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TechnologyGoogle invented the transformer, paid $2.7B to buy back its co-author, and just lost him to OpenAI. The pattern says something about why large organizations keep giving away the people who built them.
AI Advisor · Founder, 256 Technologies
Hitesh
Sarda
I help leadership teams cut through AI hype and make evidence-based decisions: what is feasible, what the ROI really is, and the smallest pilot that proves it. 25+ years building production systems, including work at Citi, Virtusa, Yash, and ValueLabs. Today I run 256 Technologies, an applied AI lab in Hyderabad, and I have been writing here since 2009.
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What I do
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AI Advisory
Acting as your fractional Head of AI: strategy, feasibility, ROI modeling, vendor assessment, and roadmaps grounded in real engineering constraints. No hype, no vendor lock-in.
AI Executive Training
A six-week program that builds an AI-native leadership team: hands-on executive workflows, governance and risk, and a 90-day adoption roadmap that moves leaders from watching to leading.
MVP Development
Tangible code beats theoretical roadmaps. I build the smallest prototype that answers the key technical and business questions, across agents, computer vision, and ML, before you commit to a full build.
Recent Writing
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Everything except permission
Google invented the transformer, paid $2.7B to buy back its co-author, and just lost him to OpenAI. The pattern says something about why large organizations keep giving away the people who built them.
When your TAM is bigger than US GDP
SpaceX just paid $60 billion for a coding tool. The price is interesting. The justification -- a $26 trillion addressable market -- reveals more about how we price AI right now than about what it's actually worth.
The real cost of running AI locally for coding
Serious developers are dropping paid AI subscriptions for local models and reporting it actually works. The 'it's free' pitch is real - but it obscures a different set of costs.
AI Writes the Code. Who Governs It?
Almost every team now codes with AI; only a third governs it. The teams pulling ahead review AI's output as seriously as they once reviewed their own code.