Latest news with #Dixit
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Abortion rights organizer Sarah Dixit running for Spokane city council
May 29—Reproductive rights organizer Sarah Dixit is running for Spokane City Council in the seat currently held by Councilman Jonathan Bingle. Bingle is one of two conservatives in the minority of the seven-member council. Fellow conservative Michael Cathcart and Bingle represent council District 1, which covers the northeastern third of the city — east of Division and north of Trent. The district also includes almost all of downtown Spokane. Bingle is running for re-election for the first time after winning his first four-year term in 2021. Last year, he unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination of Spokane's Congressional seat. Cathcart announced Wednesday that he's running for Spokane County Auditor in 2026. In challenging the incumbent, Dixit said she wants to bring a young voice to city council that will uplift marginalized communities and those who may not be civically engaged. "A lot of folks are working jobs," she said. "They have kids at home. They can't follow what's happening at city council. We need to make this whole process more accessible for people, and especially for communities of color, immigrant populations and young people." At 29, Dixit believes she can reach these underserved populations as a young, queer woman of color. Dixit said she does not see that kind of advocacy from her opponent. "I don't see Jonathan in the community. At the events I'm at," she said. "I just haven't heard that type of advocacy from him when it comes to transit, bike safety investment, other issues." A big focus of her nascent campaign will be accessibility to public transit . Dixit wants to increase investments in public transit and have fares on a sliding scale, allowing those with the least resources to get the most access. Though firmly aligned with the council's progressive majority, Dixit said she would not be a "cookie-cutter" version of those already on council. Having grown up in Southern California, Dixit came to Spokane to attend Whitworth University. While in college, the first election of Donald Trump spurred her into activism. She went on to found the Christian college's first pro-choice club. Since graduating in 2018, she has advocated for reproductive and abortion rights full time at Planned Parenthood and as organizing director of Pro-Choice Washington. At Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, Dixit worked under Paul Dillon, who now serves on Spokane's city council. Dixit called Dillon a "mentor" who encouraged her to run. As a potential representative of downtown Spokane, Dixit said she has pride for the city center. "There's a lot of rhetoric about downtown that I don't necessarily agree with," she said. "I love downtown, and it's a place that makes Spokane really special." When addressing homelessness, the city should have a "multipronged approach" that uses less incarceration and more resources to prevent someone from becoming unhoused in the first place, she said. "A lot of the issues stem from the dehumanization of folks who are unhoused. I really want to make sure that we are working on issues in a way that recognizes these folks are Spokanites too. And their humanity needs to be a part of the conversations we're having," she said. Asked about concerns she might be too young to effectively serve, Dixit said there is no shortage of older voices on council. "I approach the work in a way that comes from all my lived experiences — being the daughter of immigrants, being someone who really loves the culture and the heart of Spokane. That lends itself to me being a different type of council member for Spokane," she said. Her parents emigrated from India. Endorsements for Dixit include Council President Betsy Wilkerson, Dillon, state Rep. Natasha Hill, state Sen. Marcus Riccelli and others.
Time of India
26-05-2025
- Time of India
Gopalganj admin cracks down on orchestra groups after groom's abduction
Patna: In the aftermath of a groom's abduction by members of an orchestra group during a wedding on May 23, Gopalganj SP Avdhesh Dixit has issued stringent directives aimed at regulating such performances. Dixit has ordered immediate preparation of a list of orchestra groups employing minor girls, many from West Bengal and Odisha, who are allegedly subjected to exploitation and abuse. "FIRs will be lodged against any operator found employing minors or continuing performances beyond 10pm," the SP said. The groom was kidnapped following a dispute over payment between the orchestra and the event organisers, police sources said. The SP convened meetings with orchestra operators across the district, during which strict conditions were laid out. No permission will be granted for performances beyond 10pm and all operators were made to sign bonds pledging to maintain public order and refrain from objectionable activities. "Police investigations revealed that during a dispute involving a 'launda dance' on May 23, youths associated with the orchestra kidnapped the groom. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Kickstart your new journey with the Honda Shine 125 Honda Learn More Undo There was a previous incident involving assault at an event by a Bhojpuri group," Dixit said. He added that obscenity was often being promoted under the guise of cultural performances. "We believe such events are sending the wrong message to society. Issues like celebratory firing, display of weapons, vulgar songs and human trafficking are under investigation," he said, adding that all orchestra events are now under police surveillance. "Most dancers come from states like West Bengal and Odisha. Many are minors. We are not against employment, but if an activity threatens law and order, it must be addressed," the SP said.
Time of India
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Congress MLA gets relief from HC
Jaipur: A single bench of Rajasthan High Court Thursday granted relief to Congress MLA Indira Meena and asked police to not take any coercive action in the FIR of attempt to murder lodged against her at Bonlli police station in Sawai Madhopur district. Meena is MLA from Bamanwas constituency in Sawai Madhopur district. The FIR against her was filed by BJP functionary Hanumat Dixit, alleging attempt to murder under Section 109(1) of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. Meena approached the High Court to quash the FIR against her, saying it was "politically motivated". Kritesh Oswal appeared on behalf of the petitioner and argued in court that the dispute originated just before Ambedkar Jayanti this year, on April 13, when, as per Dixit, Meena allegedly assaulted him and damaged his vehicles. "We, too, have filed an FIR against Dixit for insulting Dr B R Ambedkar by vandalising the tiles affixed on his statue. During then, her vehicle was blocked and people at the spot also misbehaved with her," Oswal told the court. The FIR lodged on April 15 mentions assault and vandalism of the car, but the complainant did not get any medical examionation done of himself, Oswal said, adding that the allegations were baseless. "We have also presented photo-video of the incident in court," he added.
Mint
19-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Pocket FM is training its AI model to scale storytelling. Is the investment worth it?
Audio series startup Pocket FM plans to have a large language model (LLM) up and running by the end of the year. The company has already labelled and categorized its proprietary datasets and is currently testing an early version of its model. 'We're currently testing a very raw model, that is going to take some time. We're also working on getting graphic processing units," said Pocket FM co-founder and chief technology officer Prateek Dixit told Mint. Teams at the company are already working on reinforcement learning for the LLM. Pocket FM expects the LLM to be ready five to six months after that. The startup plans to buy between 30 and 50 of Nvidia's A100 or H100 GPUs in a staggered manner. These units cost anywhere between $8,000 and $25,000 each. Despite the steep costs, Dixit views the investment as strategic. 'It's not just a cost decision, you've to understand. It's more of a strategic asset for how we scale storytelling with AI," Dixit added. Beyond hardware, the LLM push includes infrastructure upgrades, hiring skilled AI engineers, and increased R&D investment. Pocket FM currently spends 8-13% of its revenue (approximately $26 million) on R&D, with 40% of that allocated to AI initiatives. This is expected to go up by 1% to 2%. Pocket FM plans to build their model on top of an open-source foundation model like Meta's Llama 3, tailored specifically for storytelling. The company currently uses open-source models, fine-tuned for its genre-specific needs, but over time, it reached a point where the quality of the content plateaued. 'With our own model training, we can have a step jump in quality," Dixit said. Popular genres of content on the platform include drama, fantasy and thrillers. The company's writers have produced thousands of stories in these categories. The plan is to use the LLM for everything ranging from story creation and comic creation to developing stories, character arcs and even AI-based videos. 'The idea is to take these foundation models and fine-tune them for different writing styles. That is the use case for comics as well," said Dixit. Earlier this year, Pocket FM launched Pocket Toons, its webcomic platform. For this, the company created an AI-powered studio it calls Blaze to produce comics, '20x faster at one-third the cost, automating processes like background rendering, scene composition, and colouring while preserving artistic creativity," the company had said. Pocket FM has been using natural language processing (NLP), a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), for translating across the 10 languages for which it produces audio content. Other use cases include text summarisation, metadata generation and genre tagging. 'An LLM forms the backbone of a powerful IP engine that not only drives our audio formats today but will also power future innovations across multiple storytelling mediums," said Dixit. Is the investment worth it? Experts are divided on whether building a domain-specific language model (DSLM) is worth the cost and can help in the long run. It's hard to say whether a DSLM can stand the test of time, given how fast the AI industry is moving. 'I don't think building a proprietary model is a good idea where the rate of innovation is so fast in the industry," said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on such models is expected to reach $838 million in 2025 and grow to $11.3 billion by 2028. The market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 233%. Open-source generative AI models are emerging as a viable source for domain-specific models, rapidly closing the performance and reliability gap with proprietary models and offering a cost-effective and flexible alternative for model training and specialization, Verma added. 'Building an LLM isn't automatically a strategic advantage. In many cases, a smaller DSLM can outperform a general-purpose LLM in speed, cost-efficiency, and relevance—especially when fine-tuned on proprietary data," said Manpreet Singh Ahuja, tech, media and telecom sector leader and chief clients and alliances officer at PwC India. 'The question is not 'can we build it?' but 'should we.'" His argument is that LLMs are only worth building when a company has a clearly established reason that current models in the market can't satisfy. If a company is unable to prove that or is not able to monetise the model itself or use it across high-scale products, the return on investment is questionable. 'Long-term value comes not from owning the model alone, but from the unique data, applications, and feedback loops built around it," Ahuja added. However, given that Pocket FM knows the use case it wants to build for, a custom LLM can benefit them, even in the long run. What's more, building one that doesn't require them to lease GPUs for training means they don't need to worry about data security concerns and safeguarding their intellectual property. 'Over time, running your own optimized model, especially using open-source foundations, can slash inference costs by up to 80%," said Sameer Jain, managing director at Primus Partners, a global management consulting firm. Inferencing refers to the process where a trained AI model uses its existing knowledge to make its own conclusions on data its never seen before. Eventually, the company expects that by owning its own GPUs and LLMs, it'll be able to reduce its AI costs significantly. 'The unit cost per generation of content at scale gets reduced. We're not talking about one-time use cases. We want to continuously generate inferences from models," Dixit said, adding that they expect their inferencing cost to drop by 20-30%. Deeper AI push Besides LLM, Pocket FM has a co-pilot that is used internally to create content in German, English, and Hindi. The company is still fine-tuning it to work with other Indic languages like Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, Marathi, and Bengali. 'We'll be making a public launch of this tool in a few months," said Dixit. The company is also building AI agents which can participate in every step of the story creation process, from how intense the beginning of a story should be to where a cliff hanger might be appropriate to add. 'We're building them in such a way that individual modules can act and trigger separately. A story could have a really good cliff hanger but bad pacing. I should be able to ask a model to address these specific queries," said the Pocket FM co-founder. Meanwhile, Pocket FM is considering acquisitions for the first time, and is moving with two strategies in mind: lean AI companies building either LLMs for stories or AI-based voice and video and secondly, companies which have large writer communities. 'We're building an AI entertainment suite so it would be great to get companies that can be baked into our systems," Dixit said. While the company hasn't actively set aside money for inorganic growth, they said they're going to be opportunistic about making acquisitions. Pocket FM is knocking on the doors of global private equity players as it looks to raise another round of money. The company is looking to raise between $100 million and $200 million, this time at a unicorn valuation, according toVCCircle in March. The company last raised money in March 2024 in a $103 million Series-D round that was led by Lightspeed India Partners at a valuation of $750 million. So far, the company has cumulatively raised $197 million across rounds and has the likes of Brand Capital, Tencent, Stepstone Group on its cap table. Pocket FM competitor Kuku FM is also leveraging AI for similar use cases. Kuku FM used AI for the creation of scripts of series on its platform, like 'Secret Billionaire,' 'Women of Prison' and 'Bloodstone Fortune.' Across industries, companies are now opting to build their own models as they look to leverage the vast amounts of user data they've collected over the years. Healthify, the health and wellness startup, built their own small language model that runs on top of LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic. Ed-tech startup Physicswallah is building smaller models to solve questions pertaining to physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology. Strategy this year While the US has always been Pocket FM's main revenue source, accounting for 70-75% of total revenue, the company expects the European market to take off this year. With the $103 million raised last year, the company expanded into Europe and Latin America. Currently, Pocket FM is available in Germany and the UK, where the company entered just six months ago and claims that the two markets have already contributed to 5% of its revenue. Instead of opting to go live simultaneously across Europe, they're staggering their entry into different nations. They'll go live in France in June, then Italy around October and finally, the Netherlands around January in 2026. Dixit expects Europe to contribute up to 30% in two years. As a result, the company said, their revenue will 'grow multi-fold." India currently contributes 10-15% to Pocket FM's revenue. Pocket FM expects that the revenue percentage contribution will remain the same while 'its absolute revenue is expected to grow significantly, potentially 2–3 times." The company claimed it had surpassed $200 million in terms of revenue in FY25, with an annual recurring revenue of $250 million. In FY24, Pocket FM's revenue stood at ₹261 crore, compared to ₹130 crore in FY23, according to regulatory files accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler. The company trimmed losses to ₹16 crore in FY24 from ₹75 crore in FY23. Founded in 2018 by Rohan Nayak, Prateek Dixit, and Nishanth KS Pocket FM started as a audio series platform. The company has since rebranded itself, changing its name to Pocket Entertainment. It now runs three verticals, Pocket FM, Pocket Novels and Pocket Toons.
India Gazette
19-05-2025
- Politics
- India Gazette
"BJP no longer in habit of answering questions," Sandeep Dixit slams BJP for dodging Congress suggestion on Pakistan
New Delhi [India] May 19 (ANI): Congress leader Sandeep Dixit, commenting on an all-party delegation visiting key partner countries to promote India's fight against cross-border terrorism and Operation Sindoor, criticized the BJP. Dixit criticized the BJP for avoiding accountability and not answering questions. He urged that a delegation should be sent to assert India's stance, set clear objectives, pressure Pakistan, and declare it a terrorist state. 'The problem with the BJP is that they are no longer in the habit of answering any questions. The Congress party has repeatedly said that the delegation should go and we should put our point there. I even said that they should set their goals, put pressure on Pakistan, and tell people that Pakistan has become a terrorist state,' he said. Meanwhile, Congress General Secretary in charge of Communications Jairam Ramesh accused the Central government (BJP) of playing 'cheap politics' and indulging in 'politicisation' by not including all the names recommended by the Opposition for the all-party parliamentary delegation. Ramesh alleged that despite formally submitting four names on request, the government ignored most of them, undermining parliamentary conventions and trust between the Opposition and the ruling party. According to Congress, the party had submitted four names to the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs by May 16, but the final list released late on May 17 included only one of the suggested names. The all-party delegations will project India's national consensus and resolute approach to combating terrorism in all forms and manifestations. They would carry forth to the world the country's strong message of zero tolerance against terrorism. The list includes MPs from multiple parties, divided into seven groups of 8-9 members. A leader has been assigned for each group, who will lead the delegation at a global level. The Members of Parliament include Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, JDU leader Sanjay Kumar Jha, BJP leader Baijayant Panda, DMK leader Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, NCP (SP) leader Supriya Sule, and Shiv Sena leader Shrikant Eknath Shinde. (ANI)
