Will we have normal conversations, or will a version of AI dial the concerned person and have a conversation on my behalf?
Did you know that Yahoo could have bought Google for only USD 1 million in 1998? However, they failed to see how Google would disrupt and, in 2024, reach a market capitalisation of USD 1.88 trillion. Then Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo in 2008 for USD 45 billion, but they rejected it all. Now, Yahoo is only worth USD 1.26 billion today. It must be paining the stakeholders at Yahoo on these missed opportunities or rather “Screw Ups”, and there are many such start-up stories, and lots of lessons can be learnt from them; turn to Pages 12-16 for the learnings.
A wise man once said that making mistakes is humane, learning from your own mistakes is intelligence, and learning from others’ mistakes and not repeating them is the making of a genius. Tech continues to make fascinating strides, and AI is its new flavour; every manufacturer is either adding. AI after their websites or dropping AI-ready products. Acer, Dell, and HP have all announced and showcased their Version of AI-ready laptops. Smartphones like the Samsung S24 series have built-in device AI capabilities to make life and work easier, such as live language translation, on-call language translation, etc.
Does AI need to take over our daily tasks? Is it pushing the envelope too far? Will I have normal conversations with AI, or will a version of AI dial the concerned person and have a conversation on my behalf? Stock brokers are already heavily dependent on trends and what to buy based on their machine-learning software. When we read articles, thoughts get blurry, whether the article is written by a human or lazily passed on to the Chat GPT. The brain needs constant stimulus and continuous thinking and debate within itself for decision-making, which needs to continue.
We also took a hard dig at all the ‘sharks’ from the ‘tank’ and what and how they invested over the previous seasons, and my team also reached out to some of the start-ups invested to understand how the flagbearer of the entrepreneurship wave started by them is shaping up. This is the 1st issue of the financial year of 2024, and we reached out to Tapan Singhel, MD & CEO of Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, for our cover story. There is a lot to learn and get inspired from his illustrious journey, and besides having many honorary degrees, his actual learning was from the “Streets University”, which has its branches everywhere, in short, life lessons.
Enjoy the issue and drink water, it’s April!