Hi, I’m thiyaga 👋 — From Pixels to Agents
Engineer. Builder. Dreamer. I’ve gone from crafting consumer products, design systems, and web based design editors at Pixels to now shaping agentic AI at Eightfold AI.
Finding Structure in Time: Decoding the 1990 Paper
In 1990, Jeffrey Elman ran a small experiment with a tiny recurrent network. No billion parameters. No attention. No massive datasets. Just a simple question: If a model learns to predict the next word, can it discover structure on its own? The answer changed how we think about intelligence. The Experiment: Learning Grammar Without Rules Elman trained a simple recurrent network (now called an Elman network) on sentences generated from a small artificial grammar. ...
Fast AI or Slow AI: The Choice That Makes or Breaks Teams
In a recent conversation, Ritendra Datta, VP of AI at Eightfold, gave a fresh perspective on AI development. With his extensive background leading AI teams of all sizes—from small pods to over 200 engineers and researchers—across Google, Facebook & Databricks, Ritendra brings a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t in building AI systems at scale. This is a refreshingly take: all of AI development can be seen through two lenses—Fast AI and Slow AI. ...
The 90/10 Rule: The Inconvenient Truth About Agentic AI - It’s All Plumbing, No Brain
The Real Challenge in Building AI Agents Isn’t the AI - It’s Everything Else The AI industry has a marketing problem. We’ve become so infatuated with the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence that we’ve forgotten the most important truth about building agentic AI systems: 90% of the work is software engineering, and only 10% is actually about the AI model itself. This isn’t just a hot take - it’s a hard-learned lesson from intense 11 months of building AI interview and agentic systems at Eightfold AI, where this realisation became both the problem statement and a career pivot. While everyone’s debating which foundation model has the highest benchmark scores, the real battles are being fought in error handling, state management, and API integrations. ...