On mathematics, machines, and what the proof never held When I was young, I learned about the great Sanskrit poet and playwright Kālidāsa, the author of Śakuntalā and other works whose beauty has survived across centuries. But the story I remember most about him is about a man sitting on a tree branch and cutting the very [ ]
From Shannon’s prediction game to modern transformers—and what gets lost in meaning The Mysteries of Words A few years ago, I sat in a dissertation defense for a student working on language models, and something quietly unsettled me. He was explaining “attention mechanisms,” showing how his system could summarize documents in perfect English. I remember [ ]
The story of how diffusion models create—and what they leave behind I m excited to share my new piece, How AI Generates: From Noise to Form. Diffusion models are behind much of today’s generative AI—image synthesis, text-to-art, even video. But how do they actually work? And what are their limits? My goal in this essay is [ ]
When intelligence turns inward, it creates the structure in which suffering can arise When Light Meets Mind In 1930, Berlin, two men sat across from each other. I’ve read the transcript more times than I can count. Not because it resolved anything, but because it kept echoing through my life. You had Albert Einstein: the [ ]
What AI-optimized schools misunderstand about learning It was just a question over breakfast. “What’s a metaphor?” Mira asked her father, spoon halfway to her mouth. He began to explain, but she interrupted: “So it’s when something isn’t what it is—but also is?” There was a silence at the table—not confusion, but recognition. She had already [ ]
A computational anatomy of intelligence. How faculties interact, architectures diverge, and coherence emerges through self-constructed fictions “There is no single path into the forest.” — Yoruba proverb Yo-Yo Ma and the Single Note It was the winter of 2018 and the NeurIPS conference—one of the world’s premier gatherings on artificial intelligence—had descended on a snow-laced [ ]
How Intelligence Arises from Nature, One Layer at a Time The Trouble with Definitions “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” — Lao Tzu As a mathematician, I’ve long sought clean definitions. Much of my work involves building precise frameworks — starting by defining key concepts, isolating the core of a [ ]
Why AI Won’t Transcend Us—But the Race to Superintelligence Might Redefine Us At the dawn of the nuclear age, a handful of scientists raced to split the atom. Behind closed doors, they unlocked forces of unimaginable power—capable of reshaping geopolitics, ending wars, or ending the world. The stakes were enormous. The oversight was minimal. As [ ]
नेति नेतिNot this, not this.— Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad The Frame Before the Frame: A Prehistory of Discovery Long before there were scientists, there was science. Across every continent, humans developed knowledge systems grounded in experience, abstraction, and prediction—driven not merely by curiosity, but by a desire to transform patterns into principles, and observation into discovery. Farmers […
What mathematics reveals about the limits of today’s AI — and why AGI remains distant “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” — Srinivasa Ramanujan When I was in high school, my mother gifted me a copy of The Man Who Knew Infinity. It told the story of Srinivasa [ ]