Is AI Still Hype? What Top VCs Are Backing in India's AI Wave
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Time of India
44 minutes ago
- Time of India
She quit school at 13 to build a GPT agency and chase financial freedom by 20. Netizens remain divided between praise and concern
A journey sparked by curiosity From cloning herself to coding with AI Netizens split over her bold move You Might Also Like: AI is reshaping career skills and college curricula, but are schools ready when students let AI do their assignments? For most 13-year-olds, life revolves around school, homework, and the occasional exam stress. But for Parineeti, the classroom became irrelevant. She left school at 13 and decided to build her own GPT-powered automation agency. At just 14 now, she says, 'School was kind of wasting my potential.'Speaking on the podcast Just Kidding With Sid! hosted by Siddhesh Lokare, Parineeti shared that she audits businesses, semi-automates their operations, and has already created custom GPTs for paying father introduced her to ChatGPT and encouraged her to spend two hours daily experimenting with it. Soon those two hours doubled, and ChatGPT became more than just a study tool. She admitted, 'Mummy thought I had a boyfriend, but no, I was talking to ChatGPT. I became more dependent on it than I should have been.'Parineeti even used AI to clear exams, including Sanskrit. 'Teachers discourage us from using AI, but it's the future, so why shouldn't I use it?' she not knowing how to code, she relied on ChatGPT to write programs and even designed AI avatars, including one of herself and her father. 'It sounds more like me than me. Sometimes I wonder—am I Parineeti or is that Parineeti?' she work is no longer just an experiment. She has 4-5 clients and says she is already earning. Her vision? To achieve financial freedom by the age of 20 and enjoy life after her parents have backed her decision, her mother worries about her social skills and heavy dependence on AI. Parineeti herself admits struggling to share her own story has not only sparked admiration but also ignited a heated debate about the role of education in the age of AI. While many see her as a pioneer charting her own unconventional path, others believe her journey paints an incomplete picture of argue that traditional schooling often stifles creativity and slows down fast learners. One user wrote, 'Parineeti is living proof that our rigid education system needs reform. Children should be encouraged to explore their interests rather than just chase marks.' Another praised her entrepreneurial spirit, commenting, 'At 14, she is doing what most adults dream of. It's refreshing to see a girl leading the AI wave instead of waiting for opportunities.'But critics remain wary. Some pointed out the risks of emotional and social isolation. 'Bookish knowledge is not everything, but school also teaches you teamwork, discipline, and resilience. She may earn money today but miss out on these life skills,' a user unusual path has sparked bigger questions: if AI is reshaping workplaces and even higher education, should schools rethink how they prepare students for the future? For now, her story sits at the intersection of inspiration and concern, leaving society to debate whether she is a trailblazer—or a cautionary tale.
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
OpenAI staff looking to sell $6 billion in stock to SoftBank, others: Source
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Current and former employees of OpenAI are looking to sell nearly $6 billion worth of the ChatGPT maker's shares to investors, including SoftBank Group and Thrive Capital , a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on potential deal would value the company at $500 billion, up from $300 billion currently, underscoring both OpenAI's rapid gains in users and revenue, as well as the intense competition among artificial intelligence firms for Thrive and Dragoneer Investment Group did not immediately respond to requests for comment. All three investment firms are existing OpenAI News, which had earlier reported the development, said discussions are in early stages and the size of the sale could secondary share sale investment adds to SoftBank's role in leading OpenAI's $40 billion primary funding by its flagship product ChatGPT, OpenAI doubled its revenue in the first seven months of the year, reaching an annualized run rate of $12 billion, and is on track to reach $20 billion by the end of the year, Reuters reported earlier in August. Microsoft-backed OpenAI has about 700 million weekly active users for its ChatGPT products, a surge from about 400 million in February.
Economic Times
3 hours ago
- Economic Times
Ex-Twitter chief Parag Agrawal launches new $30M startup Parallel, betting on AI smarter than ChatGPT-5
Synopsis Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, has returned with a new venture called Parallel Web Systems. Founded in 2023, the Palo Alto startup builds infrastructure for AI agents to conduct web research with greater accuracy and speed. Already backed by $30 million from firms including Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures, the platform claims to outperform OpenAI's GPT-5 in benchmark tests. Agrawal says he hopes Parallel, not Twitter, will define his career as he steps back into the Silicon Valley spotlight. Agencies Ex-Twitter chief Parag Agrawal launches Parallel, betting on AI smarter than GPT-5 Parag Agrawal, once at the helm of Twitter, is now leading Parallel Web Systems, an artificial intelligence startup that focuses on helping AI agents complete tasks on behalf of humans. The idea is to allow machines to gather, verify, and organise information directly from the move comes less than three years after his abrupt dismissal by Elon Musk, who sacked him and Twitter's leadership team immediately after taking over the company. Friends and colleagues urged Agrawal to take a break. He chose otherwise. 'I'm not a person that can enjoy the beach in that moment,' he told Bloomberg. Instead, he spent his days in Palo Alto coffee shops reading research papers, sketching ideas, and writing code on his said he had plenty of offers but most of them were unappealing. 'Clean up shit,' is how he described those roles. Having spent years building machine learning systems at Twitter, he was clear his next step would be in artificial intelligence. His timing was notable. Just a month after leaving Twitter, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which opened the floodgates for new AI ventures. By 2023, Agrawal had founded Parallel Web Systems and quietly assembled a 25-member team in Palo Alto. The company has already raised $30 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Index Ventures. One of the early backers is Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist known for his bets on emerging Parallel's technology is being used by early adopters, which Agrawal describes as 'some of the fastest-growing AI companies.' The system is reportedly processing millions of research tasks each platform allows AI applications to search the public web in real time, verify the accuracy of what they find, and package results into clear responses. According to the company's official blog, the system includes eight 'research engines' designed for different fastest engine can deliver results in under a minute, while the most advanced, called Ultra8x, can spend half an hour digging for highly detailed answers. Parallel says Ultra8x has outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5 by more than 10 per cent in benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench.'It is the only AI system to outperform both humans and leading AI models like GPT-5 on the most rigorous benchmarks for deep web research,' the company says its services can support a range of industries. Coding assistants can pull snippets directly from GitHub. Retailers can track rivals' product catalogues. Market analysts can have consumer reviews organised into can access these tools through three different APIs, including a low-latency version built for career has already seen sharp turns. A former International Physics Olympiad gold medallist, he earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford before joining Twitter in 2011. Starting out on the advertising team, he climbed the ranks to become Chief Technology Officer under Jack Dorsey. He worked on core products like Twitter's ad technology and its algorithmic timeline, before being named CEO in 2022, he was still leading Twitter while locked in a legal battle with Musk over the $44 billion takeover bid. When Musk finally completed the purchase, his first move was to dismiss briefly considered an AI healthcare project, but kept coming back to what he saw as a pressing challenge: building AI agents that could reliably search and interpret the web.'I don't think Twitter defines me. If I do a good job, I'm hoping this company will define me,' he said of his new believes the future of AI lies in personal agents acting on behalf of users. 'You'll probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet,' he predicted. 'And that's going to happen soon, like next year,' he told Parallel Web Systems, he is betting on speed and accuracy to give him an edge in a competitive market, and perhaps a new definition of his career.
