Nikhil R
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AI Investing frameworks
Compiled AI investing frameworks from Nabeel (Spark), Victor (Benchmark), and Sarah (Conviction) based on Twitter posts for personal reference.
n8n vs Zapier vs Workato vs Tray.io
When Zapier was exploding in the 2010s, everyone saw the obvious opportunity: no-code automation connecting SaaS tools. Lead comes into Gmail, add to spreadsheet. Stripe payment triggers Slack message. Simple workflows for non-technical users who just wanted things to work seamlessly.
Airtable "Omni" app builder review
Airtable recently launched “ Omni ” which is their conversational agent that can spin up full Airtable apps like tables, interfaces, automations and then keep working inside them as an analyst or workflow bot. All paid and free plans now ship with bundled AI credits, and Airtable positions this as an app builder,” replacing drag-and-drop with vibe-coding that’s backed by production-grade…
AI.Engineer 2025 conference - Key takeaways
I attended the AI.engineer conference held in the first week of June at San Francisco. It was the largest technical AI conference of the year, bringing together over 3,000 engineers and leaders building with AI. The event featured 18 specialized tracks with 150+ sessions running simultaneously plus an expo with 50+ companies across the AI engineering landscape.
How to optimise latency for voice agents
Over the last week, I have been researching and reading about different horizontal platforms like Vapi , Retell and Bland to understand how they work behind the scenes. My main motivation was to 1) figure out the voice agent stack 2) see if there are any unsolved problems in the space and 3) look for interesting companies which I can then take up with my team at Accel for investing. Along the way,…
Voice agent pricing calculator
Over the last week, I was reading, building and researching about voice agents. I made a few prototypes and along the way tried to understand the nuances of building voice agent applications. What started as casual curiosity about calculating pricing for voice agents culminated into vibe coding a voice ai agent pricing calculator. You can find it at comparevoiceai.com
Flipping some coins with LLMs
This experiment is not rigorous (no control on hardware/seed) and doesnt have any significance.
Is outbound going to die?
HN Discussion
Will MCP stay for the long term?
MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools. Based on the context, AI agents can decide which tools to use, in…
Introduction to AI agents
This is the first couple pages of a report I worked on about AI agents.
Investing through tech cycles
I was recently putting together a thesis on the AI agent tooling space. While I was researching the sector, talking to some VCs and looking at approaches taken by various companies, I decided to take a step back and question myself on whether the tooling+infra space is investable today in the first place. This short post is the result of that pondering.
Diffusion models are interesting
HN Discussion
How much does a man need?
I am so enamoured by the last chapter in Alok Sama’s book - Money trap , that I have decided to repost Tolstoy’s short story on my blog. I think my readers will benefit from reading it.
Receipe - cold coffee
I make 1-2 cups of cold coffee daily and sometimes for my SO and small inconsistencies have started driving us crazy. Some days it would be perfectly cold and creamy and other days a watery sludge. After months of trying various things and drinking a lot of coffee, I’ve discovered that making consistently great cold coffee comes down to understanding a few key things.
Can you bet on everything?
Prediction markets, despite their promise and success in sports ($330B US betting volume) and elections ($40B in 2024), are yet to become mainstream due to fundamental demand and liquidity constraints. The issue isn’t regulation or technology - it’s that none of the three key market participants find strong PMF with prediction markets: gamblers want quick resolutions (42% of 2020 election volume…
How to (Accurately) Evaluate RAG Systems on Tabular Data
Tackling the Explainability Gap in RAG Hallucination Evals
Unlocking Differential Privacy for >7B Parameter LLMs
Integrating Explainable LLM Data Leakage Testing into your CI/CD Pipeline
Testing LLMs for Data Leakage Vulnerabilities
Why do I write?
Over the last week, 4-5 folks have asked me why I write or why do I maintain this blog? This post attempts to answer the question and helps not having to repeat – a nice bonus!.
Attacks on machine learning models
HN discussion
AI Alignment - Weak-to-strong generalization
AI alignment is a broad topic of research to basically ponder over the question “How can AI systems be steered to accomplish the human intended goals and preferences?”. Simply put, how do we make sure that the AGI will listen to us? Currently, we use methods like RLHF to steer our large language models. However, future AI systems will be capable of extremely complex and creative behaviors that…
CFR or How I won any money in Poker?
HN Discussion
LLM security - Part 2
In the previous blog post, we gave an introduction to how LLMs work and started looking at various offensive measures that we use to break them. In this post, we will explore more offensive strategies, look at examples from the wild and also briefly touch upon the common defenses used by AI companies.
LLM security - Part 1
Since I quit my job couple months back, I’ve been tinkering around with various emerging technologies. I have been pretty obsessed with the current AI evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their surprising text generation capabilities. Whether you are surprised or not, people have started integrating them into just about every software we interact with and after spending countless hours…
Building a chrome extension using only AI
I’ve been dabbling with generative AI tools for the last couple months and being a hobby programmer, checking out and tinkering with them is my favorite pass time(full time given that I am on a sabbatical). Like anybody else, I’ve been amazed by the recent developments in AI coding tools particularly. AI tools like AlphaCode , a system for code generation achieved an average ranking in the top…
Chinchilla review
Whenever I see a discussion online about the current generation of LLMs, there is an inherent assumption and extrapolation that these technologies will keep improving with time. Why do we think that? The approximate answer is because of scaling laws which suggest indefinite improvement for the current style of transformers with additional pre-training data and parameters. This blog post delves…
Farewell to the felt - Quitting the full-time Poker scene
HN discussion
Example checklist
This post is a checklist for game developers and product managers to use during the pre-launch period and some important metrics to track immediately post launch. We are assuming that the game has been developed(and tested) and is in the final stages of going live in a single country.
Framework for game selection
As a product manager working in gaming, its impossible to miss the recent rise of multi gaming platforms which package multiple individual games together inside one app. Doing this has a lot of benefits and you can read my previous blog posts to better understand how bundling benefits everybody in the ecosystem . In this post, we investigate intrinsic aspects of a game apart from their…
Bundling <> gaming
I’ve been thinking about multi-gaming platforms due to their recent meteoric rise to capture about 10% of the RMG market and the fact that I have to make a decision at work on bundling a mini-game with our main app. The multi-gaming segment is also growing at about 40% y-o-y which is the highest among all RMG segments. While one can argue that this growth was mostly driven by monstrous…
State of Real Money Gaming (RMG) in India
The gaming industry in India has been growing exponentially in recent years, with many people joining the ranks of avid and serious players. India has now become one of the leading countries in the world in terms of gaming, and this is largely due to the large population, the availability of technology, and the increasing enthusiasm and accessibility of gaming platforms. With more and more people…
Classifying 2022 DeFi protocols
DeFi in 2022 was a lot about liquidity provisioning and balance sheet monetization. Everybody was looking for simple and safe yields without the risk of getting their hands burnt. The year has brought the dawn of certain type of protocols like:
The magic words are squeamish ossifrage
“The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage” was the solution to a challenge ciphertext posed by the inventors of the RSA cipher in 1977
A take on web3/DeFi
Most use cases for crypto are in an imaginary space. Lot of the details like “why does the customer care?”, “why will they pay for it?”, etc are not necessarily thought out clearly. Most products ask me to “Imagine a world where everything is de-centralized”.
Problem of a retail investor in DeFi
The first section of the article inspects the various user personas interacting with DeFi protocols and their individual requirements. The second section identifies various products which solve for these use cases. We mostly look for on-chain use cases which already have a reasonable amount of adoption. This post simply surfaces the various participants across the value chain and identifies open…
Make Poker fun again
Lets face it, poker has become a commoditized game/product where most poker platforms look like skins of each other. There is hardly any differentiation in the products and all of them simply focus on the betting/gambling function of the game while a human centric focus on the user journey takes a back seat.
Derivative protocols in DeFi
This post is a summary of all the options products available in the DeFi space. I embarked on doing a bit of research after I wanted to hedge my LP positions given the current volatile market and the impending merge .
We should all have something to hide - TC takedown
HN Discussion
Blockchain gaming - is it mostly hype?
A lot has been said and done about the feasibility of web3 gaming. Hyperbole stuff like “Decentralized games”, “P2E is the future of gaming” , etc are great marketing content but fall short rapidly when examined closely. After seeing loads of money being invested into such projects, I was curious as a gaming PM to understand the thesis behind them. This post looks at the feasibility of various…
GTO Inspector - Indie SaaS for poker pros
I was quite naive about selling software online!
New website theme, job and hobbies
Its been a while since I updated the website. While trying to setup a Jekyll environment, I ended up in dependency hell and decided to just boot the entire ruby installation instead of fixing the circular configs. This time, I am using a theme called Minima in its dark mode version. You may notice some parts of the website still broken or unfinished. Apologies!
Luasec - Lua HTTPS Library
I was working on the Luasec library over the summer mainly on fixing the HTTPS redirects, the CONNECT proxy implementation (for redirecting requests over the HTTP CONNECT tunnel) and adding support for HTTP/2(Client).
A Secure Portknocking Implementation - Portsmith
Source
Sailor - A MVC framework in Lua
I will be working with Lablua this summer as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC). I shall be extending the Sailor framework by adding an centralized configuration editor and adding integrations to facilitate Elasticsearch indexes to be stored as Sailor Models. Sailor is a Web Framework. View the proposal here