Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.I went to Whitefield to attend OpenAI DevDay. It was at the convention center in Sheraton hotel. I can't remember how I got the invite, but I probably filled a form somewhere. It was an enjoyable metro ride. The light rain formed little streaks on the window that showed overcast sky of outer Bangalore. The soft hum, rain sounds and fuzziness of the station announcements was calming.Everyone in the compartment had wireless earbuds on. It occurred to me how prevalent they are. Those who weren't staring down at their phones and peppering vertical thumb flicks were staring at their feet, listening to something through their buds. I once again tried (and failed) to pinpoint what makes it so unbearable for a person to sit with themselves. Why is everyone plugging themselves into the matrix.Aren't we happy to be fed.I reached the venue and registered. There were a bunch of Americans running the operations and queues, running around and doing all sorts of busy work. I noticed that the stage, camera, and sound was also handled by an all-American crew, probably one they brought with them everywhere. That must have been expensive. I thought of that one time Trevor Noah cancelled his tour in Bangalore because of how unhappy he was with the sound arrangements.On this venue, the sound arrangements were excellent. The music was sleek and lo-fi. The tables were white, with clean typography. The stage itself shared that familiar Japandi look, with the white and wood and plants in the corner. It definitely felt like they imported the San Francisco aesthetic into Bangalore.Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.It was crowded, maybe just an arm's length of free space around me at any given time. The crowds of young men (and the occasional woman) were concentrated in certain areas. Really, just three kinds of areas. The merchandise, the food, and this little backdrop to allow people to take photos to prove that they were there. The merch was fun, particularly the custom Codex pet cards. It seemed like someone could make their own design and get it printed on the spot.I wasn't too interested in the food, and it all looked fried. I could smell the batter. I was happy to indulge in the coffee.Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.There were a few booths from the various OpenAI teams, promoting the various things they were here to promote. I walked to the Dots booth, which is their personal always-on AI assistant. There was nothing in the booth, just a table. And two people on the other side of the booth from the Dots team. An absurd byproduct of this design was that a queue of people formed to make conversation with the booth people. I was standing behind this woman. When it was her turn, she started a conversation about how they are an MSME, and they have been experimenting with GPT Astra, their latest and most powerful model, to control a robot. She opened a video, and there it was. I saw a wheeled robot moving around and being controlled by the LLM.The Dots guy was delighted, "Wow, this is amazing! Can I tweet this? Can you send this to me?"He then offered to introduce this woman to a person in their team interested in hardware, and walked off the booth. He looked at me, somewhat apologetically and told me he'd be back in a few minutes, and he hopes I don't mind waiting. I enthusiastically thumbsed him up, as I genuinely did not mind. By then, the other Dots representative in the booth took me up on the conversation. I realised at that point I didn't really have anything specific or interesting to talk about. I joked about how it's funny that there's a queue for having a chat here, and I don't think it landed. I then asked a question about their Dots product, which was basically me trying to figure out why they announced @ChatGPT on Slack and Dots on Slack on the same DevDay, when the latter is basically a superset of the former. As anyone would imagine, it was a slightly lousy conversation. She was being nice, considering.I later searched "OpenAI DevDay Bengaluru" twitter to see if anyone from OpenAI tweeted about the robot. I couldn't find it. The results were full of young men sharing screenshots of their DevDay emails proclaiming their delight in getting accepted into this event. One tweet said, "my GitHub commits got me here. now let’s see if my social skills can get me through OpenAI DevDay Bengaluru tomorrow 😶‍🌫️"Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.The events were about to start. I took a second row seat. Next to me a young gentleman asked me if I had reserved the seat next to me. Of course not, please take the seat. He asked me where I'm from. I'm of this city, I told him. He said he had come all the way from Thiruvananthapuram. He was preparing for placements. He had an interview for this company set up in his city, and he showed me the JD. It is funded by Nvidia and Microsoft, he said. It's unclear what the interview round will be testing, and what tech stack and language I should prepare for. I told him that none of that matters anymore, perhaps unhelpfully to him at the moment. You see, the only thing that matters is how you are able to understand and break down a problem in front of you, it matters more in the long run than whatever Leetcode this company will ask. That's what you need to make it. He then asked me if he should focus on "core logic." Something about that framing frustrated me, but for the moment, I nodded.I looked up that company later. I needed Claude to explain what they actually do, because the website was vague, obscure and full of cool-sounding jargon. It's a "deep tech" company from the US that basically puts tiny datacenters in huge shipping containers, so that defense companies, oil rigs, disaster management teams and the like can get fast compute at their site of operation. Their website had just rebranded to remove all mentions of "AI" and replace it with "SI" instead. They now have a subsidiary in India.Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.The event on stage started. The managing director of OpenAI got on stage. He got everyone to woohoo them to prove their energy, and the crowd was happy to oblige. And then applauded the crowd for making it despite the rains, despite the traffic, and despite the journey to Whitefield. It was a fairly typical presentation for an event of this kind, especially in India. He talked about how India is the second largest "developer ecosystem" in the world (I agree, though I don't know what that means) and how 70% of cloud native developers were under 35 (I agree, though I don't know what that means) and how 96% of AI startups and developers rely on Open Source (I agree and I think I know what that means). OpenAI are positioning themselves as the more "open" AI, at least in the sense that they want to be the platform layer that enables downstream businesses and get AI in everyone's hands.He then provided us an equation:Impact=Opportunity×Competence×GritImpact = Opportunity × Competence × GritImpact=Opportunity×Competence×GritHe gave us stories about how a person was using Codex to label potholes, and automate submitting the complaints. He talked about a few prototypes people made for telemedicine, and how telemedicine can finally be solved, and implied we just need to figure out policy. There were some other examples. They have set up an ecosystem of "ambassadors" at the college level that will promote Codex, and help the builder ecosystem in India.Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.The next one was from the CTO of Applications, talking about their massive DevDay releases that happened earlier in September.The next one was a fun one, with two folks showing off the GPT Live API. The demo went pretty well. The crowd seemed to enjoy it.I was not feeling it though. I walked out of the auditorium to get myself a cup of free chai.Aren't we happy to be fed. A powerful corporation has turned its gaze upon us.Another round of snacks came out. The crowds formed near them. A voice in my head was telling me to go back and read The Power Broker at home, instead of stay along till 8PM.I did not eat any of the snacks. I realised I wasn't happy to be fed.I left the gaze of this powerful corporation.1You bet I'm taking them up on the free ChatGPT Pro 100 subscription though. ↩