Marcellus Insights
Long read: Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in
Last January, a little-known Chinese AI company called Deepseek shocked the world by showcasing model capability comparable to the frontier models but built on meagre resources. Since then, the Americans have pulled ahead, most notably with Anthropic’s Claude. Last week though, another Chinese company, Moonshot AI launched its latest model Kimi K3 which outperforms most […]
Long read: The silent labour strike: How a worker shortage is threatening India’s industrial leap
The Indian government has been doing quite a bit to shore up the share of manufacturing in GDP. From PLI schemes to labour law reforms, there is a clear push to manufacture more in India for India, as well as for the world. However, these efforts are running into an unexpected wall – the unwillingness […]
Long read: See the whole world in lichens
In middle school we rote learn that nature is a contest and only the fittest survive. But what if that is not entirely correct? So, it is worth pausing over a life form that has quietly declined to play by those rules — and forced scientists to rewrite the textbook. In this lovely piece of […]
Can India Build Its Own Claude or ChatGPT?
In January 2025, an AI model built by the research arm of a Chinese hedge fund, for a total compute bill of around $6mn, wiped $600bn off Nvidia’s market value in a single trading day. 18 months on, Chinese AI models have overtaken their American rivals in usage on the world’s largest open AI marketplace, […]
Short read: The remarkable story of Lionel Messi’s meeting with a baby Lamine Yamal
Tonight’s FIFA World Cup football final couldn’t have been a tastier match up, not just because Argentina and Spain were the top 2 in the FIFA pre-tournament rankings but also are the two teams who play a brand of football that does justice to the sport’s billing as the beautiful game. And even more remarkable […]
Profiting From a Fading State & a Falling Rupee
The rupee’s decline since 1991 — from ₹18 to ₹96 per dollar — has been the calmest depreciation in the emerging world, built on three pillars: a state that funds itself in its own currency, a large reserve buffer, and a credible central bank. All three pillars are eroding now. Usable FX reserves are ~US$439bn, […]
Short read: The Reverse Information Paradox
Enterprise users of AI have already begun questioning the cost benefit as they realise the cost of tokens (sort of unit of AI use) is not commensurate to the value they are deriving. Whilst more efficient models and better chips will likely bring down token costs in due course, there is another rather implicit cost […]
Short read: When the Curve Moves, It’s Hard to Stick the Landing
Those who followed the “soft landing” debate over the last few years will remember the cautious optimism of 2023: inflation was falling, unemployment wasn’t rising much, and for once the textbook trade-off between the two seemed to be behaving itself. Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, was one of […]
Long read: The century-old device choking the world’s AI push
Among the myriad ways AI is disrupting the world is an age-old electrical technology – transformers. Transformers are ubiquitous in their use for transport and use of electricity – they ‘step up’ or increase the voltage at power generation plants to allow efficient transmission over long distances through the electrical grid and ‘step down’ or […]
Long read: Fight for a berth — the capacity crisis on India’s rail routes
Anyone who has stood on an Indian railway platform watching a sleeper coach fill up in minutes will recognise the scene ETB Sivapriyan opens this piece with: “Videos of passengers jostling to board trains from the washing pit lines at Darbhanga Junction in Bihar, hoping to secure seats on a sweltering June afternoon, went viral […]
Long read: The Terrorist in the Brain
Many of us have seen an elder in the family or amongst relatives losing their minds. And we fear it might happen to us too as we age. As expected, a whole industry has grown up to feed on that fear. In this superb piece, physician William Meller uses the stories of two famous actors […]
The Football World Cup is a Cruel Joke for Indian Investors
Football is by far the world’s most popular and most lucrative sport. The Football World Cup has now been played for 96 years. In those 96 years, India has never played a single match in the World Cup. And yet, every World Cup is actively followed and fanatically cheered on by Indian viewers. The parallels […]
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