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TechnologyAnthropic now requires a government ID before accessing its most capable models. What looks like a safety measure is export control, and it is nudging developers toward the Chinese AI alternatives the US is trying to contain.
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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When your AI asks for a government ID
Anthropic now requires a government ID before accessing its most capable models. What looks like a safety measure is export control, and it is nudging developers toward the Chinese AI alternatives the US is trying to contain.
Homework scores up. Learning down.
Norway just banned AI in elementary schools. The research behind that decision is more uncomfortable than the headlines suggest.
Will Apple Pull a SpaceX?
The companies building giant AI compute for themselves have started renting it out: SpaceX leased all of Colossus to Anthropic, and Meta says a cloud business is on the table. Apple is about to have the most efficient, most private inference fleet on earth. Can it keep that to itself?
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.