Shyam Sankar
speaker
319 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 May
Shyam Sankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think that he felt that the Saudis were definitely playing games and that the senior officials in the US government just didn't get it.
We were pleasantly surprised to see how much the world we had been building for met its moment with LLMs.
By January, it was quite obvious that we needed to tear up all our roadmaps and get excited about how we could incorporate LLMs into our software to provide a whole new series of experiences.
And we hope you're in favor of that.
With AI and the AI revolution, people think, oh, it's going to make the median person better. That's true. But it's going to make the very best person superhuman.
When Rocket Man was rattling his saber in 2017, the Army wanted to answer the question, how many tanks are there in the Army? That is a three-week data call. Are you serious? So Operation Paperclip was our covert action to bring the very best scientists from Nazi Germany to the US to enable our defense program, in particular our rocket and space program.
No, thank you for having me. I'm just really grateful for everything this country has given us.
I love it. Thank you.
Yes, absolutely. Quantum, quantum surprise, staying ahead of it, understanding its implications. One way of thinking about it is there's nothing new under the sun. There's just the OODA loop. And what is quantum's implication on how quickly you're going to go through John Boyd's observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop? I think it has exponential implications on that.
I think that it's really fast, like millions of times faster is the way to think about it. It's like you can compute, it uses quantum mechanics to do the computation and you're able to compute things enormous permutations and combinations of things at incredible speed. The most obvious implication is it breaks all of our legacy encryption.
So your ability to communicate securely and to the extent anyone has been storing historical encrypted communications, their ability to decrypt that will be near instantaneous. So it has huge implications there. But then for your ability going forward now, you're going to have to adopt that so you have quantum proof. quantum encryption that works.
But then I think there's even more implications beyond that. The encryption is the first thing that we have to worry about. The next thing is, how are we going to employ this for decision advantage? How close are we to that? Well, that's kind of an open question.
I think really smart people I know keep saying we're really close, but really smart people in the 60s thought we were 10 years away from AI. We'll have to see.
My father did. Your father did. Yeah. So my father was the last of nine children in a single, he grew up, he was born in a single room mud hut in the south of India. And his siblings all helped him get to college. And India had its own version, still does, have its own version of DEI there. So he was not allowed, he's a very smart man, but he wasn't allowed to go to med school.
He couldn't get a slot, but he became a pharmacist. That's like the next best thing for him. And he was sleeping, after he graduated from pharmacy school, he was sleeping literally under the kitchen table of one of his brothers. And his sister-in-law, brother's wife, got kind of tired of having him around the house, so found him a job in Nigeria. He was 23 at the time.
And so he, you know, young man, excited about adventure. He went to Nigeria as a pharmacist to build the first pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in all of Africa. Until then, all the drugs were imported. And so he did really well for himself at a very young age. I was probably born seven years after he'd been living in Nigeria. My mom went back to India to have me.
And then I came back to Nigeria as soon as I was old enough to travel. So really, my first three or so years of my life, I was in Nigeria. But the reason that came to an end, we had a horrible armed robbery in the house, which we lived across the street from the manufacturing facility. where all of the cash was kept from the operation.
And so it was a little bit of an inside job of people who worked there who did this. They decapitated the dog. They pistol-whipped dad. They threatened to execute him. They threatened my mom. I was a child, and really, I was just excited to have visitors. You can't control a child. I was just excited to have visitors in the middle of the night.
Dad was only spared because one of the five armed robbers was a regular at, my mom ran an open kitchen. Anyone who worked at the facility, anyone who was help, anyone from the surrounding area, they could always come and eat Indian food that mom would make. And so this guy was a regular and he just, you know, he just made sure they didn't kill us. Wow.
And so we left all of our earthly possessions behind and had to find a place to resettle. Dad had a friend who somehow just, you know, how life works, had moved to L.A., a friend that he grew up with in this village, moved to L.A. and he was selling knickknacks at theme parks.
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