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[{"pageData": {"url": "https://pipingpotcurry.com/indian-chicken-tikka-kebab/", "title": "Easy Chicken Tikka Kebab - Piping Pot Curry", "content": "Skip to primary navigation\nSkip to main content\nSkip to primary sidebar\nSkip to footer\nHome\n \nRecipes\n \nResources\n \nSubscribe\n \nAbout\n \nNav Social Menu\nsearch...\nHome \u00bb Recipes \u00bb Chicken, Lamb & Seafood\nChicken Tikka Kebab\n\nAugust 31, 2023 . By Meeta Arora . 20 Comments | This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.\n\n Jump to Recipe\n\nChicken Tikka Kebab is a delicious appetizer that is packed with flavor. It starts with chicken pieces marinated in yogurt along with lime juice and aromatic spices, then threaded onto skewers and cooked to create a delicious appetizer. Make it in the air fryer or oven to serve at the gathering, or include it in\u00a0your meal prep for the week!\u00a0\n\nWhen we go to Indian restaurants, one of our favorite appetizers to order is Chicken Tikka Kebab, and for good reason. It's arguably the most popular Indian appetizer not only in India but in Indian restaurants all over the world.\n\nI've been looking for ways to make my favorite dishes for my spice-loving family more easily, and this quick and easy Chicken Tikka Kebab recipe is no exception.\n\nMarinate the chicken and then cook it for less than 20 minutes. This is a great option for serving at dinner parties or family gatherings, similar to my Tandoori Chicken Wings recipe.\n\nIf you like fusion recipes, check out this Chicken Tikka Masala Pasta\u00a0and this Indo-Chinese favorite Chilli Chicken.\n\nCheck out my post for 15+ Air Fryer Indian Recipes.\n\nAdditionally, this Chicken Tikka recipe is very versatile. You can customize the kebabs with your favorite veggies, and even make a big batch while you're doing your weekly meal prep, then enjoy it all week long!\n\nThis chicken tikka recipe is a great low-carb Indian recipe.\u00a0Below I'll share different techniques, including air fryer, grill, and oven\u00a0for cooking Chicken Tikka Kebab at home, along with tips for preparation, serving, and more.\n\nIf you want a vegetarian version of this Indian BBQ recipe, check out my Tandoori Paneer Tikka, Mushroom Tikka, and Hariyali Paneer Tikka recipe.\n\nChicken Tikka vs. Chicken Tikka Masala\n\nYou may be wondering what is the difference between Chicken Tikka and Tikka Masala. Both Chicken Tikka and Chicken Tikka Masala start with essentially the same idea.\n\nChicken Tikka is traditionally made by cooking small pieces of boneless, skinless chicken over a fire pit. Chicken tikka is marinated in a mixture of yogurt and spices, including Garam Masala.\n\nIt can be served right from the skewer or added to a curry sauce, to make the popular dish called Chicken Tikka Masala.\n\nIngredients Needed for Chicken Tikka Skewers\nBoneless, skinless chicken thighs (cut into 1-2 inch cubes)\nRed onion\nGreen & red bell pepper (cut into 2-inch cubes)\nLime wedges & onion rounds for garnish\n\nFeel free to add other veggies to your skewers if you like. Some ideas are: yellow bell pepper, orange bell pepper, mushrooms, or grape tomatoes. You could even add pineapple chunks for a little sweetness.\n\nFor the Marinade:\n\nThe Indian marinade for this Chicken Tikka includes basic ingredients such as yogurt, ginger, garlic, flavorful Indian spices, and lime juice. This marinade is super flavorful, and the addition of Kashmiri red chili powder gives the chicken a gorgeous red color. The lime juice gives this chicken dish a tangy flavor that will keep your family coming back for more.\n\nI recently used this marinade to make paneer tikka for a BBQ, and now I have become the designated person to bring this to every grilling event. So try and share it at your own risk \ud83d\ude09\n\nHow to make Chicken Tikka Marinade?\n\nHere's the secret to nailing any Kebab recipe: All you need is to get the marinade, the cooking time & the cooking temperature right.\n\nJust combine all of the marinade ingredients in a bowl, then toss the chicken in the marinade, ensuring it's evenly coated.\nCover the bowl and place it in the\u00a0refrigerator. Allow the Tikka Kebab meat to marinate for at least 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld together and infuse into the chicken. You can marinate it for up to 8 hours or overnight for a deeper flavor.\nWhen you're ready to cook the marinated Chicken Tikka, simply remove it from the refrigerator and toss the vegetables in the marinade with the chicken. Then thread the chicken and veggies on your skewers, alternating chicken, onion, and bell pepper.\nHow to make Chicken Tikka Kebab in Instant Pot using CrispLid?\nBrush oil all over the inside of the CrispLid basket to prevent the chicken from sticking.\nLightly brush the chicken skewers with oil and place them in the fryer basket.\nPlace the CrispLid trivet in the inner steel pot inside the Instant Pot, then place the fryer basket with the chicken inside on top of the trivet.\nSet the CrispLid over the inner steel pot and plug it in.\nSet the cooking temperature to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and cook the chicken for about 8 minutes.\nFlip the chicken and cook for an additional 7 minutes or until it is lightly charred on the outside.\n\nWhen cooking, be sure not to overcrowd the fryer basket. Work in batches if needed.\n\nYou can use skewers or even place the marinated chicken directly in the CrispLid basket. You can call these Chicken Tikka Bites.\n\nMy daughter loves these chicken tikka bites with buttered naan!\n\nHow to make Chicken Tikka Kebab in the Air Fryer?\n\nThere's not much difference between the Air Fryer and CrispLid method. Here's what you'll need to do.:\n\nLightly grease the air fryer basket.\nArrange the chicken sticks in the air fryer. Lightly brush or spray with oil. Cook at 180 degrees or 360F for 10 minutes.\nTurn the chicken sticks and cook for 7 more minutes, then serve.\n\nAs you can notice, I skipped the veggies when cooking in the Philips air fryer below, as my daughter just wants the chicken!\n\nHow to make Chicken Tikka Kebab in the Oven?\nPrepare a baking tray lined with parchment paper or foil.\nPlace a rack over the top.\nPreheat the oven to 400 degrees\nPlace the skewers on the rack, then bake for 15-20 minutes until chicken is well cooked.\nTurn on your oven's broiler and broil the Tikka Kebabs for about 5 minutes to get the char marks. Be sure to keep an eye on the chicken while it broils so that it doesn't burn.\nOther ways to cook Chicken Tikka:\nGrill it on skewers on your backyard grill.\nChar it in a cast iron grill pan on the stove (To ensure that the chicken cooks thoroughly, you may want to cook it without the skewers if using this method.)\nHow to Serve Chicken Tikka Kebab?\nGarnish with lime wedges and red onion. Serve with Mint Cilantro Chutney on the side for dipping.\nServe as an appetizer at a party on the skewers or without skewers as Chicken Tikka bites. Serve with Mint Chutney or other dipping sauces as desired.\nSlice them to add to a salad or make a wrap with lettuce, onion, tomatoes, and Mint Chutney.\nAdd it to my easy Curry Sauce for a quick delicious curry in minutes.\nServe with saffron rice and raita for a filling lunch or dinner.\nTips to make the best Chicken Tikka Kebab\nMarinate for at least 30 minutes, but longer is ideal for more tender Chicken Tikka.\nFor best results, cook the meat only until done. This will result in soft, juicy & tender chicken kebabs. Overcooked meat can result in chewy kebabs.\nMake a batch of this marinated chicken and freeze for later use or meal prep for the week.\nPopular questions\nCan you make Chicken Tikka in advance?\n\nYes, it is perfect for weekly meal prep. You can make this quick Chicken Tikka in advance and refrigerate or freeze it for later. You can keep it in the refrigerator for 3-4 days or in the freezer for a couple of months.\n*Cooked vegetables may lose their crispness after freezing. To avoid this, you can freeze the chicken by itself and add the vegetables when reheating.\n\nHow to store Chicken Tikka in the fridge or freezer?\n\nStore Chicken Tikka meat in an airtight container with a lid or an airtight gallon-sized freezer bag for best results.\n\nHow to reheat Chicken Kebabs?\n\nTo reheat from frozen, place the kebabs in the refrigerator to defrost overnight. Reheat for 4 minutes in the air fryer at 375F. You can also reheat in the oven at 300F for 10-15 minutes.\n\nWhy you will love this Air Fryer Chicken Tikka?\nIt's easy to prepare. It only takes a few steps and about 20 minutes to cook this easy Chicken Tikka.\nIt's healthy. Chicken Tikka Kebab is low-carb and gluten-free.\nIt's not too spicy, which makes it great for children. My daughter loves these kebabs with her parathas.\n\nOther Indian chicken recipes to enjoy:\n\nChicken Saag - Another delicious north Indian dish made with chicken and a spinach curry sauce\nInstant Pot Butter Chicken - An extremely popular chicken curry recipe made with lots of butter and cream\nInstant Pot Chicken Korma - Chicken marinated in yogurt and spices, cooked with onions, and finished with cashew paste\nLow Carb Tandoori Chicken - Flavorful chicken marinated in yogurt, spices, and lemon juice, then cooked in the air fryer\nKadai Chicken - A restaurant-style chicken curry made with tender chicken cooked with onions and peppers.\n\ud83d\udcd6 Recipe\nTried this recipe?\nGive a rating by clicking the \u2605 below\nChicken Tikka Kebab\nMeeta Arora\nChicken Tikka Kebab is a delicious appetizer that is packed with flavor. It starts with chicken pieces marinated in yogurt along with lime juice and aromatic spices, then threaded onto skewers and cooked to create a delicious appetizer. Make it in the air fryer or oven to serve at the gathering, or include it into\u00a0your meal prep for the week!\u00a0\n4.87 from 37 votes\n Print\n Save\n Pin\n Servings: 4\n Calories: 337\n Course: Appetizer\n Cuisine: Indian\n Diet: Gluten-free, Low Carb\n Prep Time: 35\nminutes\n mins\n Cook Time: 15\nminutes\n mins\n Total Time: 50\nminutes\n mins\nINGREDIENTS\n\u00a0\nUS Customary\nMetric\n\u00a0\n1x\n2x\n3x\n\u25a2\n1 lb\u00a0 Chicken thighs boneless skinless, cut into 1.5-2 inch cubes\n\u25a2\n1 tablespoon Oil\n\u25a2\n\u00bd cup Red Onion cut into 2 inch cubes, layers separated\n\u25a2\n\u00bd cup Green Bell Pepper cut into 2 inch cubes\n\u25a2\n\u00bd cup Red Bell Pepper cut into 2 inch cubes\n\u25a2\nLime wedges to garnish\n\u25a2\nOnion rounds to garnish\nFor marinade\n\u25a2\n\u00bd\u00a0 cup\u00a0 Yogurt greek (also called hung curd)\n\u25a2\n\u00be\u00a0 tablespoon Ginger\u00a0 grated\n\u25a2\n\u00be\u00a0 tablespoon Garlic\u00a0 minced\n\u25a2\n1\u00a0 tablespoon Lime juice\n\u25a2\n2\u00a0 teaspoon Kashmiri red chili powder mild, adjust to taste\n\u25a2\n\u00bd\u00a0 teaspoon Ground Turmeric (Haldi powder)\n\u25a2\n1\u00a0 teaspoon Garam Masala\n\u25a2\n1 teaspoon Coriander powder (Dhaniya powder)\n\u25a2\n\u00bd tablespoon Dried Fenugreek leaves (Kasoori Methi)\n\u25a2\n1\u00a0 teaspoon Salt adjust to taste\nCook Mode\nPrevent your screen from going dark\nINSTRUCTIONS\n\u00a0\nCombine all ingredients for the marinade in a bowl and mix well.\u00a0Add chicken and coat on each side with the marinade.\u00a0Let it rest for anywhere between 30 minutes to 8 hours in the refrigerator.\nWhen ready to cook, add the oil, onions, green and red bell pepper to the marinade. Mix well.\u00a0\nThread the marinated chicken, peppers and onions in the skewers altenating between each.\nPressure Cooker CrispLid Method:\nBrush the CrispLid fryer basket with oil. Lightly brush the skewers on all sides with oil and place in the basket. Do not overcrowd,\u00a0work in batches as needed.\u00a0\nSet CrispLid trivet in inner steel pot of pressure cooker and set fryer basket on top of trivet. Set CrispLid on top of inner steel pot and plug in. Set to 400\u00b0F and cook for 8 minutes. Flip and cook until lightly charred about 7 minutes more.\nServe warm with lime wedges and onion rounds, along with mint cilantro chutney to dip.\u00a0\nAirFryer Method:\nLightly grease the air fryer basket.\nArrange the chicken sticks in airfryer. Lightly brush or spray with oil. Cook at 180 degrees or 360F for 10 minutes.\nTurn the chicken sticks and cook for 7 more minutes, then serve.\nOven Method:\nPrepare a baking tray lined with parchment paper or foil. Place a rack over the top.\nPreheat the oven to 400 degrees.\nPlace the skewers on the rack, lightly brush or spray with oil, then bake for 15-20 minutes until chicken is well cooked.\nTurn on your oven's broiler and broil the Tikka Kebabs for about 5 minutes to get the char marks.\nNOTES\nTips to Make the Best Chicken Tikka\nMarinate: Marinate for at least 30 minutes, but longer is ideal for more tender Chicken Tikka.\nCook: For best results cook the meat only until done. This will result in soft, juicy & tender chicken kebabs. Over cooked meat can result in chewy kebabs.\nMeal Prep: Make a batch of this marinated chicken and freeze for later use or meal prep for the week.\nSkewers:\u00a0I used wooden skewers which I soaked in water for 30 minutes and broke them in a smaller size so they would fit in the air fryer or in the crisplid basket. You can use bamboo skewers too.\u00a0\nMake Chicken Tikka Bites:\u00a0Skip the skewers and place the marinated chicken and veggies directly in the air fryer basket to make chicken tikka bites.\u00a0\n\nNote: Nutrition values are my best estimates. If you rely on them for your diet, use your preferred nutrition calculator.\n\nNUTRITION\nCalories: 337kcal\nCarbohydrates: 9g\nProtein: 21g\nFat: 24g\nSaturated Fat: 6g\nCholesterol: 115mg\nSodium: 622mg\nPotassium: 466mg\nFiber: 3g\nSugar: 4g\nVitamin A: 1501IU\nVitamin C: 43mg\nCalcium: 63mg\nIron: 2mg\nKEYWORD\nchicken kebabs, chicken tikka, kebab, tikka kebab\nTried this recipe?\nShare your photo and tag @PipingPotCurry or #pipingpotcurry\nMore Chicken Recipes\nRestaurant Style Kadai Chicken\n15 Best Indian Chicken Recipes\nMalai Chicken Curry (Creamy White Chicken Curry)\nChicken Kali Mirch\n1.1K\nSHARES\nReader Interactions\nComments\n\nLiane Fisher says\n\nOctober 29, 2022 at 3:40 pm\n\nI am Indian from Bombay and my parents are the absolute best chefs. In other words, I know good Indian food and THIS IS IT. Yum. Yum. Yummy. I made this in the airfryer. I added cilantro to the finished product and it was outstanding. Definitely will be making this again and again and again. So far everything I have made from your website has been outstanding. Thank you!\n\nReply\n\nPiping Pot Curry says\n\nOctober 31, 2022 at 3:56 pm\n\nHi Liane - So good to hear that. Thank you for sharing back \ud83d\ude42\n\nReply\n\nJessica says\n\nAugust 02, 2022 at 11:39 am\n\nMade this tonight and it was delicious, thank you for the recipe.\n\nReply\n\nPiping Pot Curry says\n\nAugust 04, 2022 at 9:57 am\n\nHi Jessica - So good to hear that. Thank you for sharing it \ud83d\ude42\n\nReply\n\u00ab Older Comments\nLeave a Reply\n\nYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *\n\nRecipe Rating\nRecipe Rating\n\nComment *\n\nName *\n\nEmail *\n\nPrimary Sidebar\n\nI strongly believe that each one of us has a chef inside us. We just need to explore the ingredients and create great food. Here you will find easy & delicious recipes using Instant Pot & Air Fryer.\n\nMore about me \u2192\n\nSearch\nPopular\nAir Fryer Roasted Sweet Potatoes\nInstant Pot Coconut Chicken Curry\nCrispy Air Fryer Kale Chips\nInstant Pot Chana Masala (Punjabi Chole Masala / Chickpea Curry)\nIndian Dal Tadka / Dal Fry with Basmati Rice - Instant Pot Pressure Cooker\nPerfect Basmati Rice - Instant Pot Pressure Cooker\nAS FEATURED ON\nFooter\nAS FEATURED ON\nFOOTER\n\n\u2191 BACK TO TOP\n\nABOUT\nABOUT MEETA\nCONTACT\nPRIVACY POLICY\nRECIPES\nINSTANT POT 101\nINSTANT POT RECIPES\nAIR FRYER RECIPES\nINDIAN FOOD RECIPES\nCOOKING 101\nWEB STORIES\nRESOURCES\nSHOP\nGIFT GUIDE\nHOW TO START A BLOG?\nSUBSCRIBE\n\nAS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES.\n\nCOPYRIGHT \u00a9 2023 PIPING POT CURRY"}}, {"pageData": {"url": "https://www.reuters.com/world/india/modi-uses-bharat-g20-nameplate-not-india-amid-name-change-row-2023-09-09/#:~:text=NEW%20DELHI%2C%20Sept%209%20(Reuters,for%20the%20South%20Asian%20nation.", "title": "Modi uses 'Bharat' for G20 nameplate, not India, amid name-change row | Reuters", "content": "Skip to main content\nExclusive news, data and analytics for financial market professionals\nReuters home\nWorld\nBusiness\nMarkets\nSustainability\nLegal\nBreakingviews\nTechnology\nInvestigations\nMore\nMy View\nSign In\nRegister\nIndia\nModi uses 'Bharat' for G20 nameplate, not India, amid name-change row\nBy Tanvi Mehta\nSeptember 9, 20231:06 PM GMT+5:30Updated 3 days ago\n\nA giant screen displays India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the International Media Centre, as he sits behind the country tag that reads \"Bharat\", while delivering the opening speech during the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, September 9, 2023. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis Acquire Licensing Rights\n\nNEW DELHI, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Narendra Modi's placard at the opening of the G20 summit on Saturday referred to India as \"Bharat\", raising speculation of a change of name for the South Asian nation.\n\nIndia is also called Bharat, Bharata, Hindustan - its pre-colonial names - in Indian languages and these are used interchangeably by the public and officially.\n\nWhile the country has traditionally stuck to using India in titles such as president or prime minister while communicating in English, President Droupadi Murmu earlier this week referred to herself as the \"President of Bharat\" in a dinner invitation for a reception of G20 leaders, sparking controversy.\n\nAs Modi declared the summit in New Delhi open on Saturday, he sat behind a table nameplate that read \"Bharat\", while the G20 logo had both names - \"Bharat\" written in Hindi and \"India\" in English.\n\nSuch placards have used \"India\" in the past.\n\nSpeaking in Hindi, the language spoken by a majority of the population, Modi said \"Bharat welcomes the delegates as the President of the G20\".\n\nNew Delhi is hosting leaders of major economies for the bloc's summit at a new, $300 million conch-shaped convention centre called Bharat Mandapam, opposite a 16th-century stone fort.\n\nWhile some supporters of the name Bharat say \"India\" was given by British colonisers, historians say the name predates colonial rule by centuries.\n\nThe Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), has always insisted on calling the country Bharat.\n\nModi's rivals say the change has been forced by the new opposition alliance formed by 28 parties in July called INDIA or Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, to take on BJP in parliamentary elections next year.\n\nA spokesperson for the Prime Minister's Office did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nReporting by Tanvi Mehta; Editing by YP Rajesh and Jacqueline Wong\n\nOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.\n\nAcquire Licensing Rights\n, opens new tab\nRead Next\nWorld\ncategory\nBiden accused of sidelining Vietnam and India rights over strategic interests\n\nThe White House fact sheet issued during President Joe Biden's visit to Vietnam weighed in at over 2,600 words. 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See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays.\n\n\u00a9 2023 Reuters. All rights reserved"}}, {"pageData": {"url": "https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity", "title": "Productivity - Sam Altman", "content": "LOGIN\nSam Altman\n\u00ab\u00a0Back to blog\nProductivity\n\nI think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. \u00a0So I decided to just write them all down in one place.\n\nCompound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic.\u00a0 A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot.\u00a0 So it\u2019s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive.\u00a0\n\nWhat you work on\n\nIt doesn\u2019t matter how fast you move if it\u2019s in a worthless direction.\u00a0 Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored.\u00a0 So think about it more!\u00a0 Independent thought is hard but it\u2019s something you can get better at with practice.\n\nThe most impressive people I know have strong beliefs about the world, which is rare in the general population. \u00a0If you find yourself always agreeing with whomever you last spoke with, that\u2019s bad.\u00a0 You will of course be wrong sometimes, but develop the confidence to stick with your convictions.\u00a0 It will let you be courageous when you\u2019re right about something important that most people don\u2019t see.\n\nI make sure to leave enough time in my schedule to think about what to work on. \u00a0The best ways for me to do this are reading books, hanging out with interesting people, and spending time in nature.\n\nI\u2019ve learned that I can\u2019t be very productive working on things I don\u2019t care about or don\u2019t like. \u00a0So I just try not to put myself in a position where I have to do them (by delegating, avoiding, or something else). \u00a0Stuff that you don\u2019t like is a painful drag on morale and momentum.\n\nBy the way, here is an important lesson about delegation: remember that everyone else is also most productive when they\u2019re doing what they like, and do what you\u2019d want other people to do for you\u2014try to figure out who likes (and is good at) doing what, and delegate that way. \u00a0\n\nIf you find yourself not liking what you\u2019re doing for a long period of time, seriously consider a major job change. \u00a0Short-term burnout happens, but if it isn\u2019t resolved with some time off, maybe it\u2019s time to do something you\u2019re more interested in.\u00a0\n\nI\u2019ve been very fortunate to find work I like so much I\u2019d do it for free, which makes it easy to be really productive.\n\nIt\u2019s important to learn that you can learn anything you want, and that you can get better quickly. \u00a0This feels like an unlikely miracle the first few times it happens, but eventually you learn to trust that you can do it.\n\nDoing great work usually requires colleagues of some sort. \u00a0Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don\u2019t belittle your ambitions.\u00a0 I love being around people who push me and inspire me to be better.\u00a0 To the degree you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people\u2014the cost of letting them take up your mental cycles is horrific.\u00a0\n\nYou have to both pick the right problem and do the work. \u00a0There aren\u2019t many shortcuts.\u00a0 If you\u2019re going to do something really important, you are very likely going to work both smart and hard. \u00a0The biggest prizes are heavily competed for.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t true in every field (there are great mathematicians who never spend that many hours a week working) but it is in most.\n\n\ufeffPrioritization\n\n\nMy system has three key pillars: \u201cMake sure to get the important shit done\u201d, \u201cDon\u2019t waste time on stupid shit\u201d, and \u201cmake a lot of lists\u201d.\n\nI highly recommend using lists. \u00a0I make lists of what I want to accomplish each year, each month, and each day. \u00a0Lists are very focusing, and they help me with multitasking because I don\u2019t have to keep as much in my head.\u00a0 If I\u2019m not in the mood for some particular task, I can always find something else I\u2019m excited to do.\n\nI prefer lists written down on paper.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to add and remove tasks.\u00a0 I can access them during meetings without feeling rude.\u00a0 I re-transcribe lists frequently, which forces me to think about everything on the list and gives me an opportunity to add and remove items.\n\nI don\u2019t bother with categorization or trying to size tasks or anything like that (the most I do is put a star next to really important items). \u00a0\n\nI try to prioritize in a way that generates momentum. \u00a0The more I get done, the better I feel, and then the more I get done.\u00a0 I like to start and end each day with something I can really make progress on.\n\nI am relentless about getting my most important projects done\u2014I\u2019ve found that if I really want something to happen and I push hard enough, it usually happens.\u00a0\n\nI try to be ruthless about saying no to stuff, and doing non-critical things in the quickest way possible. \u00a0I probably take this too far\u2014for example, I am almost sure I am terse to the point of rudeness when replying to emails.\n\nI generally try to avoid meetings and conferences as I find the time cost to be huge\u2014I get the most value out of time in my office. \u00a0However, it is critical that you keep enough space in your schedule to allow for chance encounters and exposure to new people and ideas. \u00a0Having an open network is valuable; though probably 90% of the random meetings I take are a waste of time, the other 10% really make up for it.\n\nI find most meetings are best scheduled for 15-20 minutes, or 2 hours. \u00a0The default of 1 hour is usually wrong, and leads to a lot of wasted time.\n\nI have different times of day I try to use for different kinds of work. \u00a0The first few hours of the morning are definitely my most productive time of the day, so I don\u2019t let anyone schedule anything then. \u00a0I try to do meetings in the afternoon.\u00a0 I take a break, or switch tasks, whenever I feel my attention starting to fade.\u00a0\n\nI don\u2019t think most people value their time enough\u2014I am surprised by the number of people I know who make $100 an hour and yet will spend a couple of hours doing something they don\u2019t want to do to save $20.\n\nAlso, don\u2019t fall into the trap of productivity porn\u2014chasing productivity for its own sake isn\u2019t helpful. \u00a0Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system, and not nearly enough asking if they\u2019re working on the right problems. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t matter what system you use or if you squeeze out every second if you\u2019re working on the wrong thing.\n\nThe right goal is to allocate your year optimally, not your day.\n\nPhysical factors\n\nVery likely what is optimal for me won\u2019t be optimal for you. \u00a0You\u2019ll have to experiment to find out what works best for your body.\u00a0 It\u2019s definitely worth doing\u2014it helps in all aspects of life, and you\u2019ll feel a lot better and happier overall.\n\nIt probably took a little bit of my time every week for a few years to arrive at what works best for me, but my sense is if I do a good job at all the below I\u2019m at least 1.5x more productive than if not.\n\nSleep seems to be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. \u00a0Some sort of sleep tracker to figure out how to sleep best is helpful. \u00a0I\u2019ve found the only thing I\u2019m consistent with are in the set-it-and-forget-it category, and I really like the Emfit QS+Active.\n\nI like a cold, dark, quiet room, and a great mattress (I resisted spending a bunch of money on a great mattress for years, which was stupid\u2014it makes a huge difference to my sleep quality. \u00a0I love this one). \u00a0Not eating a lot in the few hours before sleep helps.\u00a0 Not drinking alcohol helps a lot, though I\u2019m not willing to do that all the time.\n\nI use a Chili Pad to be cold while I sleep if I can\u2019t get the room cold enough, which is great but loud (I set it up to have the cooler unit outside my room).\n\nWhen traveling, I use an eye mask\u00a0and ear plugs.\n\nThis is likely to be controversial, but I take a low dose of sleeping pills (like a third of a normal dose) or a very low dose of cannabis whenever I can\u2019t sleep. \u00a0I am a bad sleeper in general, and a particularly bad sleeper when I travel.\u00a0 It likely has tradeoffs, but so does not sleeping well.\u00a0 If you can already sleep well, I wouldn\u2019t recommend this.\n\nI use a full spectrum LED light most mornings for about 10-15 minutes while I catch up on email. \u00a0It\u2019s great\u2014if you try nothing else in here, this is the thing I\u2019d try.\u00a0 It\u2019s a ridiculous gain for me. \u00a0I like this one, and it\u2019s easy to travel with.\n\nExercise is probably the second most important physical factor. \u00a0I tried a number of different exercise programs for a few months each and the one that seemed best was lifting heavy weights 3x a week for an hour, and high intensity interval training occasionally. \u00a0In addition to productivity gains, this is also the exercise program that makes me feel the best overall. \u00a0\n\nThe third area is nutrition. \u00a0I very rarely eat breakfast, so I get about 15 hours of fasting most days (except an espresso when I wake up). \u00a0I know this is contrary to most advice, and I suspect it\u2019s not optimal for most people, but it definitely works well for me.\n\nEating lots of sugar is the thing that makes me feel the worst and that I try hardest to avoid. \u00a0I also try to avoid foods that aggravate my digestion or spike up inflammation (for example, very spicy foods). \u00a0I don\u2019t have much willpower when it comes to sweet things, so I mostly just try to keep junk food out of the house.\n\nI have one big shot of espresso immediately when I wake up and one after lunch. \u00a0I assume this is about 200mg total of caffeine per day.\u00a0 I tried a few other configurations; this was the one that worked by far the best. \u00a0I otherwise aggressively avoid stimulants, but I will have more coffee if I\u2019m super tired and really need to get something done.\n\nI\u2019m vegetarian and have been since I was a kid, and I supplement methyl B-12, Omega-3, Iron, and Vitamin D-3. \u00a0I got to this list with a year or so of quarterly blood tests; it\u2019s worked for me ever since (I re-test maybe every year and a half or so). \u00a0There are many doctors who will happily work with you on a super comprehensive blood test (and services like WellnessFX).\u00a0 I also go out of my way to drink a lot of protein shakes, which I hate and I wouldn\u2019t do if I weren\u2019t vegetarian.\n\n\ufeffOther stuff\n\n\nHere\u2019s what I like in a workspace: natural light, quiet, knowing that I won\u2019t be interrupted if I don\u2019t want to be, long blocks of time, and being comfortable and relaxed (I\u2019ve got a beautiful desk with a couple of 4k monitors on it in my office, but I spend almost all my time on my couch with my laptop).\n\nI wrote custom software for the annoying things I have to do frequently, which is great. \u00a0I also made an effort to learn to type really fast and the keyboard shortcuts that help with my workflow.\n\nLike most people, I sometimes go through periods of a week or two where I just have no motivation to do anything (I suspect it may have something to do with nutrition). \u00a0This sucks and always seems to happen at inconvenient times.\u00a0 I have not figured out what to do about it besides wait for the fog to lift, and to trust that eventually it always does.\u00a0 And I generally try to avoid people and situations that put me in bad moods, which is good advice whether you care about productivity or not.\n\nIn general, I think it\u2019s good to overcommit a little bit. \u00a0I find that I generally get done what I take on, and if I have a little bit too much to do it makes me more efficient at everything, which is a way to train to avoid distractions (a great habit to build!). \u00a0However, overcommitting a lot is disastrous.\n\nDon\u2019t neglect your family and friends for the sake of productivity\u2014that\u2019s a very stupid tradeoff (and very likely a net productivity loss, because you\u2019ll be less happy). \u00a0Don\u2019t neglect doing things you love or that clear your head either.\n\nFinally, to repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn\u2019t worth anything at all. \u00a0Think more about what to work on.\n\nUpvote 1444\n  \nLike this post? Subscribe by Email\n 1444 responses\nA posthaven user upvoted this post.\nA posthaven user upvoted this post.\nA posthaven user upvoted this post.\nAjay Karpur upvoted this post.\nA posthaven user upvoted this post.\nHiep Nguyen Phi upvoted this post.\n1438 visitors upvoted this post.\nSam Altman\nSubscribe by Email\nPosted 5 years ago\nApril 10, 2018 at 9:48 PM\n438888 views"}}, {"pageData": {"url": "https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/", "title": "What OpenAI Really Wants | WIRED", "content": "Skip to main content\nOPEN NAVIGATION MENU\nWhat OpenAI Really Wants\nBACKCHANNEL\nBUSINESS\nCULTURE\nGEAR\nIDEAS\nSCIENCE\nSECURITY\nWIRED MERCH\nSIGN IN\nSEARCH\nBackchannel\nBusiness\nCulture\nGear\nIdeas\nScience\nSecurity\nWIRED MERCH\nPodcasts\nVideo\nArtificial Intelligence\nClimate\nGames\nNewsletters\nMagazine\nEvents\nWired Insider\nJobs\nCoupons\n\nSTEVEN LEVY\n\nBACKCHANNELSEP 5, 2023 6:00 AM\nWhat OpenAI Really Wants\nThe young company sent shock waves around the world when it released ChatGPT. But that was just the start. The ultimate goal: Change everything. Yes. Everything.\nIlya Sutskever, Sam Altman, Mira Murati, and Greg Brockman, of OpenAIPHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nTHE AIR CRACKLES with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They\u2019ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London\u2014the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury\u2014it\u2019s as if they\u2019re surfing one of civilization\u2019s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who\u2019ve waited in line to the prime minister.\n\nInside the luxury van, wolfing down a salad, is the neatly coiffed 38-year-old entrepreneur Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI; a PR person; a security specialist; and me. Altman is unhappily sporting a blue suit with a tieless pink dress shirt as he whirlwinds through London as part of a monthlong global jaunt through 25 cities on six continents. As he gobbles his greens\u2014no time for a sit-down lunch today\u2014he reflects on his meeting the previous night with French president Emmanuel Macron. Pretty good guy! And very interested in artificial intelligence.\n\nAs was the prime minister of Poland. And the prime minister of Spain.\n\nRiding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous chord that opens \u201cA Hard Day\u2019s Night\u201d\u2014introducing the future. Last November, when OpenAI let loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it triggered a tech explosion not seen since the internet burst into our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search engines were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be trusted. No job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable.\n\nAltman didn\u2019t do the research, train the neural net, or code the interface of ChatGPT and its more precocious sibling, GPT-4. But as CEO\u2014and a dreamer/doer type who\u2019s like a younger version of his cofounder Elon Musk, without the baggage\u2014one news article after another has used his photo as the visual symbol of humanity\u2019s new challenge. At least those that haven\u2019t led with an eye-popping image generated by OpenAI\u2019s visual AI product, Dall-E. He is the oracle of the moment, the figure that people want to consult first on how AI might usher in a golden age, or consign humans to irrelevance, or worse.\n\nAltman\u2019s van whisks him to four appearances that sunny day in May. The first is stealthy, an off-the-record session with the Round Table, a group of government, academia, and industry types. Organized at the last minute, it\u2019s on the second floor of a pub called the Somers Town Coffee House. Under a glowering portrait of brewmaster Charles Wells (1842\u20131914), Altman fields the same questions he gets from almost every audience. Will AI kill us? Can it be regulated? What about China? He answers every one in detail, while stealing glances at his phone. After that, he does a fireside chat at the posh Londoner Hotel in front of 600 members of the Oxford Guild. From there it\u2019s on to a basement conference room where he answers more technical questions from about 100 entrepreneurs and engineers. Now he\u2019s almost late to a mid-afternoon onstage talk at University College London. He and his group pull up at a loading zone and are ushered through a series of winding corridors, like the Steadicam shot in Goodfellas. As we walk, the moderator hurriedly tells Altman what he\u2019ll ask. When Altman pops on stage, the auditorium\u2014packed with rapturous academics, geeks, and journalists\u2014erupts.\n\nAltman is not a natural publicity seeker. I once spoke to him right after The New Yorker ran a long profile of him. \u201cToo much about me,\u201d he said. But at University College, after the formal program, he wades into the scrum of people who have surged to the foot of the stage. His aides try to maneuver themselves between Altman and the throng, but he shrugs them off. He takes one question after another, each time intently staring at the face of the interlocutor as if he\u2019s hearing the query for the first time. Everyone wants a selfie. After 20 minutes, he finally allows his team to pull him out. Then he\u2019s off to meet with UK prime minister Rishi Sunak.\n\nMaybe one day, when robots write our history, they will cite Altman\u2019s world tour as a milestone in the year when everyone, all at once, started to make their own personal reckoning with the singularity. Or then again, maybe whoever writes the history of this moment will see it as a time when a quietly compelling CEO with a paradigm-busting technology made an attempt to inject a very peculiar worldview into the global mindstream\u2014from an unmarked four-story headquarters in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District to the entire world.\n\nThis article appears in the October 2023 issue.\u00a0Subscribe to WIRED. PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nFor Altman and his company, ChatGPT and GPT-4 are merely stepping stones along the way to achieving a simple and seismic mission, one these technologists may as well have branded on their flesh. That mission is to build artificial general intelligence\u2014a concept that\u2019s so far been grounded more in science fiction than science\u2014and to make it safe for humanity. The people who work at OpenAI are fanatical in their pursuit of that goal. (Though, as any number of conversations in the office caf\u00e9 will confirm, the \u201cbuild AGI\u201d bit of the mission seems to offer up more raw excitement to its researchers than the \u201cmake it safe\u201d bit.) These are people who do not shy from casually using the term \u201csuper-intelligence.\u201d They assume that AI\u2019s trajectory will surpass whatever peak biology can attain. The company\u2019s financial documents even stipulate a kind of exit contingency for when AI wipes away our whole economic system.\n\nIt\u2019s not fair to call OpenAI a cult, but when I asked several of the company\u2019s top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn\u2019t believe AGI was truly coming\u2014and that its arrival would mark one of the greatest moments in human history\u2014most executives didn\u2019t think so. Why would a nonbeliever want to work here? they wondered. The assumption is that the workforce\u2014now at approximately 500, though it might have grown since you began reading this paragraph\u2014has self-selected to include only the faithful. At the very least, as Altman puts it, once you get hired, it seems inevitable that you\u2019ll be drawn into the spell.\n\nAt the same time, OpenAI is not the company it once was. It was founded as a purely nonprofit research operation, but today most of its employees technically work for a profit-making entity that is reportedly valued at almost $30 billion. Altman and his team now face the pressure to deliver a revolution in every product cycle, in a way that satisfies the commercial demands of investors and keeps ahead in a fiercely competitive landscape. All while hewing to a quasi-messianic mission to elevate humanity rather than exterminate it.\n\nThat kind of pressure\u2014not to mention the unforgiving attention of the entire world\u2014can be a debilitating force. The Beatles set off colossal waves of cultural change, but they anchored their revolution for only so long: Six years after chiming that unforgettable chord they weren\u2019t even a band anymore. The maelstrom OpenAI has unleashed will almost certainly be far bigger. But the leaders of OpenAI swear they\u2019ll stay the course. All they want to do, they say, is build computers smart enough and safe enough to end history, thrusting humanity into an era of unimaginable bounty.\n\nGROWING UP IN the late \u201980s and early \u201990s, Sam Altman was a nerdy kid who gobbled up science fiction and Star Wars. The worlds built by early sci-fi writers often had humans living with\u2014or competing with\u2014superintelligent AI systems. The idea of computers matching or exceeding human capabilities thrilled Altman, who had been coding since his fingers could barely cover a keyboard. When he was 8, his parents bought him a Macintosh LC II. One night he was up late playing with it and the thought popped into his head: \u201cSomeday this computer is going to learn to think.\u201d When he arrived at Stanford as an undergrad in 2003, he hoped to help make that happen and took courses in AI. But \u201cit wasn\u2019t working at all,\u201d he\u2019d later say. The field was still mired in an innovation trough known as AI winter. Altman dropped out to enter the startup world; his company Loopt was in the tiny first batch of wannabe organizations in Y Combinator, which would become the world\u2019s most famed incubator.\n\nIn February 2014, Paul Graham, YC\u2019s founding guru, chose then-28-year-old Altman to succeed him. \u201cSam is one of the smartest people I know,\u201d Graham wrote in the announcement, \u201cand understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself.\u201d But Altman saw YC as something bigger than a launchpad for companies. \u201cWe are not about startups,\u201d he told me soon after taking over. \u201cWe are about innovation, because we believe that is how you make the future great for everyone.\u201d In Altman\u2019s view, the point of cashing in on all those unicorns was not to pack the partners\u2019 wallets but to fund species-level transformations. He began a research wing, hoping to fund ambitious projects to solve the world\u2019s biggest problems. But AI, in his mind, was the one realm of innovation to rule them all: a superintelligence that could address humanity\u2019s problems better than humanity could.\n\nAs luck would have it, Altman assumed his new job just as AI winter was turning into an abundant spring. Computers were now performing amazing feats, via deep learning and neural networks, like labeling photos, translating text, and optimizing sophisticated ad networks. The advances convinced him that for the first time, AGI was actually within reach. Leaving it in the hands of big corporations, however, worried him. He felt those companies would be too fixated on their products to seize the opportunity to develop AGI as soon as possible. And if they did create AGI, they might recklessly unleash it upon the world without the necessary precautions.\n\nAt the time, Altman had been thinking about running for governor of California. But he realized that he was perfectly positioned to do something bigger\u2014to lead a company that would change humanity itself. \u201cAGI was going to get built exactly once,\u201d he told me in 2021. \u201cAnd there were not that many people that could do a good job running OpenAI. I was lucky to have a set of experiences in my life that made me really positively set up for this.\u201d\n\nAltman began talking to people who might help him start a new kind of AI company, a nonprofit that would direct the field toward responsible AGI. One kindred spirit was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. As Musk would later tell CNBC, he had become concerned about AI\u2019s impact after having some marathon discussions with Google cofounder Larry Page. Musk said he was dismayed that Page had little concern for safety and also seemed to regard the rights of robots as equal to humans. When Musk shared his concerns, Page accused him of being a \u201cspeciesist.\u201d Musk also understood that, at the time, Google employed much of the world\u2019s AI talent. He was willing to spend some money for an effort more amenable to Team Human.\n\nWithin a few months Altman had raised money from Musk (who pledged $100 million, and his time) and Reid Hoffman (who donated $10 million). Other funders included Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, Amazon Web Services, and YC Research. Altman began to stealthily recruit a team. He limited the search to AGI believers, a constraint that narrowed his options but one he considered critical. \u201cBack in 2015, when we were recruiting, it was almost considered a career killer for an AI researcher to say that you took AGI seriously,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I wanted people who took it seriously.\u201d\n\nGreg Brockman is now OpenAI\u2019s president. PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nGreg Brockman, the chief technology officer of Stripe, was one such person, and he agreed to be OpenAI\u2019s CTO. Another key cofounder would be Andrej Karpathy, who had been at Google Brain, the search giant\u2019s cutting-edge AI research operation. But perhaps Altman\u2019s most sought-after target was a Russian-born engineer named Ilya Sutskever.\n\nSutskever\u2019s pedigree was unassailable. His family had emigrated from Russia to Israel, then to Canada. At the University of Toronto he had been a standout student under Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of modern AI for his work on deep learning and neural networks. Hinton, who is still close to Sutskever, marvels at his prot\u00e9g\u00e9\u2019s wizardry. Early in Sutskever\u2019s tenure at the lab, Hinton had given him a complicated project. Sutskever got tired of writing code to do the requisite calculations, and he told Hinton it would be easier if he wrote a custom programming language for the task. Hinton got a bit annoyed and tried to warn his student away from what he assumed would be a monthlong distraction. Then Sutskever came clean: \u201cI did it this morning.\u201d\n\nSutskever became an AI superstar, coauthoring a breakthrough paper that showed how AI could learn to recognize images simply by being exposed to huge volumes of data. He ended up, happily, as a key scientist on the Google Brain team.\n\nIn mid-2015 Altman cold-emailed Sutskever to invite him to dinner with Musk, Brockman, and others at the swank Rosewood Hotel on Palo Alto\u2019s Sand Hill Road. Only later did Sutskever figure out that he was the guest of honor. \u201cIt was kind of a general conversation about AI and AGI in the future,\u201d he says. More specifically, they discussed \u201cwhether Google and DeepMind were so far ahead that it would be impossible to catch up to them, or whether it was still possible to, as Elon put it, create a lab which would be a counterbalance.\u201d While no one at the dinner explicitly tried to recruit Sutskever, the conversation hooked him.\n\nDig Deeper With Our Longreads Newsletter\nSign up to get our best longform features, investigations, and thought-provoking essays, in your inbox every Sunday.\nYour email\nSUBMIT\nBy signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from WIRED. You can unsubscribe at any time.\n\nSutskever wrote an email to Altman soon after, saying he was game to lead the project\u2014but the message got stuck in his drafts folder. Altman circled back, and after months fending off Google\u2019s counteroffers, Sutskever signed on. He would soon become the soul of the company and its driving force in research.\n\nSutskever joined Altman and Musk in recruiting people to the project, culminating in a Napa Valley retreat where several prospective OpenAI researchers fueled each other\u2019s excitement. Of course, some targets would resist the lure. John Carmack, the legendary gaming coder behind Doom, Quake, and countless other titles, declined an Altman pitch.\n\nOpenAI officially launched in December 2015. At the time, when I interviewed Musk and Altman, they presented the project to me as an effort to make AI safe and accessible by sharing it with the world. In other words, open source. OpenAI, they told me, was not going to apply for patents. Everyone could make use of their breakthroughs. Wouldn\u2019t that be empowering some future Dr. Evil? I wondered. Musk said that was a good question. But Altman had an answer: Humans are generally good, and because OpenAI would provide powerful tools for that vast majority, the bad actors would be overwhelmed. He admitted that if Dr.\u00a0Evil were to use the tools to build something that couldn\u2019t be counteracted, \u201cthen we\u2019re in a really bad place.\u201d But both Musk and Altman believed that the safer course for AI would be in the hands of a research operation not polluted by the profit motive, a persistent temptation to ignore the needs of humans in the search for boffo quarterly results.\n\nAltman cautioned me not to expect results soon. \u201cThis is going to look like a research lab for a long time,\u201d he said.\n\nThere was another reason to tamp down expectations. Google and the others had been developing and applying AI for years. While OpenAI had a billion dollars committed (largely via Musk), an ace team of researchers and engineers, and a lofty mission, it had no clue about how to pursue its goals. Altman remembers a moment when the small team gathered in Brockman\u2019s apartment\u2014they didn\u2019t have an office yet. \u201cI was like, what should we do?\u201d\n\nAltman remembers a moment when the small team gathered in Brockman\u2019s apartment\u2014they didn\u2019t have an office yet. \u201cI was like, what should we do?\u201d\n\nI had breakfast in San Francisco with Brockman a little more than a year after OpenAI\u2019s founding. For the CTO of a company with the word open in its name, he was pretty parsimonious with details. He did affirm that the nonprofit could afford to draw on its initial billion-dollar donation for a while. The salaries of the 25 people on its staff\u2014who were being paid at far less than market value\u2014ate up the bulk of OpenAI\u2019s expenses. \u201cThe goal for us, the thing that we\u2019re really pushing on,\u201d he said, \u201cis to have the systems that can do things that humans were just not capable of doing before.\u201d But for the time being, what that looked like was a bunch of researchers publishing papers. After the interview, I walked him to the company\u2019s newish office in the Mission District, but he allowed me to go no further than the vestibule. He did duck into a closet to get me a T-shirt.\n\nHad I gone in and asked around, I might have learned exactly how much OpenAI was floundering. Brockman now admits that \u201cnothing was working.\u201d Its researchers were tossing algorithmic spaghetti toward the ceiling to see what stuck. They delved into systems that solved video games and spent considerable effort on robotics. \u201cWe knew what we wanted to do,\u201d says Altman. \u201cWe knew why we wanted to do it. But we had no idea how.\u201d\n\nBut they believed. Supporting their optimism were the steady improvements in artificial neural networks that used deep-learning techniques.\u201cThe general idea is, don\u2019t bet against deep learning,\u201d says Sutskever. Chasing AGI, he says, \u201cwasn\u2019t totally crazy. It was only moderately crazy.\u201d\n\nOpenAI\u2019s road to relevance really started with its hire of an as-yet-unheralded researcher named Alec Radford, who joined in 2016, leaving the small Boston AI company he\u2019d cofounded in his dorm room. After accepting OpenAI\u2019s offer, he told his high school alumni magazine that taking this new role was \u201ckind of similar to joining a graduate program\u201d\u2014an open-ended, low-pressure perch to research AI.\n\nThe role he would actually play was more like Larry Page inventing PageRank.\n\nRadford, who is press-shy and hasn\u2019t given interviews on his work, responds to my questions about his early days at OpenAI via a long email exchange. His biggest interest was in getting neural nets to interact with humans in lucid conversation. This was a departure from the traditional scripted model of making a chatbot, an approach used in everything from the primitive ELIZA to the popular assistants Siri and Alexa\u2014all of which kind of sucked. \u201cThe goal was to see if there was any task, any setting, any domain, any anything that language models could be useful for,\u201d he writes. At the time, he explains, \u201clanguage models were seen as novelty toys that could only generate a sentence that made sense once in a while, and only then if you really squinted.\u201d His first experiment involved scanning 2 billion Reddit comments to train a language model. Like a lot of OpenAI\u2019s early experiments, it flopped. No matter. The 23-year-old had permission to keep going, to fail again. \u201cWe were just like, Alec is great, let him do his thing,\u201d says Brockman.\n\nHis next major experiment was shaped by OpenAI\u2019s limitations of computer power, a constraint that led him to experiment on a smaller data set that focused on a single domain\u2014Amazon product reviews. A researcher had gathered about 100 million of those. Radford trained a language model to simply predict the next character in generating a user review.\n\nRadford began experimenting with the transformer architecture. \u201cI made more progress in two weeks than I did over the past two years,\u201d he says.\n\nBut then, on its own, the model figured out whether a review was positive or negative\u2014and when you programmed the model to create something positive or negative, it delivered a review that was adulatory or scathing, as requested. (The prose was admittedly clunky: \u201cI love this weapons look \u2026 A must watch for any man who love Chess!\u201d) \u201cIt was a complete surprise,\u201d Radford says. The sentiment of a review\u2014its favorable or disfavorable gist\u2014is a complex function of semantics, but somehow a part of Radford\u2019s system had gotten a feel for it. Within OpenAI, this part of the neural net came to be known as the \u201cunsupervised sentiment neuron.\u201d\n\nSutskever and others encouraged Radford to expand his experiments beyond Amazon reviews, to use his insights to train neural nets to converse or answer questions on a broad range of subjects.\n\nAnd then good fortune smiled on OpenAI. In early 2017, an unheralded preprint of a research paper appeared, coauthored by eight Google researchers. Its official title was \u201cAttention Is All You Need,\u201d but it came to be known as the \u201ctransformer paper,\u201d named so both to reflect the game-changing nature of the idea and to honor the toys that transmogrified from trucks to giant robots. Transformers made it possible for a neural net to understand\u2014and generate\u2014language much more efficiently. They did this by analyzing chunks of prose in parallel and figuring out which elements merited \u201cattention.\u201d This hugely optimized the process of generating coherent text to respond to prompts. Eventually, people came to realize that the same technique could also generate images and even video. Though the transformer paper would become known as the catalyst for the current AI frenzy\u2014think of it as the Elvis that made the Beatles possible\u2014at the time Ilya Sutskever was one of only a handful of people who understood how powerful the breakthrough was. \u201cThe real aha moment was when Ilya saw the transformer come out,\u201d Brockman says. \u201cHe was like, \u2018That\u2019s what we\u2019ve been waiting for.\u2019 That\u2019s been our strategy\u2014to push hard on problems and then have faith that we or someone in the field will manage to figure out the missing ingredient.\u201d\n\nRadford began experimenting with the transformer architecture. \u201cI made more progress in two weeks than I did over the past two years,\u201d he says. He came to understand that the key to getting the most out of the new model was to add scale\u2014to train it on fantastically large data sets. The idea was dubbed \u201cBig Transformer\u201d by Radford\u2019s collaborator Rewon Child.\n\nThis approach required a change of culture at OpenAI and a focus it had previously lacked. \u201cIn order to take advantage of the transformer, you needed to scale it up,\u201d says Adam D\u2019Angelo, the CEO of Quora, who sits on OpenAI\u2019s board of directors. \u201cYou need to run it more like an engineering organization. You can\u2019t have every researcher trying to do their own thing and training their own model and make elegant things that you can publish papers on. You have to do this more tedious, less elegant work.\u201d That, he added, was something OpenAI was able to do, and something no one else did.\n\nMira Murati, OpenAI\u2019s chief technology officer. PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nThe name that Radford and his collaborators gave the model they created was an acronym for \u201cgeneratively pretrained transformer\u201d\u2014GPT-1. Eventually, this model came to be generically known as \u201cgenerative AI.\u201d To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams. All in all, the model included 117 million parameters, or variables. And it outperformed everything that had come before in understanding language and generating answers. But the most dramatic result was that processing such a massive amount of data allowed the model to offer up results beyond its training, providing expertise in brand-new domains. These unplanned robot capabilities are called zero-shots. They still baffle researchers\u2014and account for the queasiness that many in the field have about these so-called large language models.\n\nRadford remembers one late night at OpenAI\u2019s office. \u201cI just kept saying over and over, \u2018Well, that\u2019s cool, but I\u2019m pretty sure it won\u2019t be able to do x.\u2019 And then I would quickly code up an evaluation and, sure enough, it could kind of do x.\u201d\n\nEach GPT iteration would do better, in part because each one gobbled an order of magnitude more data than the previous model. Only a year after creating the first iteration, OpenAI trained GPT-2 on the open internet with an astounding 1.5 billion parameters. Like a toddler mastering speech, its responses got better and more coherent. So much so that OpenAI hesitated to release the program into the wild. Radford was worried that it might be used to generate spam. \u201cI remember reading Neal Stephenson\u2019s Anathem in 2008, and in that book the internet was overrun with spam generators,\u201d he says. \u201cI had thought that was really far-fetched, but as I worked on language models over the years and they got better, the uncomfortable realization that it was a real possibility set in.\u201d\n\nIn fact, the team at OpenAI was starting to think it wasn\u2019t such a good idea after all to put its work where Dr. Evil could easily access it. \u201cWe thought that open-sourcing GPT-2 could be really dangerous,\u201d says chief technology officer Mira Murati, who started at the company in 2018. \u201cWe did a lot of work with misinformation experts and did some red-teaming. There was a lot of discussion internally on how much to release.\u201d Ultimately, OpenAI temporarily withheld the full version, making a less powerful version available to the public. When the company finally shared the full version, the world managed just fine\u2014but there was no guarantee that more powerful models would avoid catastrophe.\n\nThe very fact that OpenAI was making products smart enough to be deemed dangerous, and was grappling with ways to make them safe, was proof that the company had gotten its mojo working. \u201cWe\u2019d figured out the formula for progress, the formula everyone perceives now\u2014the oxygen and the hydrogen of deep learning is computation with a large neural network and data,\u201d says Sutskever.\n\nTo Altman, it was a mind-bending experience. \u201cIf you asked the 10-year-old version of me, who used to spend a lot of time daydreaming about AI, what was going to happen, my pretty confident prediction would have been that first we\u2019re gonna have robots, and they\u2019re going to perform all physical labor. Then we\u2019re going to have systems that can do basic cognitive labor. A really long way after that, maybe we\u2019ll have systems that can do complex stuff like proving mathematical theorems. Finally we will have AI that can create new things and make art and write and do these deeply human things. That was a terrible prediction\u2014it\u2019s going exactly the other direction.\u201d\n\nThe world didn\u2019t know it yet, but Altman and Musk\u2019s research lab had begun a climb that plausibly creeps toward the summit of AGI. The crazy idea behind OpenAI suddenly was not so crazy.\n\nBY EARLY 2018, OpenAI was starting to focus productively on large language models, or LLMs. But Elon Musk wasn\u2019t happy. He felt that the progress was insufficient\u2014or maybe he felt that now that OpenAI was on to something, it needed leadership to seize its advantage. Or maybe, as he\u2019d later explain, he felt that safety should be more of a priority. Whatever his problem was, he had a solution: Turn everything over to him. He proposed taking a majority stake in the company, adding it to the portfolio of his multiple full-time jobs (Tesla, SpaceX) and supervisory obligations (Neuralink and the Boring Company).\n\nMusk believed he had a right to own OpenAI. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t exist without me,\u201d he later told CNBC. \u201cI came up with the name!\u201d (True.) But Altman and the rest of OpenAI\u2019s brain trust had no interest in becoming part of the Muskiverse. When they made this clear, Musk cut ties, providing the public with the incomplete explanation that he was leaving the board to avoid a conflict with Tesla\u2019s AI effort. His farewell came at an all-hands meeting early that year where he predicted that OpenAI would fail. And he called at least one of the researchers a \u201cjackass.\u201d\n\nHe also took his money with him. Since the company had no revenue, this was an existential crisis. \u201cElon is cutting off his support,\u201d Altman said in a panicky call to Reid Hoffman. \u201cWhat do we do?\u201d Hoffman volunteered to keep the company afloat, paying overhead and salaries.\n\nBut this was a temporary fix; OpenAI had to find big bucks elsewhere. Silicon Valley loves to throw money at talented people working on trendy tech. But not so much if they are working at a nonprofit. It had been a massive lift for OpenAI to get its first billion. To train and test new generations of GPT\u2014and then access the computation it takes to deploy them\u2014the company needed another billion, and fast. And that would only be the start.\n\nSomewhere in the restructuring documents is a clause to the effect that, if the company does manage to create AGI, all financial arrangements will be reconsidered. After all, it will be a new world from that point on.\n\nSo in March 2019, OpenAI came up with a bizarre hack. It would remain a nonprofit, fully devoted to its mission. But it would also create a for-profit entity. The actual structure of the arrangement is hopelessly baroque, but basically the entire company is now engaged in a \u201ccapped\u2019\u2019 profitable business. If the cap is reached\u2014the number isn\u2019t public, but its own charter, if you read between the lines, suggests it might be in the trillions\u2014everything beyond that reverts to the nonprofit research lab. The novel scheme was almost a quantum approach to incorporation: Behold a company that, depending on your time-space point of view, is for-profit and nonprofit. The details are embodied in charts full of boxes and arrows, like the ones in the middle of a scientific paper where only PhDs or dropout geniuses dare to tread. When I suggest to Sutskever that it looks like something the as-yet-unconceived GPT-6 might come up with if you prompted it for a tax dodge, he doesn\u2019t warm to my metaphor. \u201cIt\u2019s not about accounting,\u201d he says.\n\nBut accounting is critical. A for-profit company optimizes for, well, profits. There\u2019s a reason why companies like Meta feel pressure from shareholders when they devote billions to R&D. How could this not affect the way a firm operates? And wasn\u2019t avoiding commercialism the reason why Altman made OpenAI a nonprofit to begin with? According to COO Brad Lightcap, the view of the company\u2019s leaders is that the board, which is still part of the nonprofit controlling entity, will make sure that the drive for revenue and profits won\u2019t overwhelm the original idea. \u201cWe needed to maintain the mission as the reason for our existence,\u201d he says, \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t just be in spirit, but encoded in the structure of the company.\u201d Board member Adam D\u2019Angelo says he takes this responsibility seriously: \u201cIt\u2019s my job, along with the rest of the board, to make sure that OpenAI stays true to its mission.\u201d\n\nPotential investors were warned about those boundaries, Lightcap explains. \u201cWe have a legal disclaimer that says you, as an investor, stand to lose all your money,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are not here to make your return. We\u2019re\u00a0here to achieve a technical mission, foremost. And, oh, by the way, we don\u2019t really know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.\u201d\n\nThat last sentence is not a throwaway joke. OpenAI\u2019s plan really does include a reset in case computers reach the final frontier. Somewhere in the restructuring documents is a clause to the effect that, if the company does manage to create AGI, all financial arrangements will be reconsidered. After all, it will be a new world from that point on. Humanity will have an alien partner that can do much of what we do, only better. So previous arrangements might effectively be kaput.\n\nThere is, however, a hitch: At the moment, OpenAI doesn\u2019t claim to know what AGI really is. The determination would come from the board, but it\u2019s not clear how the board would define it. When I ask Altman, who is on the board, for clarity, his response is anything but open. \u201cIt\u2019s not a single Turing test, but a number of things we might use,\u201d he says. \u201cI would happily tell you, but I like to keep confidential conversations private. I realize that is unsatisfyingly vague. But we don\u2019t know what it\u2019s going to be like at that point.\u201d\n\nNonetheless, the inclusion of the \u201cfinancial arrangements\u201d clause isn\u2019t just for fun: OpenAI\u2019s leaders think that if the company is successful enough to reach its lofty profit cap, its products will probably have performed well enough to reach AGI. Whatever that is.\n\n\u201cMy regret is that we\u2019ve chosen to double down on the term AGI,\u201d Sutskever says. \u201cIn hindsight it is a confusing term, because it emphasizes generality above all else. GPT-3 is general AI, but yet we don\u2019t really feel comfortable calling it AGI, because we want human-level competence. But back then, at the beginning, the idea of OpenAI was that superintelligence is attainable. It is the endgame, the final purpose of the field of AI.\u201d\n\nThose caveats didn\u2019t stop some of the smartest venture capitalists from throwing money at OpenAI during its 2019 funding round. At that point, the first VC firm to invest was Khosla Ventures, which kicked in $50 million. According to Vinod Khosla, it was double the size of his largest initial investment. \u201cIf we lose, we lose 50 million bucks,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we win, we win 5 billion.\u201d Others investors reportedly would include elite VC firms Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and Sequoia.\n\nThe shift also allowed OpenAI\u2019s employees to claim some equity. But not Altman. He says that originally he intended to include himself but didn\u2019t get around to it. Then he decided that he didn\u2019t need any piece of the $30 billion company that he\u2019d cofounded and leads. \u201cMeaningful work is more important to me,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think about it. I honestly don\u2019t get why people care so much.\u201d\n\nBecause \u2026 not taking a stake in the company you cofounded is weird?\n\n\u201cIf I didn\u2019t already have a ton of money, it would be much weirder,\u201d he says. \u201cIt does seem like people have a hard time imagining ever having enough money. But I feel like I have enough.\u201d (Note: For Silicon Valley, this is extremely weird.) Altman joked that he\u2019s considering taking one share of equity \u201cso I never have to answer that question again.\u201d\n\nIlya Sutskever, OpenAI\u2019s chief scientist. PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nTHE BILLION-DOLLAR VC round wasn\u2019t even table stakes to pursue OpenAI\u2019s vision. The miraculous Big Transformer approach to creating LLMs required Big Hardware. Each iteration of the GPT family would need exponentially more power\u2014GPT-2 had over a billion parameters, and GPT-3 would use 175 billion. OpenAI was now like Quint in Jaws after the shark hunter sees the size of the great white. \u201cIt turned out we didn\u2019t know how much of a bigger boat we needed,\u201d Altman says.\n\nObviously, only a few companies in existence had the kind of resources OpenAI required. \u201cWe pretty quickly zeroed in on Microsoft,\u201d says Altman. To the credit of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott, the software giant was able to get over an uncomfortable reality: After more than 20 years and billions of dollars spent on a research division with supposedly cutting-edge AI, the Softies needed an innovation infusion from a tiny company that was only a few years old. Scott says that it wasn\u2019t just Microsoft that fell short\u2014\u201cit was everyone.\u201d OpenAI\u2019s focus on pursuing AGI, he says, allowed it to accomplish a moonshot-ish achievement that the heavy hitters weren\u2019t even aiming for. It also proved that not pursuing generative AI was a lapse that Microsoft needed to address. \u201cOne thing you just very clearly need is a frontier model,\u201d says Scott.\n\nMicrosoft originally chipped in a billion dollars, paid off in computation time on its servers. But as both sides grew more confident, the deal expanded. Microsoft now has sunk $13 billion into OpenAI. (\u201cBeing on the frontier is a very expensive proposition,\u201d Scott says.)\n\nOf course, because OpenAI couldn\u2019t exist without the backing of a huge cloud provider, Microsoft was able to cut a great deal for itself. The corporation bargained for what Nadella calls \u201cnon-controlling equity interest\u201d in OpenAI\u2019s for-profit side\u2014reportedly 49 percent. Under the terms of the deal, some of OpenAI\u2019s original ideals of granting equal access to all were seemingly dragged to the trash icon. (Altman objects to this characterization.) Now, Microsoft has an exclusive license to commercialize OpenAI\u2019s tech. And OpenAI also has committed to use Microsoft\u2019s cloud exclusively. In other words, without even taking its cut of OpenAI\u2019s profits (reportedly Microsoft gets 75 percent until its investment is paid back), Microsoft gets to lock in one of the world\u2019s most desirable new customers for its Azure web services. With those rewards in sight, Microsoft wasn\u2019t even bothered by the clause that demands reconsideration if OpenAI achieves general artificial intelligence, whatever that is. \u201cAt that point,\u201d says Nadella, \u201call bets are off.\u201d It might be the last invention of humanity, he notes, so we might have bigger issues to consider once machines are smarter than we are.\n\nBy the time Microsoft began unloading Brinks trucks\u2019 worth of cash into OpenAI ($2 billion in 2021, and the other $10 billion earlier this year), OpenAI had completed GPT-3, which, of course, was even more impressive than its predecessors. When Nadella saw what GPT-3 could do, he says, it was the first time he deeply understood that Microsoft had snared something truly transformative. \u201cWe started observing all those emergent properties.\u201d For instance, GPT had taught itself how to program computers. \u201cWe didn\u2019t train it on coding\u2014it just got good at coding!\u201d he says. Leveraging its ownership of GitHub, Microsoft released a product called Copilot that uses GPT to churn out code literally on command. Microsoft would later integrate OpenAI technology in new versions of its workplace products. Users pay a premium for those, and a cut of that revenue gets logged to OpenAI\u2019s ledger.\n\nSome observers professed whiplash at OpenAI\u2019s one-two punch: creating a for-profit component and reaching an exclusive deal with Microsoft. How did a company that promised to remain patent-free, open source, and totally transparent wind up giving an exclusive license of its tech to the world\u2019s biggest software company? Elon Musk\u2019s remarks were particularly lacerating. \u201cThis does seem like the opposite of open\u2014OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft,\u201d he posted on Twitter. On CNBC, he elaborated with an analogy: \u201cLet\u2019s say you founded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead you became a lumber company, chopped down the forest, and sold it.\u201d\n\nMusk\u2019s jibes might be dismissed as bitterness from a rejected suitor, but he wasn\u2019t alone. \u201cThe whole vision of it morphing the way it did feels kind of gross,\u201d says John Carmack. (He does specify that he\u2019s still excited about the company\u2019s work.) Another prominent industry insider, who prefers to speak without attribution, says, \u201cOpenAI has turned from a small, somewhat open research outfit into a secretive product-development house with an unwarranted superiority complex.\u201d\n\nEven some employees had been turned off by OpenAI\u2019s venture into the for-profit world. In 2019, several key executives, including head of research Dario Amodei, left to start a rival AI company called Anthropic. They recently told The New York Times that OpenAI had gotten too commercial and had fallen victim to mission drift.\n\nAnother OpenAI defector was Rewon Child, a main technical contributor to the GPT-2 and GPT-3 projects. He left in late 2021 and is now at Inflection AI, a company led by former DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman.\n\nAltman professes not to be bothered by defections, dismissing them as simply the way Silicon Valley works. \u201cSome people will want to do great work somewhere else, and that pushes society forward,\u201d he says. \u201cThat absolutely fits our mission.\u201d\n\nUNTIL NOVEMBER OF last year, awareness of OpenAI was largely confined to people following technology and software development. But as the whole world now knows, OpenAI took the dramatic step of releasing a consumer product late that month, built on what was then the most recent iteration of GPT, version 3.5. For months, the company had been internally using a version of GPT with a conversational interface. It was especially important for what the company called \u201ctruth-seeking.\u201d That means that via dialog, the user could coax the model to provide responses that would be more trustworthy and complete. ChatGPT, optimized for the masses, could allow anyone to instantly tap into what seemed to be an endless source of knowledge simply by typing in a prompt\u2014and then continue the conversation as if hanging out with a fellow human who just happened to know everything, albeit one with a penchant for fabrication.\n\nWithin OpenAI, there was a lot of debate about the wisdom of releasing a tool with such unprecedented power. But Altman was all for it. The release, he explains, was part of a strategy designed to acclimate the public to the reality that artificial intelligence is destined to change their everyday lives, presumably for the better. Internally, this is known as the \u201citerative deployment hypothesis.\u201d Sure, ChatGPT would create a stir, the thinking went. After all, here was something anyone could use that was smart enough to get college-level scores on the SATs, write a B-minus essay, and summarize a book within seconds. You could ask it to write your funding proposal or summarize a meeting and then request it to do a rewrite in Lithuanian or as a Shakespeare sonnet or in the voice of someone obsessed with toy trains. In a few seconds, pow, the LLM would comply. Bonkers. But OpenAI saw it as a table-setter for its newer, more coherent, more capable, and scarier successor, GPT-4, trained with a reported 1.7 trillion parameters. (OpenAI won\u2019t confirm the number, nor will it reveal the data sets.)\n\nAltman explains why OpenAI released ChatGPT when GPT-4 was close to completion, undergoing safety work. \u201cWith ChatGPT, we could introduce chatting but with a much less powerful backend, and give people a more gradual adaptation,\u201d he says. \u201cGPT-4 was a lot to get used to at once.\u201d By the time the ChatGPT excitement cooled down, the thinking went, people might be ready for GPT-4, which can pass the bar exam, plan a course syllabus, and write a book within seconds. (Publishing houses that produced genre fiction were indeed flooded with AI-generated bodice rippers and space operas.)\n\nA cynic might say that a steady cadence of new products is tied to the company\u2019s commitment to investors, and equity-holding employees, to make some money. OpenAI now charges customers who use its products frequently. But OpenAI insists that its true strategy is to provide a soft landing for the singularity. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense to just build AGI in secret and drop it on the world,\u201d Altman says. \u201cLook back at the industrial revolution\u2014everyone agrees it was great for the world,\u201d says Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI policy researcher. \u201cBut the first 50 years were really painful. There was a lot of job loss, a lot of poverty, and then the world adapted. We\u2019re trying to think how we can make the period before adaptation of AGI as painless as possible.\u201d\n\nSutskever puts it another way: \u201cYou want to build larger and more powerful intelligences and keep them in your basement?\u201d\n\nEven so, OpenAI was stunned at the reaction to ChatGPT. \u201cOur internal excitement was more focused on GPT-4,\u201d says Murati, the CTO. \u201cAnd so we didn\u2019t think ChatGPT was really going to change everything.\u201d To the contrary, it galvanized the public to the reality that AI had to be dealt with, now. ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer software in history, amassing a reported 100 million users. (Not-so-OpenAI won\u2019t confirm this, saying only that it has \u201cmillions of users.\u201d) \u201cI underappreciated how much making an easy-to-use conversational interface to an LLM would make it much more intuitive for everyone to use,\u201d says Radford.\n\nChatGPT was of course delightful and astonishingly useful, but also scary\u2014prone to \u201challucinations\u201d of plausible but shamefully fabulist details when responding to prompts. Even as journalists wrung their hands about the implications, however, they effectively endorsed ChatGPT by extolling its powers.\n\nThe clamor got even louder in February when Microsoft, taking advantage of its multibillion-dollar partnership, released a ChatGPT-powered version of its search engine Bing. CEO Nadella was euphoric that he had beaten Google to the punch in introducing generative AI to Microsoft\u2019s products. He taunted the search king, which had been cautious in releasing its own LLM into products, to do the same. \u201cI want people to know we made them dance,\u201d he said.\n\nIn so doing, Nadella triggered an arms race that tempted companies big and small to release AI products before they were fully vetted. He also a triggered a new round of media coverage that kept wider and wider circles of people up at night: interactions with Bing that unveiled the chatbot\u2019s shadow side, replete with unnerving professions of love, an envy of human freedom, and a weak resolve to withhold misinformation. As well as an unseemly habit of creating hallucinatory misinformation of its own.\n\nBut if OpenAI\u2019s products were forcing people to confront the implications of artificial intelligence, Altman figured, so much the better. It was time for the bulk of humankind to come off the sidelines in discussions of how AI might affect the future of the species.\n\nPHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\nOpenAI\u2019s San Francisco headquarters is unmarked; but inside, the coffee is awesome. PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA CHOU\n\nAS SOCIETY STARTED to prioritize thinking through all the potential drawbacks of AI\u2014job loss, misinformation, human extinction\u2014OpenAI set about placing itself in the center of the discussion. Because if regulators, legislators, and doomsayers mounted a charge to smother this nascent alien intelligence in its cloud-based cradle, OpenAI would be their chief target anyway. \u201cGiven our current visibility, when things go wrong, even if those things were built by a different company, that\u2019s still a problem for us, because we\u2019re viewed as the face of this technology right now,\u201d says Anna Makanju, OpenAI\u2019s chief policy officer.\n\nMakanju is a Russian-born DC insider who served in foreign policy roles at the US Mission to the United Nations, the US National Security Council, and the Defense Department, and in the office of Joe Biden when he was vice president. \u201cI have lots of preexisting relationships, both in the US government and in various European governments,\u201d she says. She joined OpenAI in September 2021. At the time, very few people in government gave a hoot about generative AI. Knowing that OpenAI\u2019s products would soon change that, she began to introduce Altman to administration officials and legislators, making sure that they\u2019d hear the good news and the bad from OpenAI first.\n\n\u201cSam has been extremely helpful, but also very savvy, in the way that he has dealt with members of Congress,\u201d says Richard Blumenthal, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He contrasts Altman\u2019s behavior with that of the younger Bill Gates, who unwisely stonewalled legislators when Microsoft was under antitrust investigations in the 1990s. \u201cAltman, by contrast, was happy to spend an hour or more sitting with me to try to educate me,\u201d says Blumenthal. \u201cHe didn\u2019t come with an army of lobbyists or minders. He demonstrated ChatGPT. It was mind-blowing.\u201d\n\nIn Blumenthal, Altman wound up making a semi-ally of a potential foe. \u201cYes,\u201d the senator admits. \u201cI\u2019m excited about both the upside and the potential perils.\u201d OpenAI didn\u2019t shrug off discussion of those perils, but presented itself as the force best positioned to mitigate them. \u201cWe had 100-page system cards on all the red-teaming safety valuations,\u201d says Makanju. (Whatever that meant, it didn\u2019t stop users and journalists from endlessly discovering ways to jailbreak the system.)\n\nBy the time Altman made his first appearance in a congressional hearing\u2014fighting a fierce migraine headache\u2014the path was clear for him to sail through in a way that Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg could never hope to. He faced almost none of the tough questions and arrogant badgering that tech CEOs now routinely endure after taking the oath. Instead, senators asked Altman for advice on how to regulate AI, a pursuit Altman enthusiastically endorsed.\n\nThe paradox is that no matter how assiduously companies like OpenAI red-team their products to mitigate misbehavior like deepfakes, misinformation efforts, and criminal spam, future models might get smart enough to foil the efforts of the measly minded humans who invented the technology yet are still naive enough to believe they can control it. On the other hand, if they go too far in making their models safe, it might hobble the products, making them less useful. One study indicated that more recent versions of GPT, which have improved safety features, are actually dumber than previous versions, making errors in basic math problems that earlier programs had aced. (Altman says that OpenAI\u2019s data doesn\u2019t confirm this. \u201cWasn\u2019t that study retracted?\u201d he asks. No.)\n\nIt makes sense that Altman positions himself as a fan of regulation; after all, his mission is AGI, but safely. Critics have charged that he\u2019s gaming the process so that regulations would thwart smaller startups and give an advantage to OpenAI and other big players. Altman denies this. While he has endorsed, in principle, the idea of an international agency overseeing AI, he does feel that some proposed rules, like banning all copyrighted material from data sets, present unfair obstacles. He pointedly didn\u2019t sign a widely distributed letter urging a six-month moratorium on developing more powerful AI systems. But he and other OpenAI leaders did add their names to a one-sentence statement: \u201cMitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d Altman explains: \u201cI said, \u2018Yeah, I agree with that. One-minute discussion.\u201d\n\nAs one prominent Silicon Valley founder notes, \u201cIt\u2019s rare that an industry raises their hand and says, \u2018We are going to be the end of humanity\u2019\u2014and then continues to work on the product with glee and alacrity.\u201d\n\nOpenAI rejects this criticism. Altman and his team say that working and releasing cutting-edge products is the way to address societal risks. Only by analyzing the responses to millions of prompts by users of ChatGPT and GPT-4 could they get the knowledge to ethically align their future products.\n\nStill, as the company takes on more tasks and devotes more energy to commercial activities, some question how closely OpenAI can concentrate on the mission\u2014especially the \u201cmitigating risk of extinction\u201d side. \u201cIf you think about it, they\u2019re actually building five businesses,\u201d says an AI industry executive, ticking them off with his fingers. \u201cThere\u2019s the product itself, the enterprise relationship with Microsoft, the developer ecosystem, and an app store. And, oh yes\u2014they are also obviously doing an AGI research mission.\u201d Having used all five fingers, he recycles his index finger to add a sixth. \u201cAnd of course, they\u2019re also doing the investment fund,\u201d he says, referring to a $175 million project to seed startups that want to tap into OpenAI technology. \u201cThese are different cultures, and in fact they\u2019re conflicting with a research mission.\u201d\n\nI repeatedly asked OpenAI\u2019s execs how donning the skin of a product company has affected its culture. Without fail they insist that, despite the for-profit restructuring, despite the competition with Google, Meta, and countless startups, the mission is still central. Yet OpenAI has changed. The nonprofit board might technically be in charge, but virtually everyone in the company is on the for-profit ledger. Its workforce includes lawyers, marketers, policy experts, and user-interface designers. OpenAI contracts with hundreds of content moderators to educate its models on inappropriate or harmful answers to the prompts offered by many millions of users. It\u2019s got product managers and engineers working constantly on updates to its products, and every couple of weeks it seems to ping reporters with demonstrations\u2014just like other product-oriented Big Tech companies. Its offices look like an Architectural Digest spread. I have visited virtually every major tech company in Silicon Valley and beyond, and not one surpasses the coffee options in the lobby of OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in San Francisco.\n\nNot to mention: It\u2019s obvious that the \u201copenness\u201d embodied in the company\u2019s name has shifted from the radical transparency suggested at launch. When I bring this up to Sutskever, he shrugs. \u201cEvidently, times have changed,\u201d he says. But, he cautions, that doesn\u2019t mean that the prize is not the same. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a technological transformation of such gargantuan, cataclysmic magnitude that, even if we all do our part, success is not guaranteed. But if it all works out we can have quite the incredible life.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe biggest thing we\u2019re missing is coming up with new ideas,\u201d says Brockman. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have something that could be a virtual assistant. But that\u2019s not the dream. The dream is to help us solve problems we can\u2019t.\u201d\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t emphasize this enough\u2014we didn\u2019t have a master plan,\u201d says Altman. \u201cIt was like we were turning each corner and shining a flashlight. We were willing to go through the maze to get to the end.\u201d Though the maze got twisty, the goal has not changed. \u201cWe still have our core mission\u2014believing that safe AGI was this critically important thing that the world was not taking seriously enough.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, OpenAI is apparently taking its time to develop the next version of its large language model. It\u2019s hard to believe, but the company insists it has yet to begin working on GPT-5, a product that people are, depending on point of view, either salivating about or dreading. Apparently, OpenAI is grappling with what an exponentially powerful improvement on its current technology actually looks like. \u201cThe biggest thing we\u2019re missing is coming up with new ideas,\u201d says Brockman. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have something that could be a virtual assistant. But that\u2019s not the dream. The dream is to help us solve problems we can\u2019t.\u201d\n\nConsidering OpenAI\u2019s history, that next big set of innovations might have to wait until there\u2019s another breakthrough as major as transformers. Altman hopes that will come from OpenAI\u2014\u201cWe want to be the best research lab in the world,\u201d he says\u2014but even if not, his company will make use of others\u2019 advances, as it did with Google\u2019s work. \u201cA lot of people around the world are going to do important work,\u201d he says.\n\nIt would also help if generative AI didn\u2019t create so many new problems of its own. For instance, LLMs need to be trained on huge data sets; clearly the most powerful ones would gobble up the whole internet. This doesn\u2019t sit well with some creators, and just plain people, who unwittingly provide content for those data sets and wind up somehow contributing to the output of ChatGPT. Tom Rubin, an elite intellectual property lawyer who officially joined OpenAI in March, is optimistic that the company will eventually find a balance that satisfies both its own needs and that of creators\u2014including the ones, like comedian Sarah Silverman, who are suing OpenAI for using their content to train its models. One hint of OpenAI\u2019s path: partnerships with news and photo agencies like the Associated Press and Shutterstock to provide content for its models without questions of who owns what.\n\nAs I interview Rubin, my very human mind, subject to distractions you never see in LLMs, drifts to the arc of this company that in eight short years has gone from a floundering bunch of researchers to a Promethean behemoth that has changed the world. Its very success has led it to transform itself from a novel effort to achieve a scientific goal to something that resembles a standard Silicon Valley unicorn on its way to elbowing into the pantheon of Big Tech companies that affect our everyday lives. And here I am, talking with one of its key hires\u2014a lawyer\u2014not about neural net weights or computer infrastructure but copyright and fair use. Has this IP expert, I wonder, signed on to the mission, like the superintelligence-seeking voyagers who drove the company originally?\n\nRubin is nonplussed when I ask him whether he believes, as an article of faith, that AGI will happen and if he\u2019s hungry to make it so. \u201cI can\u2019t even answer that,\u201d he says after a pause. When pressed further, he clarifies that, as an intellectual property lawyer, speeding the path to scarily intelligent computers is not his job. \u201cFrom my perch, I look forward to it,\u201d he finally says.\n\nUpdated 9-7-23, 5:30pm EST: This story was updated to clarify Rewon Child's role at OpenAI, and the aim of a letter calling for a six-month pause on the most powerful AI models.\u00a0\n\nStyling by Turner/The Wall Group. Hair and Makeup by Hiroko Claus.\n\nThis article appears in the October 2023 issue. Subscribe now.\n\nLet us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.\n\nGet More From WIRED\n\nWant more WIRED in your life? 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Ad Choices\n\nSelect international site\nUnited States"}}, {"pageData": {"url": "https://archive.is/6lUvm", "title": "The Best Place to Drink Is the Emptiest Bar in the City - The New York Times", "content": "archive.today\nwebpage capture\n\tSaved from\t\nhistory\u2190priornext\u2192\n\t\n\t27 Jun 2023 05:52:06 UTC\nAll snapshots\tfrom host www.nytimes.com\nWebpageScreenshot\nsharedownload .zipreport bug or abuseBuy me a coffee\nSKIP TO CONTENT\nSECTIONS\nSEARCH\nLETTER OF RECOMMENDATION\nThe Best Place to Drink Is the Emptiest Bar in the City\nWhen your hearing starts to go, you just want a place to sit, sip and have a talk: namely, a hotel bar.\nGive this article\nCredit...\nIoulex for The New York Times\nBy John Cotter\nJune 20, 2023\nI\u2019m sipping a bitters and soda in an empty hotel bar \u2014 empty but for the mixologist, who\u2019s pouring himself one finger, very deftly, of Pernod, then concealing it down by the sink. Soon my long-lost friend arrives, and the two of us will stay here at the bar for the evening. He looks around to make sure no one is listening \u2014 it\u2019s clear as a bare stage. He warms to his story: a brother in trouble, red-pilled and creeping around at sinister rallies. I offer some cautions, some questions. Very naturally, we touch on my bad health. Which, as it happens, is why we\u2019re talking here in a hotel bar. And why we\u2019ll be here for hours to come, no plans to move on later to someplace brighter, or hipper, or darker \u2014 nowhere to see or be seen.\nMy hearing is going. \u201cGoing\u201d understates the issue. My hearing is nearly gone. When I was a kid, I\u2019d spend the night in any loud dive, the pulse of bass in my blood cells. I loved the simultaneity of busy bars: the overhead music and the smack of pool balls. You could laugh while you listened while you danced. I knew what everyone in the room was down for, like a spider in the center of its web. I knew who to kiss and who to shun.\nI like hotel bars because I want to try to hear voices; not the little barks and repetitions shuffled around in loud music and crowd clamor.\nAll this changed in my early 30s, when my hearing grew unreliable, then alarming. Voids of sound rolled down on me from nowhere. Roaring and hissing filled up my head. Tinnitus from M\u00e9ni\u00e8re\u2019s disease; first in one ear, then the other. I\u2019d lose balance on walks, and then I\u2019d lose my balance while I sat still in a chair, or while I was lying down. I couldn\u2019t find a cure.\nA decade on, I talk about this when I see old friends at hotel bars. It\u2019s the kind of conversation we wouldn\u2019t be able to have at a dark place full of thrum, or a pop-song bar with ironic cocktails. I like hotel bars because I want to try to hear voices; not the little barks and repetitions shuffled around in loud music and crowd clamor \u2014 that simultaneity of sound I no longer tune into. Not color patter about our fellow drinkers. Instead, I want a real connection, a friendly intimacy. In a leather half-booth, in the emptiest bar in the city, there is no impetus to be decorous. The sorrows we pour out won\u2019t get absorbed in cacophony. In all the world there\u2019s only us.\nHotel bars are the mudrooms of the city, a place by the entrance, a liminality, where most people linger but briefly, at the start or the end of the night: business travelers on their laptops, sex workers on their phones, elderly couples growing amorous, thirsty parents on a break from their kids, entertainers with odd hours. They\u2019re places you can tell the truth, over nuts and standard-issue wine. I should clarify that I don\u2019t mean fancy hotel bars \u2014 not the Ace, or even the W; not a storied corner like Bemelmans at the Carlyle. Nothing chic and nothing stuffy and nothing raw; not the blaring screens of sports bars, nor the hoary formica of busy dives. For now, a Marriott will do, a run-down Hilton, someplace there\u2019s nothing worth stealing or being looked at. Where the carpet rebuffs your gaze, and where you don\u2019t care if the spider plant on the empty bookshelves is real \u2014 it\u2019s beside the point if it\u2019s real. When I touch down in a city where I have friends to catch up with \u2014 voices I\u2019m desperate to hear \u2014 I start by searching for hotels, double-checking to be sure they won\u2019t be swarming with conventioneers.\nBut the soft leather booths and patterned carpets of a previous century are disappearing at speed. As Kate Wagner describes in The Atlantic, restaurants, bars and coffee shops are increasingly made of materials like slate and metal, with high ceilings: \u201cThe result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible.\u201d Because these new places are stylish but uncomfortable, they generate higher turnover, thus higher profits. Once everything is Instagrammable, nothing will be audible.\nWhen that day comes, there will be no place where my old friend Jen can whisper about the romance novels she quietly plans to start writing \u2014 but whisper in a way I can hear her. Or where Sommer and I mutually disclose our histories of shyness, and talk about how we beat it back. Or where Kennen can break down his adventures in polyamory, really dig into who did what, and why it\u2019s bewitching. It\u2019s where my agent and I can talk through book trouble, without me straining to read his lips. It\u2019s where I can sit alone, far away from my house and my street, far from work, with its dreads and distractions. It\u2019s where I can read a book and sip a drink and sketch out the early part of a story.\nBecause I am transported, in this plush lounge, in this scentless air, awaiting you, whoever you are. (I\u2019m so pleased we agreed to this place, that we can be so unfashionable together.) Right now I\u2019m watching the lobby, an eye on the business of bags, cards and brochures. The just-arriving guests are dressed in new vacation clothes they\u2019re unused to wearing, clothes that need to be tugged one way and then another. You smirk at them when you come through the front doors. I wave my hand, and then you see me. Tell me what you\u2019re thinking about these days, and what\u2019s going as planned, and what worries you. Let\u2019s spend an hour reassuring each other. Let\u2019s order another. Give up the idea that the party is someplace else for now. Return, for as long as you like, to the quiet place inside yourself that is always arriving, always traveling. Where the clock is hidden behind the bar, by the empty Pernod, and the hand that refills it, unseen but for us.\nJohn Cotter is the author of the memoir \u201cLosing Music.\u201d\nA version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2023, Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Hotel Bars. Order Reprints | Today\u2019s Paper | Subscribe\nGive this article\nSite Index\nGo to Home Page \u00bb\nNEWS\nOPINION\nARTS\nLIVING\nLISTINGS & MORE\nSite Information Navigation\n\u00a9\u00a02023\u00a0The New York Times Company\nNYTCoContact UsAccessibilityWork with usAdvertiseT Brand StudioYour Ad ChoicesPrivacy PolicyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite MapHelpSubscriptions\n0%\n\u2003\n10%\n\u2003\n20%\n\u2003\n30%\n\u2003\n40%\n\u2003\n50%\n\u2003\n60%\n\u2003\n70%\n\u2003\n80%\n\u2003\n90%\n\u2003\n100%"}}, {"pageData": {"url": "https://www.thehotchips.com/p/boom-roasted", "title": "Boom, Roasted - by Pranav Manie - Hot Chips", "content": "Hot Chips\nSubscribe\nSign in\nDiscover more from Hot Chips\na monthly deep (AF) dive at the intersection of culture and numbers ($ / % / #)!\nOver 1,000 subscribers\nSubscribe\nContinue reading\nSign in\nBoom, Roasted\nAn exploration of India's relationship with coffee.\nPRANAV MANIE\n20 NOV 2022\n37\n4\nShare\n\nHello, folks! Hot Chips is back, and I think I will end up talking about every food and beverage item before I dive into the one that inspired my newsletter. Some day.\n\nBut the piece this time around is about coffee and how we Indians look at it today. It tilts more towards cafes than retail off-the-shelf options, but I had an extremely fun time piecing this story. As usual, I was blown away by what I heard from people and read, and I was constantly learning something new.\n\nHowever, I drank more tea to get the energy to finish writing this piece. Sorry. Ginger tea is just the classic winter beverage for me. Thank you, Tata Tea.\n\nI didn\u2019t really give too much thought to the backing track, but since coffee table jazz is a thing, I figured I\u2019ll go with one that\u2019s not just popular, but is also a pretty good reading track, in my opinion. Happy reading :))\n\nThere\u2019s an entire genre of videos on YouTube that\u2019s simply about a routine day in the life of a management consultant in Toronto/Tokyo/London/insert global city.\n\nAny given video has a set structure: show the consultant waking up, using some face pack product that has likely sponsored them, prep for work, take a cycle, get coffee, reach work, speed-run work\u2026.you know the gist. It\u2019s every bit meant to be sold as a glamorous career option in all the things one gets to do as a management consultant. It\u2019s actually a little different from the '\u201cproduct manager\u201d genre of videos, because at least the poor consultants seem to be on the grind all day.\n\nBut this post isn\u2019t about what management consulting or product management is \u2014 you can pick up an MBA pamphlet for that. Among creators in either genre \u2014 every day, without fail, they go to the same coffee shop, and get that same cup of coffee. And while it\u2019s certainly true for Western countries, you\u2019d be surprised to see that behavior in Indian working professionals, too. The potential for one of us to make \u201ccontent\u201d around this is not far away \u2014 it\u2019s already happening, minus the coffee.\n\n(If my parents are reading this \u2014 please don\u2019t pick up an MBA pamphlet.)\n\nIndia has come a long way when it comes to consuming coffee \u2014 from \u201cyeah, I\u2019m good with my Nescafe\u201d to \u201cnope, not touching anything except my morning Starbucks\u201d. And there is still longer to go. But between consumers who are extremely protective about their darling French press, and the professional who can only spend enough time to buy a frappucino, the spectrum of coffee among people who can pay (or don\u2019t care about what good coffee costs) is huge.\n\nThis also raises the question of how spoilt for choice we have become, and whether as premium customers, loyalty to that one cup of coffee holds meaning for us. That\u2019s loyalty not just in terms of what the product has to offer, but also what the brand is doing over and above the product to ensure some lifetime patreons.\n\nIn order to start this story, we might want to roll back a decade or so, to go back to when coffee started becoming cool, owing to a Karnataka native named VG Siddhartha.\n\nThe earliest I can remember being exposed to cafe culture in my tier-2 hometown was a Cafe Coffee Day store. Bright yellow lights, walls with word clouds, \u201cA lot can happen over coffee\u201d having its own space, brown sofas, a counter with some of the most delectable cake and sandwiches I had ever eaten, a verandah for outside seating, and amicable staff. I had not seen this before, because I didn\u2019t know what cafe culture was before this. CCD defined that for an entire generation of people who didn\u2019t hail from a metro, and who didn\u2019t have enough immediate family members who had likely seen the massive green-and-white logo abroad.\n\nAnd this was by design. Interactions with German and Singaporean cultures made ex-financial services entrepreneur Siddhartha realize that there may be money to be made in selling coffee to people under the guise of providing them with free internet. He decided to move his consumer business of selling readymade coffee to something that might give him more margins \u2014 like selling an experience. It\u2019s not like internet was a very widely-available commodity back in the 90s. Sigh, kids these days, cribbing about their Jio Fiber connection snapping for just 30 minutes.\n\nI\u2019m kids.\n\nIn 1996, Siddhartha opened the first CCD outlet on Brigade Road in Bangalore. Its biggest draw in a tea-loving nation was its free (but timebound for an hour) internet. While, of course, metropolitan cities would have seen the first spoils, fast-growing tier-2 cities like mine weren\u2019t far away \u2014 Bhubaneswar saw its own in the early 2000s. By 2010, there were 1000+ stores all over India \u2014 5 times that of Barista, that had entered India in 2000 with its first store in Delhi.\n\nMore importantly, CCD had an otherworldly pulse on what areas in cities were truly popular. As part of their go-to-market strategy, many CCD stores neighbored popular schools/colleges \u2014 a cup of cold coffee with benchmates after a dreary day of classwork sounded like the perfect cure. In that vein, CCD had tie-ups with multiple institutes to have a subsidized in-house cafe \u2014 multiple IITs have this arrangement. I didn\u2019t realize until writing this that the first store in Bhubaneswar was right in front of the lane that led to my school (and an MBA institute, while we\u2019re at that \u2014 please leave me alone).\n\nWhile Barista is Indian-origin, it always felt like it came from Italy or somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula, owing to the name and the logo. CCD felt very distinctly desi. That logo with the ugly thin font and inconspicuous green leaf that seemed to emulate the French accent over the \u201ce\u201d in \u201ccafe\u201d could only have been a product of jugaad. One look at CCD\u2019s logo today should tell you that the change might have been tough for them.\n\nI mean, font so ugly, they should have just gone with comic sans or something.\n\nBut while CCD was able to sell the cafe experience to India, it never truly sold coffee culture \u2014 even if it sourced beans from real Indian coffee estates. For the longest time, Indians associated coffee very strongly with two other ingredients: milk and sugar. Sure, Barista and CCD explained the difference between a cappuccino and an espresso. But with template optimization over time and scale, you could never tell if you were just having milk with a yellow heart designed on the first layer of the cup. There was quite a blurry line between coffee culture and cafe culture, and there was no micro-level education that was undertaken by any chain at the time to explain the minute differences in cups.\n\nIn one way, at the time, coffee was perceived the same way tea was: something to have while sitting and watching the breeze, or chatting with friends. The local CCD store was a premium tapri, if you will, but one that sold coffee. Back in 2008, the average Indian supposedly spent an hour at a cafe \u2014 as opposed to a Brit who would be more likely to just grab it on-the-go and average only 25 minutes there.\n\nBut Barista and CCD alerted global chains to the possibility of the Indian market maturing to other subtleties of drinking coffee. \u201cI mean, what\u2019s big about offering free Wi-Fi? We could do that too.\u201d English chain Costa Coffee set foot in India in 2005, but not necessarily only with the idea of importing coffee from another country. They found a local blend that matched the one they use in their stores elsewhere in the world. But Costa was playing in uncharted territory: the kind that doesn\u2019t believe in on-the-go coffee. They were trying to do it without a strategic Indian partner, unlike a green-and-white logo brand we know. They were also trying to introduce India to a more premium coffee experience, Italian and all.\n\nFor better or for worse, Costa might have been right about its hypothesis on the Indian coffee consumer. After one failed attempt in partnership with the Future Group, that same green-and-white logo finally entered India through a joint venture with Tata in October 2012, opening its first store in Mumbai. The plan was to use the coffee beans that Tata\u2019s estates farmed, thereby solving one end of the supply chain for Starbucks. Apparently, John Derkach \u2014 the then-head of Costa Coffee India \u2014 once said that he wasn\u2019t afraid of Starbucks\u2019 possible foray, having been used to fighting them in its home country, Britain. But cafe culture had now truly arrived, and this time, the free Wi-Fi was unlimited.\n\nA lot of things have changed since October 2012. Cafe Coffee Day nearly shut shop under immense debt pressure, and turned into how we know it today \u2014 a has-bean. Starbucks is gaining significant ground, not just in terms of number of stores across the country, but also in terms of profit. Barista is re-orienting itself to scale stealthily. Costa went through its ups and downs, only to give India another shot with franchise operators Devyani International extending its partnership till 2026. But in the aftermath of the entry of global players trying to bring coffee to India, a few homegrown seeds were planted in the 2010s, that promised a much wider landscape to coffee consumers.\n\n(Something about CCD being that ex that changed your life for the better, but you knew it was time to move on from them.)\n\nIndia consistently ranks in the top 10 coffee producers. Yet, it usually exports around 70% of all of those beans. A HUGE chunk of the exported stuff \u2014 usually 60-70% \u2014 ends up being specialty coffee, which is as opposed to instant coffee. There is such a thing as Indian coffee, just that it has been for long largely unknown to regions that were not South India.\n\nThis was a gap that Blue Tokai wanted to exploit, and convinced farmers to sell their specialty beans to them, to roast and package for sale. They began operations in 2013, and at the time, they hadn\u2019t started running cafes which they\u2019re now more known for. 3 years later, co-founders Ayush Bathwal, Anirudh Sharma and Sushant Goel set up their own spin on farm-to-cup in the form of Third Wave Coffee Roasters. Sleepy Owl started around the same time, in an attempt to take our eyes away from cold coffee to cold brew, and bring more authenticity to the beverage. And these are only just the popular offshoots of the advent of cafe culture. All of these players were sourcing their coffee primarily from the same region of Karnataka, but found different ways to popularize it. And the battleground was a mix of playing direct-to-consumer, while ideally also opening offline stores. We were finally moving from cafes to coffee.\n\nCool beans.\n\nEverything Nice\n\nIn the grand landscape of Indian coffee, loyalty to one brew is a complex question. I wish I could tell you that it had a straightforward answer. It is not aroma or strength alone that plays into why the average coffee consumer in India is a regular drinker of a certain kind of brew, if they are so. It is a blend of product and non-product factors, while also being limited by the (mis)conception that coffee is also viewed as an item of consumption to be had only on certain occasions.\n\nBut I would be wrong if I told you price wasn\u2019t first on that list. Why CCD was able to succeed is because their average price of Rs 150/cup is accessible at once for many people in the earning spectrum. In fact, CCD\u2019s highest-priced serving of coffee, hot or cold, is the (sinfully indulgent) Devil\u2019s Own with cream at Rs 250 \u2014 a point that marked the average for other players trying to tap into a loyal consumer base for their brew. For starters, a regular cup of cold brew at Third Wave would cost that much, only to increase with size.\n\nI distinctly remember a friend questioning the need for \u201cfancy brew\u201d as opposed to Nescafe \u2014 only to be countered by another friend saying that on a per-gram basis, both cost the same. And it\u2019s true \u2014 Nescafe Gold costs around Rs 390 for every 100g, while a pack of Blue Tokai Attikan Coffee beans costs little more than Rs 250 for the same weight. However, naturally, a cup of ground coffee becomes more expensive to brew by virtue of needing to buy the equipment to roast the beans. You may always make the argument that said equipment would be a one-time purchase, but hefty one-time purchases are only useful if we use them regularly. No one knows that better than us thrifty Indians.\n\nMore importantly, we are still quite some time away from educating people on what equipment is required to brew those beans. It can be confusing, and a little intimidating at first, to navigate between moka pots, grinders, French presses, drip machines, and good old filter papers. In fact, many of us aren\u2019t entirely aware of how the texture and flavour associated with light roast as opposed to medium.\n\nBlue Tokai understood this early on. A quick look at their website UI tells you that they\u2019re willing to put in effort to make the consumer understand what it is they\u2019re consuming. If you\u2019re a newbie, they have easy pour products for you that just need 4 steps, without any equipment. If you\u2019re looking to have your own home setup, they are willing to offer you a discount on a machine + coffee bundle should you choose to buy both from them. This obsession over ensuring information symmetry for customers is also evident in the notes that accompany each Blue Tokai product \u2014 roast level, source, tasting notes \u2014 acidity and bitterness levels. And as of this year, they kickstarted something called the Taster\u2019s Club \u2014 a series of subscription boxes, each of which is accompanies by 3 samples of 75g, along with a handbook, a video, and access to an exclusive Discord server. Blue Tokai has regular classes on how to brew ground coffee in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.\n\nI was almost going to make my own version of the iceberg meme to explain the kind of user evolution Blue Tokai is trying to bring about, but I guess Reddit (from u/ejtc25 on r/JamesHoffman) beat me to it already. I don\u2019t know half of these things myself:\n\nThis meme is a huge missed opportunity: this should have been a glass of cold brew instead of an iceberg, dammit.\n\nBut education is important \u2014 not just because it leads to evolution of tastes, but fundamentally for Blue Tokai, it should lead to more money. Blue Tokai operates as both a cafe and a coffee retailer, and as of today, sells the entire suite of coffee products, from the bean to the mean machine. There is always the possibility that they may lose a small fraction of this customer set to more exotic forms of coffee that one may find abroad or in another places in the country \u2014 maybe a contact who owns some land at Chikmagalur. But they\u2019re very firm on who their customer is \u2014 earns well, likely lives in a metro city, ideally Gen Z or millennial, wants to buy products that align with their values, likes cafes not just for ergonomic purposes (like work or the \u201cvibe\u201d) but also for the actual offering. As long as their product quality is top notch, they wouldn\u2019t need to worry about a fall off. Price is not really an important consideration for Blue Tokai\u2019s target audience, because they believe that the worth of a cup of premium coffee is justified.\n\nIt\u2019s a notable shift from the singularity of \u201ccafe culture\u201d, and Blue Tokai is very self-aware about this. In fact, this is an actual quote from co-founder Matt Chittaranjan, courtesy YourStory:\n\n\u201cOur vision has always been to be a coffee company, not necessarily a cafe company. Cafes have been important because that is where people come, try the product, and compare how we are different from the standard coffee available.\u201d\n\nThis is also true for Third Wave. If you are interested, on ordering a pour-over coffee, the barista can also show you how the pour-over machine actually works. The off-the-shelf packets also contain tasting notes and roast type.\n\nOne game-changer for coffee consumption in India was the pandemic. This was true across the entire suite of coffee products: instant, ground, sachets, filters, equipment. And of course, Dalgona coffee was one of the most popular searches across the internet. It may be safe to say that by virtue of CoVID locking us all down at home, some people might have had more time and money to learn how to brew coffee the way they wanted.\n\nSugar and Spice\n\nBut education is just one aspect of customer evolution, because what is education without scale? A large part of why Cafe Coffee Day succeeded was how effectively and quickly it opened stores, till it opened one too many. Third Wave aims to open 150 stores by March 2023 \u2014 that\u2019s 150 stores in nearly 7 years. Blue Tokai, however, had only 50+ outlets by February 2022 \u2014 in their ~10-year span. Starbucks crossed the 250 mark earlier this year. But it\u2019s where these stores seem to be concentrated that tell a greater story.\n\nIn 2018, Quartz did quite a funnily titled story \u2014 \u201cChennai, home of Indian coffee, scoffs as Starbucks enters the market\u201d. Starbucks entered the city 2 years after it first entered India \u2014 which, for a tier-1 city, sounds slightly odd. However, the piece theorises 2 reasons for this delay: a) as protectors of the holy filter coffee, Chennai knew the beverage inside out, and b) CCD alone had 74 outlets in the city. To date, neither Blue Tokai nor Third Wave has a single store in Chennai. In fact, Chennai\u2019s first roastery cafe opened only in 2020, after the first CoVID wave. The story doesn\u2019t just lie in the fact that specialty coffee (or premium instant, in the case of Starbucks) seems exclusive only to tier-1 cities.\n\nBlue Tokai is spread across 10 cities in India, and Third Wave across 8. With the exception of Bangalore and Hyderabad, there\u2019s very little representation anywhere else in South India, or even in the east. Let this sink in: Blue Tokai opened in Tokyo before Chennai. It\u2019s very likely that there\u2019s little reason to chalk this up primarily to CCD\u2019s omnipresence \u2014 South Indians just know coffee inside out. And it\u2019s hard to be a coffee store in a city where the people you hope to attract believe that they can do better from the comfort of their own homes.\n\nWhich is funny \u2014 national stats show that tea outstrips coffee consumption in Tamil Nadu by a mile or two. Ganapathi Ramanathan, a marketer at insurance startup Plum, mentions that coffee has been a marker of caste in his hometown Chennai. After opposition to a Western beverage that could corrupt Tamil women, Tamil Brahmins drank coffee as a status symbol. Tea, on the other hand, was, and continues to be a drink for the working class \u2014 Ganapathi sends me photos of how small tea shops exist on every corner even in a city that\u2019s known by the rest of India as a coffee bastion. Coffee hotels took off \u2014 with certain areas reserved solely for upper castes. Brahmins developed often-discriminatory rituals around coffee, which eventually crept into mainstream pop culture \u2014 and shaped our perception of Tamil Nadu as a state dominated by beans instead of leaves. There\u2019s more in this paper from 2002.\n\nNorth India loves tea \u2014 even if a tectonic shift in its inclination towards coffee began in the early 2010s. And within coffee, instant continues to dominate; being one of Tata\u2019s biggest consumer segments last year. We love our adrak-wali (ginger) chai, and we are unabashed in how much milk and sugar we want in our cup. There is a significant difference in how South India perceives coffee as opposed to other regions of the country \u2014 making it a harder market to crack. That tectonic shift that marked an increasing preference over tea for North and East Indians is indicative of a large growth opportunity for coffee chains. However, on the flip side, the misconception about coffee necessarily needing milk has possibly destroyed palettes, and may not be present anywhere else more than in the north.\n\nThat being said, Starbucks has 300 stores in 36 cities as of last month. Half of the stores are spread across tier-1 cities. The Seattle chain has also opened at least one store in Bhubaneswar (which has 2 now), Trivandrum, Siliguri, Nashik and Guwahati, to name a few. With the field left wide open after the fall of CCD, Tata Starbucks is looking to crowd in and make the brand name more accessible and ubiquitous. In fact, Maharashtra \u2014 which ranked highest in tea consumption in 2017 according to the NSSO \u2014 has the highest number of Starbucks stores of any state in India.\n\nAnd sometimes, expansion is just a question of high footfall. Massive chains literally placed next to, or opposite each other at popular areas in cities like Bangalore and Delhi is quite the \u201cphenomenon\u201d. Below is one such area in Gurgaon that I tweeted about (yes, my tweets often precede my pieces). Similarly, the Tim Hortons in Saket\u2019s Select CityWalk mall, that opened only in August this year, is right opposite the Starbucks there. While all chains have differentiated target audiences, this looks like an attempt to get at fencesitters \u2014 with real loyalty to any one brew, yet.\n\nPranav Manie \n@pranavmanie\nwell well well, look what we have here. that Starbucks wasn't here until a few months ago. someone's feeling the heat \ud83d\udd25 \n4:15 PM \u2219 Sep 18, 2022\n\nI spoke to Vardhman Jain, co-founder of BONOMI Cold Brew (which, having tasted, I highly recommend), who refers to the popularity of cold coffee, or the Indian version of it \u2014 with lots of froth, icecream, and chocolate sauce. A very small niche in India truly understands as a standalone flavourful beverage, and our inability to separate it from sweeteners like milk hampers our taste buds. With BONOMI, that\u2019s what Vardhman is trying to change.\n\nHe also tells me an alarming fact that at first sounds too insane: a large portion of India has some level of intolerance toward dairy, but does not know this yet. But apparently, this might have some truth to it, if not all. This may contribute to the idea of palette destruction when it comes to coffee \u2014 something that he\u2019s trying to solve for at BONOMI. Moreover, health consciousness became omnipresent in the pandemic, because people realized that life is too short. This is why multiple coffee-related retail startups opened up in the same time \u2014 like Kaapi Machines and BONOMI as well.\n\nThe milk agenda is also something that seems to be pushed by chains. One look at Starbucks\u2019 \u201cbarista recommends\u201d proves that much \u2014 with the exception of the Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew, every other item is the most indulgent combo of milk and coffee, and sometimes things like hot chocolate. The top 2 items are Cold Coffee, and Java Chip Frappuccino (which is just Cold Coffee with whipped cream and chocolate chips. I assume this dashboard is dynamic, but I don\u2019t expect it to change to purer forms of coffee anytime soon.\n\nNaturally, BONOMI has to constantly be abreast of what its customers like. Vardhman initially thought that his Classic Cold Brew would be the highest-selling bottle for them. He was proven wrong \u2014 it ended up being BONOMI\u2019s caramel flavour, simply because it was sweet. After having received training as a barista, and enjoying coffee in its purest, most flavorful forms at different places, Vardhman was primed to introduce the same to a mainstream Indian audience. But it\u2019s tough to sell cold brew that\u2019s not inherently sugar-y in India.\n\nBut on the other end of associating sugar with milk is the idea that pure, unadulterated coffee always has to be bitter. Ashwani, the manager of the Third Wave store near Sikanderpur metro station in Gurgaon \u2014 one of the prime locations in the city by footfall, says that only 10-15% of customers drink black coffee or cold brew. This niche audience also knows that there is a difference between cold brew and black coffee, and are very likely to be repeat customers in Third Wave for the very same item. This is also a sentiment echoed by Vardhman, who often finds himself trying to explain the difference between cold brew and iced coffee. Or that coffee doesn't always have to be bitter.\n\nPrathiksha BU, a reporter for YourStory, fits the ideal consumer for a lot of the pro-arguments for spending good coffee. Her hunt for good coffee came from her dislike (not necessarily intolerance) for milk. She tells me that she was not the biggest fan of filter coffee brewed at her family home either, simply because of the existence of milk and sugar in the final product. She started learning brewing her own beans from people in the industry, and also invested in equipment to do the same at home herself.\n\nWelcome to the Working Week\n\nThere\u2019s little doubt that coffee is quite a nice and complex beverage that deserves its own little time slot to enjoy while sitting in the balcony without any other distraction.\n\nAssuming that\u2019s true \u2014 it\u2019s pretty insane that it\u2019s become widely accepted that we find that our work has to accompany our cup of coffee. Those \u201cday in the life\u201d videos are the most popular exemplification of this.\n\nBesides Red Bull/Monster, coffee is the go-to for people who need a productivity kick. And cafes have turned out to be a boon for people who need a space to work, and a good cup of coffee. But over the years, it\u2019s become harder to decouple the relationship between coffee and work. It\u2019s as if our idea of coffee consumption is increasingly defined by how we choose to work. It\u2019s no coincidence that coffee culture in India has progressed pretty much hand-in-hand with its tech ecosystem.\n\nAbhishek Shah, the founder of an early-stage e-commerce startup named KURA, is quite the frequent visitor of the Starbucks near his house in Mumbai. He tells me that he\u2019d give Starbucks a 5 or 6/10 for the brew quality, saying that he\u2019s certainly had better coffee. But one of the core reasons why he goes there almost every day is because it\u2019s significantly cheaper than renting a co-working space, especially in Mumbai. He doesn\u2019t use this Starbucks, or any Starbucks in general, for a social reason. For that, he prefers to visit indie shops, like The Bagelshop in Bandra. He adds that whenever he sets up an office space for KURA, he\u2019d want freshly-brewed coffee every day \u2014 much like the Blue Tokai he makes when he can, and not the Starbucks that he finds convenient to go to.\n\nIt\u2019s not tough to imagine coffee as a function of your profession. I speak to Ankit Kumar, who works in the product division of a company that \u2014 and I swear I didn\u2019t realize this until I wrote these words \u2014 BREW.com. Working in a remote job allowed him to explore a lot of cafes in any given city that he stayed in. But at the same time, it\u2019s also the type of establishment he goes to almost every day to do focused work.\n\nHis morning cup comes from a cafe near his place of residence in Bangalore, called All About Coffee. He has taken the black coffee redpill as well, having moved to loving the Americano more than the iced latte. My conversation with him indicates that certain cafes have different purposes for him. He looks at the cafes that he frequents for work as a ROI problem \u2014 \u201cX is what I earn per hour. If I\u2019m paying 200 bucks for 4 hours of productivity, what\u2019s the return I get on my salary?\u201d\n\nAnd some cafes are, of course, deliberately designed to be productivity-friendly. Third Wave Coffee has a dedicated in-house design team, which ensures a couple of things: a) every store screams the brand\u2019s minimalist approach, and b) there\u2019s enough plugpoints in the entire cafe. Third Wave initially started by gathering micro-communities of people across different professions who enjoyed coffee. But in the last couple of years, especially with the boom that India\u2019s startup ecosystem has seen, the chain became singularly known on social media as a productivity space. This is also one reason why Nikhil George, a fintech professional based out of Mumbai, prefers to go to Starbucks over some other chain \u2014 plug-points.\n\nIn metro cities like Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, our enjoyment of coffee also falls victim to convenience. There is no way anyone in either city is willingly wading through traffic (and smog) to go to a fancy cafe to have your work be accompanied by some incredible coffee. And on the days you\u2019re not working, your will to explore is a little hampered by those same factors that define a city\u2019s flow.\n\nUtility, not experience.\n\nImage is Everything?\n\nBigger chains capitalize on this idea of ease for the sake of productivity not only by expanding quickly across India\u2019s prime locations, but also ideally by introducing a loyalty program. Both Starbucks and Third Wave have loyalty programs that are designed to retain regular customers. Interestingly, CCD was a pioneer of coffee loyalty programs in India, with the launch of the Citizens\u2019 Card in 2002. This evolved later into earning \u201cBeans\u201d on the CCD app, which was launched in 2015. Barista launched its own \u201cBean \u2018o\u2019 holic\u201d loyalty card in 2012, with consumers graduating levels by accumulating points with every purchase. Costa has an app for loyalty too.\n\nHow effective are loyalty programs overall? While it\u2019s not known how successful that has been for most other chains, Starbucks\u2019s loyalty program has been killing it in India \u2014 with users increasing significantly year on year. It\u2019s the promise of rewards on a set number of repeat purchases, and the idea that the average cost of your cup of coffee dips with time through discounts. However, it\u2019s not difficult to have the apps of different chains on your smartphone. You don\u2019t necessarily have to pay anything beyond a cup of coffee to install loyalty apps.\n\nWhich is where Blue Tokai differs \u2014 it prioritizes discounts online subscriptions over out-and-out loyalty programs. Sarthak Rastogi is a venture capitalist at Gurgaon-based Huddle, whose portfolio includes Blue Tokai. He says that Blue Tokai knows its customers really well, who, unlike for other chains, also buy Blue Tokai\u2019s off-the-shelf products in bulk. For them, investing in education has been the more important method of customer retention than any sort of loyalty schem Its customers are looking to migrate to a top-tier level of coffee, ideally never to look back on the artificially-sweetened products they were once used to. They understand what the brand of Blue Tokai stands for, and why so.\n\nThis raises other questions about brand perceptions. Why did Dalgona coffee get a bad name from coffee connoiseurs at the height of its popularity in 2020? Why is CCD sill so revered as the spot for a lot of \u201cfirst\u201d experiences? Why is Blue Tokai\u2019s logo a peacock? (To that last question, they have a cool story about \u201ctokai\u201d meaning the plume of a peacock \u2014 the national bird of India.)\n\nBut adding to the idea of brand perception is a conversation with Tejas Kinger, a product marketer at Plum. He says that even though he can certainly afford it \u2014 and has spent a lot on experimenting with different coffee brands \u2014 entering a Starbucks continues to feel a little intimidating. This may have something to do with looking at it as an aspirational brand while a college student. A sentiment that Ankit also shared \u2014 spending a fraction of his first internship stipend at the nearest Starbucks store is a memory he remembers.\n\nAnd image is everything, especially when it comes to getting new customers. Starbucks attracts aspiration, Blue Tokai evokes purity, Third Wave recalls utility, CCD is comfort.\n\nThis is also something that a brand like Tim Hortons \u2014 that entered India only this year with its pilot stores in Delhi/NCR \u2014 understands deeply. \u201cCheaper man\u2019s Starbucks\u201d / \u201cCanada\u2019s Starbucks\u201d is the most common moniker that you could hear on the aisles of CyberHub in Gurgaon, where Tim Hortons first opened this August. The line to enter the store was long every day for at least the first 2 weeks from the store\u2019s opening. More importantly, Tim Hortons left no stone unturned in cashing into its Canadian heritage \u2014 opening its third store recently in Chandigarh. They\u2019re looking to be an aspirational brand, much like Starbucks, but a little more affordable. An increasing market size for coffee, especially among Gen-Z and millennials is something they\u2019re banking on. It helps that their emphasis on literally painting the town red reminds one of Christmas.\n\nThe Fourth Wave\n\nIndia is well into the third wave of coffee right now \u2014 where the story behind the beans has become more important than ever. The quality of the bean is important, and the consumer should be able to manipulate the bitterness and texture of their drink. More people are slowly realizing that the coffee bean has so many form factors that they can\u2019t, and shouldn\u2019t be one single template way of enjoying the drink. Coffee doesn\u2019t always need to be heavily roasted, and light roast beans go extremely well with other flavours \u2014 especially citric ones.\n\nSpecialty coffee players that have expertise in the end-to-end of the single-origin coffee bean have emerged in small numbers in metro cities. Fermentation of coffee seems to be quite an experiment that some of these roasteries are trying out their hand with. There\u2019s Maverick and Farmer, that created a fermented brew with orange juice. They have 3 cafes spread across Bangalore and Goa. There\u2019s Mumbai-based Subko, that offers a cup with notes of maple syrup, apricot, and pecans. This natural extension of the third wave is \u2014 a) focused on expanding the science of coffee by extracting the most out of coffee beans, and b) commercializing this science by taking it to homes. In the most ideal state of this phase, coffee is not associated singularly with bitterness or sweetness, specialty blends become more accessible to homebodies, and large cafe chains have much less of a hold.\n\nThe issue? Growth for such coffee is pretty slow. Vardhman says the same for BONOMI \u2014 that the move away from his sweeter flavours to more exotic ones is happening, but not as fast as he thought it would be. Maverick and Farmer closed their Gurgaon cafe permanently \u2014 proving that it\u2019s tough to sell the idea of experimenting with coffee to a city that breathes on constantly moving for work, among other harmful substances. But notably, the idea of coffee being more flavourful also coincides with its health aspects. Post-CoVID, the most popular question Vardhman gets asked is regarding the calorie intake and sugar level in his bottles.\n\nIndia is also trying to create a name for its beans globally. Blue Tokai has entered the Japanese market. Roasteries like Subko trying to sell their single-origin experimental brews sourced from their micro-estates to the world \u2014 like coffee with lychee candy. They\u2019re also explaining why growing coffee at different altitudes is different, among other nuances. Coffee-based cocktails are quite suave, too, although beyond the occasional bar, there has never been an attempt to make them mainstream.\n\nIn a lot of ways, the stage for such artisan cafes / retailers has been set because of the advent of Blue Tokai\u2019s transparency in its packets \u2014 what\u2019s the origin of the bean, how bitter or acidic it is, etcetera. The move to specialty coffee will depend on how India\u2019s income levels grow in time. Making your own batch of coffee at home can get fairly expensive. Even more so when you like exotic flavours.\n\nBut it may be safe to say that we\u2019re getting used to cafes existing because they have more to offer than just their aura. And we wouldn\u2019t likely be here if we hadn\u2019t been graced by the funk that CCD brought. The best way to look at summarizing India\u2019s journey and perception towards the beverage lies in CCD\u2019s tagline. We went from \u201ca lot can happen over coffee\u201d to \u201ca lot can happen around coffee\u201d. For a country that had little knowledge outside of pockets as to how much we produce coffee, our graduation into coffee culture necessitated the precedence of cafe culture. Coffee culture is staying for the better, and is most certainly evolving.\n\nUntil next time :)\n\nSpecial thanks to the following people who made this piece happen: Vardhman Jain, Sarthak Rastogi, Nikhil George, Anagha K, Ganapathi Ramanathan, Tejas Kinger, Prathiksha BU, Abhishek Shah, Ankit Kumar, Siddharth Vijayaraghavan!\n\nI\u2019ve been simultaneously sort of doing some groundwork on my next edition \u2014 I have known for a while what the December edition is going to be. It will be my most ambitious piece to-date, which also makes it significantly harder to pull off. If everything works out, I\u2019d love to show it to you as soon as possible!\n\nSubscribe to Hot Chips\n\nBy Pranav Manie \u00b7 Launched 2 years ago\n\na monthly deep (AF) dive at the intersection of culture and numbers ($ / % / #)!\n\nSubscribe\n37 Likes\n37\n4\nShare\nPrevious\nNext\n4 Comments\n\t\nBobby\nNov 21, 2022\nLiked by Pranav Manie\n\nWoke up to smell this coffee - delectable!\n\nNo connection but, reminded me of the line ' I have measured out my life in coffee spoons...' from a poem called The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock :-) And no, I didn't pick up the MBA pamphlet!\n\nLIKE (3)\nREPLY\nSHARE\n1 reply by Pranav Manie\n\t\nUnowhu\nNov 21, 2022\nLiked by Pranav Manie\n\nDon't like MBA Pamphlet. theek hai, Booklet coming your way...\n\nLIKE (1)\nREPLY\nSHARE\n1 reply by Pranav Manie\n2 more comments...\nTop\nNew\nCommunity\nAlcoholics Autonomous\nThe long and short of Gurgaon's thriving liquor culture.\nAPR 15, 2022\n\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\nPRANAV MANIE\n58\nReturn To Home Bass 1\nA look at my relationship with Delhi, through Delhi hip-hop.\nDEC 26, 2022\n\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\nPRANAV MANIE\n30\n6\nThe Museum of Subtle Arts of Selling Ferraris\nHow the proliferation of self-help books led to the rise of LinkedIn influencers.\nAUG 19\n\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\nPRANAV MANIE\n26\n6\nSee all\n\nReady for more?\n\nSubscribe\n\u00a9 2023 Pranav Manie\nPrivacy \u2219 Terms \u2219 Collection notice\nStart Writing\nGet the app\nSubstack is the home for great writing"}}]