Hello Panini

Hello world,

We are two friends who worked together in an AI company before and, after going our separate ways for a while, decided to come back to build technologies and products that we truly believe in (more about us). During our shared time we worked as founding Engineer and ML Researcher at a speech conversational systems startup which was, in 2018, one of the first to build and deploy fully automated voicebots in India.

Our work was interesting because the problems were difficult. To make a voicebot work end-to-end in 2018 was difficult. Speech models were poor, and general purpose intelligence meant better generalization on narrow tasks, not LLMs like today. Still, there were pockets of opportunities to create products with limited technology, which stays a fact even today.

We are building Panini to find and work in similar pockets of opportunities. Our focus is to stay close to the problem and solutions, and leverage our extensive expertise in AI and engineering to create new products ourselves and help others create them, while keeping a really high bar of quality.

At Panini, we do not want to compromise on a few common shared principles. We are not going to fool ourselves into thinking that we have explicated every one of them, but there is one that we are clear on: we don’t want to pick up work that infringes on human freedom, drives huge inequality or oppression, or eats away at our agency by taking our attention and time. For example, we won’t be working on recommendation systems that are primarily about companies’ profits at the expense of users’ autonomy.

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We call Panini a product technology lab. That means we work on technologies that can help in building products. By using the term “lab” we clarify that our core outcomes could be insights, research outcomes, and prototypes, in addition to actual products. Much of our technological work will not directly be a source of money. We hope they do, but many times we will have to pick up work on top of or around them to get revenue. This would mean both contractual and product-led revenue, whose share will keep shifting as we move.

We will create more clarity and directions of work as we continue writing and publishing here. If you find us interesting and want to stay in touch, please subscribe to our newsletter using the form at the bottom of the page.

Our newsletter will be a set of emails with updates around new blog posts, and any other updates that are not part of blogs, like release notes for tools, and some other logistical changes. We promise to not spam, since we write these by hand and that takes time, like most human writing should.

See you soon!