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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

AI’s Maharaja smiles joyfully

All 30 grounded aircrafts now fly Mumbai : Air India’s Maharaja is all pleased as punch at 80. After years of huge costs and efforts, the last of the grounded 30 aircraft – inherited by the Tata Group during the privatization in Jan. 2022 – is now resurrected fully and took to the skies gracefully on Monday.   The aircraft is the gleaming VT-ALL, a Boeing 777-300ER, that was gathering grime since February 2020, and becomes the final among the two-and-half dozen aircraft that have been revved...

AI’s Maharaja smiles joyfully

All 30 grounded aircrafts now fly Mumbai : Air India’s Maharaja is all pleased as punch at 80. After years of huge costs and efforts, the last of the grounded 30 aircraft – inherited by the Tata Group during the privatization in Jan. 2022 – is now resurrected fully and took to the skies gracefully on Monday.   The aircraft is the gleaming VT-ALL, a Boeing 777-300ER, that was gathering grime since February 2020, and becomes the final among the two-and-half dozen aircraft that have been revved up and revived in the past few years, AI official sources said.   It marked a symbolic milestone for Air India itself - founded in 1932 by the legendary Bharat Ratna J. R. R. Tata - which once ruled the roost and was India’s pride in the global skies.   Once renowned for its royal service with the iconic Maharaja welcoming fliers on board, in 1953 it was taken over by the government of India. After years of piling losses, ageing aircraft, decline in operations and standards – almost like a Maharaja turning a pauper - it returned to the Tata Group four years ago.   This time it was not just the aircraft, the brand and the deflated Maharaja coming into the large-hearted Tata Group stables, but a formidable challenge to ensure that the airline could regain its old glory and glitter. Of the total around 190 aircraft in its fleet were 30 – or 15 pc – that had been grounded and neglected for years.   At that time, the late Ratan N. Tata had directed that all these valuable aircraft must be revived as far as possible and join the fleet. Accordingly, the VT-ALL, languishing at Nagpur for nearly five years, was ‘hospitalized’ at the Air India Engineering Service Ltd., its MRO facility in May 2025.   New Avatar Then started a thorough, painstaking nose-to-tail restoration of an unprecedented scale, in which over 3000 critical components were replaced, over 4,000 maintenance tasks executed, besides key structural upgrades like the longeron modification, engines, auxiliary power units, avionics, hydraulics, landing gears and almost every vital system was rebuilt or replaced.   After the repairs, the old aircraft was reborn, under the gaze of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and technical assistance from Boeing, and the new ‘avatar’ jetliner emerged with the highest global safety standards.   The aircraft cleared all the rigorous checks, a successful test flight, earned the mandatory Airworthiness Review Certificate and then made its maiden commercial flight from Monday, March 16 – after a wait of six years.   Sturdy Fliers Created in 1946 to become an instant global icon, the Air India’s mascot Maharaja now sports a youthful and chic look, a welcome with folded hands, closed eyes, featuring a bejewelled turban, stylish jootis, and a textured kurta in Air India’s new colours. He is prominently visible at various touch-points in a flyer’s journey, such as First Class, exclusive lounges, and luxury products.   Today, he commands a mix fleet of around 190 narrow and wide-body Airbus and Boeing aircraft like : A319, A320, A320neo, A321, A321neo, A350-900 and B787-8, B787-9, B7770200LR, B-777-300ER. With the merger of Vistara and agreements signed for 10 A350 and 90 A320 aircraft, the Maharaja’s fleet is slated to soar to some 570 in the near future.

How DeepSeek Is Making Silicon Valley Nervous

Updated: Feb 18, 2025

DeepSeek

Until recently, the artificial intelligence (AI) ‘arms race’ seemed like an all-American affair. OpenAI’s ChatGPT led the charge, with Google’s Gemini and Meta’s LLaMA models not far behind. American dominance in AI was assumed to be an inevitability, and an extension of Silicon Valley’s long-standing supremacy. Now, DeepSeek, the homegrown Chinese model has sent tremors through the AI industry, despite its baggage of state-backed propaganda.


DeepSeek’s emergence should have been unremarkable: yet another large language model (LLM), another iteration in a rapidly evolving space. But it has out-optimized its American competitors by achieving comparable - if not better - results through an optimized co-design of algorithms, frameworks and hardware. Since it is not just a matter of fewer parameters but also the algorithms operating on them more efficiently.


This has thrown a wrench into Meta’s grand AI ambitions. Meta, along with OpenAI and Google, have built their models on the assumption that more parameters mean better performance. Training these behemoth models requires staggering computational resources, and American tech firms have been quick to justify their exorbitant costs. But DeepSeek has shown otherwise. It has outperformed GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet - the two US flagship models - on a series of standard and open-ended benchmarks.


Unlike its closed-source competitors, DeepSeek has open-sourced its model, allowing smaller players to adapt it without relying on subscription services of OpenAI or Anthropic. Small but clever modifications like the use of rotary embeddings and group relative policy optimization (GRPO) - a reinforcement learning paradigm - have led it to achieve impressive results without the usual computational bloat.


This has made American AI firms uneasy. Perplexity, a relatively small startup in the U.S., had to rely on post-training methods rather than foundational model training because it simply lacked the resources. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, has publicly noted how DeepSeek’s cost-effectiveness exposed flaws in the current American approach. Whereas OpenAI and Google charge sky-high fees for API access, DeepSeek offers a pricing structure - around $0.34 per 1,000 tokens - that undercuts them significantly.


For years, the prevailing assumption in AI research was that Western firms, with their access to the best talent and most powerful hardware, would remain untouchable. Yet, DeepSeek has shown that even modest improvements in model efficiency can disrupt the market. And now, other countries are taking notice.


American tech firms and policymakers alike have been quick to point out its ties to the Chinese government, warning of potential security risks and propaganda concerns. These concerns are not unfounded. AI models trained in authoritarian regimes inevitably reflect the biases of their environment, and DeepSeek is no exception. But to dismiss its technical achievements outright would be myopic. The reality is that DeepSeek’s advancements are not confined to China. Its innovations in model optimization can be repurposed by anyone. The backlash also smacks of a certain American hubris. Silicon Valley has long viewed itself as the sole architect of the AI revolution. When OpenAI and Google release new models, the conversation revolves around their transformative potential. When China does the same, the narrative shifts to fears of espionage and state control. It is in the interests of American firms to bash DeepSeek not just for geopolitical reasons, but because it threatens their bottom line.


While DeepSeek is unlikely to dethrone OpenAI or Google anytime soon, and its government ties will always make it a controversial player in global AI development, its existence has nonetheless forced a reckoning in Silicon Valley. It has shown that more efficient AI is possible and that cost need not be a barrier to entry. For the first time in a long while, Silicon Valley is feeling just a little bit jealous.(The author is a U.S.-based data scientist)

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