Ripples In A Teacup

Lots of promises are being made with regard to AI Chatbots , setting up sky-high expectations. Last November, when Sam Altman was asked what surprises the field would bring in 2024, he said that online chatbots like OpenAI’s  ChatGPT  will take “a leap forward that no one expected.” It is expected that A.I.-powered image generators  like DALL-E  and Midjourney will soon be able to instantly deliver videos as well as still images. These players will gradually merge with chatbots like ChatGPT. Chatbots will expand well beyond digital text by handling photos, videos, diagrams, charts and other media. They will exhibit behavior that looks more like human reasoning, tackling increasingly complex tasks in fields like math and science. As the AI technology moves into robots, chatbots will also help to solve problems beyond the digital world. AI is being advanced very quickly by tech companies like OpenAI, Google since AI technology relies on  neural networks , ma...

  I think I was around ten years old when I heard that Aryabhatta invented the zero. I had vision of this clever mathematician sitting on the banks of a river and conjuring up the zero. However, I soon became skeptical. How could someone invent the zero? I mean, if before the invention of zero, someone had two mangoes, she eats both of them, her friend asks her how many mangoes do you have left, what would she say? Would she be at a total loss for words because the zero hadn’t been invented until then? When I asked this question to my mother (a software engineer), she told me that what Aryabhatta invented was actually the concept of zero. At that point in time, I did not question her any further, though I did not fully comprehend what she told me. I hear about the “invention of zero” time and again and these days I want to scream, what was invented wasn’t zero, but the modern notation and symbol for zero. The concept of zero as a placeholder in positional numeral systems was in...