New Chinese AI DeepSeek

The tech markets sold off today because Chinese AI company DeepSeek just released an AI model that is as good as Western models, but without the latest chips, and at 1% of the cost.

It shows that the government ban on high-end chips to China forced them to get innovative, and they caught up.

It's possible that the U.S. bans DeepSeek, but that might not matter.This might be like running the 5 minute mile. Once Roger Bannister did "the impossible", several other people did it. So now DeepSeek has shown that it's possible to build a good model with less.

In the long run, this will help the tech markets. I'm sure Nvidia will still have to sell chips for big models.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

What Children Should Learn in School Today, To Prepare for Tomorrow

Here are the skills that kids today should learn, to have a successful future (Number 0 is the most important):

** 0. In school (and programming classes) you learn to solve well-defined problems. The real value is being able to analyze the real world and write the well-defined problem.

1. Critical thinking.
2. Being able to brainstorm / discuss with an open mind.
3. test and iterate quickly
4. Be able to communicate details and context, to eliminate ambiguity.
5. Be curious and willing to learn new things.
6. Have reading and self-learning skills.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Hidden Value of AI

Most talk about the value of AI is in the realm of answering questions or creation: code, essays, pictures, movies, etc.

But I think an underestimated feature of AI is its ability to understand what you want.  In other words, combine the communications ability of Chat GPT , Grok, etc with non-AI tasks, such as making changes to a spreadsheet, filling in a form, etc.

Think of being able to execute a complex formula, or extensively reformat your document without having to look up extensive menu picks and command key sequences.

The advantage with this way of using AI is that hallucinations, if they occur, are trivial since you know what you want.  For example, if you tell an AI to change the quote in the third paragraph to italics, and it changes it to bold, you can see that, and simply re-tell it to change it to italics.

How much easier would a doctor's day be if he could tell AI:  "Create a pre-authorization for Insurance company ACME, for Mrs. Smith, for an MRI."

(Yes, after all of Wile E. Coyote's injuries, ACME branched out into health insurance :-) )
© 2025 Praveen Puri

Learning and Doing

After you attend a seminar or read a book just pick one or two improvements, ignore the rest, and work on implementing them successfully. You return on investment on the book or seminar will be much higher than if you greedily try to process everything to "get your money's worth".

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Collaboration Versus Groupthink: How to Tell the Difference

When teams are collaborating to design a project solution, they risk falling into groupthink for two reasons: 

   1. they have worked projects in the past, all using one approach.

   2. the team is dominated by one or two strong personalities.

The warning signs are:

    1. The team rapidly makes decisions.

    2. Only one or two approaches are considered.

    3. There is no questioning.

    4. A few people dominate the discussion.

When this occurs, the team leader should start asking questions to provoke more out of the box thinking, such as: What if we could not do X, what would be an alternative?  Let's start with a blank slate. How would you approach the design from scratch.  He/she should also encourage others in the group to give their opinions.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Run a 15-Minute Meeting

Photo by Christina Morillo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-on-conference-room-1181396/

I advise all my clients to run shorter meetings because we are now in the Attention Scarcity Age, where everyone (including employees and managers) are overwhelmed, overworked, and have short attention spans.  

The productivity of longer meetings start to drop after 15 minutes, and participants will start to multitask and lose focus.

The key to keeping meetings short is to:

1. Set a short, focused agenda.

2. Prior to the meeting, send out any background info so the participants are

ready to hit the ground running.

3. During the meeting, ruthlessly focus on that agenda.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Quote for Consulting Success

This quote describes the essence for success in tech, consulting, and business:

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."  - Ursula Le Guin

© 2025 Praveen Puri