Zero Shot (Private)

On July 12, Satya Nadella published a blog post in which he argued that you pay for AI twice. Once with money, and once with proprietary knowledge you have to feed it. His recommendation to every company: create your private evals.

But wait, do you know what an eval is? Could you define it in simple terms? 

Most people can't. And that’s the thing with the AI vocabulary that has seeped into our lives. 

On today’s episode of Zero Shot, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar, Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Brady Ng put some common AI concepts and words to test in their own lives. They pick from the following options:

A. Never heard of it

B. Heard of it, can't define it

C. Can define it

D. It changed how I work

Here are the words they unpack: Frontier models · Open weights · Tokens · Context window · Fine-tuning · Distillation · RAG · Prompt/context engineering · Context store · Prompt library · Context rot · Voice & style · Harness · Loops · Evals

Along the way, they discuss Fable, distillation, the hype around prompt engineering, the current push around taste, and the one AI leader missing from all of the action. 

If this episode resonated with you, we’d love to hear from you and also see you at our sixth live event on how professionals, companies, and India keep their edge as AI gets more powerful. 

It's on August 1 at the Bangalore International Centre in Indiranagar. Livestream tickets are available if you can't make it in person and prices go up soon. Here are all the details: https://the-ken.com/events/intelligence-independence/



This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.



Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.



Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears.


Additional material: 

https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/
https://snscratchpad.com/posts/reverse-information-paradox/
https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/indias-ai-edge-is-that-it-has-no-ai-of-its-own/



What is Zero Shot (Private)?

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.