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Time of India
44 minutes ago
- Time of India
Zuckerberg's AI dream team is all built by immigrants: Will visa walls break Silicon Valley's AI backbone?
The United States of America, sobriqueted as the "land of opportunities," now stands at the precipice reeking of irony. What if we told you that America's tech supremacy, the very capability it is globally championed for, rests not on homegrown talent, but on the passports of the immigrants? Historical facts have added their weight to it, and now present affirms it further. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Mark Zuckerberg's newly announced AI Superintelligence Lab tells the story emphatically: Eleven scientists, eleven immigrants, not a single US-born engineer in sight. What is striking is not that America depends on immigrants: It is how profoundly that dependency is knitted into the architecture of its future. Their names are not etched on billboards. Their accents may differ. But from Princeton to Peking University, from IIT Kanpur to Carnegie Mellon, these minds are carrying the bastion of artificial intelligence for the Silicon Valley. The global minds behind American machines Meta's all-immigrant dream team reads like a map of intellectual migration. Trapit Bansal, an alumnus from IIT Kanpur, honed his brilliance at UMass Amherst and OpenAI. Shuchao Bi, born in China, gave GPT-4o its voice. Huiwen Chang invented architectures that made machines 'see.' Ji Lin made AI cheaper and faster. The journeys trace their roots back to overcrowded classrooms in Beijing, Delhi, or Pretoria, survived the crucible of elite admissions, and culminated in a foreign land where visa renewals were as stressful as debugging code. They trained in the US, built foundational models, and are now constructing the scaffolding of AI's future. This isn't an exception. It is the rule. From Google's Bard to OpenAI's GPT-4, from Microsoft's Azure to Amazon's Alexa, the architects of American AI are more likely to have roots in Chennai than Chicago, in Wuhan than Washington. Silicon Valley's immigrant skeleton America's tech economy has always run on imported intellect. Over 70% of H-1B visas are granted to Indian nationals alone, according to data shared by USCIS. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Some years, the number has crossed 75%. And it's not just engineering cubicles. Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Arvind Krishna (IBM), the corner office is increasingly accentuated. The journey started in the 1990s when coders flocked the Silicon Valley, which has now translated into an artery system of AI architects, cloud infrastructure pioneers, and cybersecurity leaders. They do not just solve technical problems; they set the global agenda for what AI is and what it has become. And yet, these very professionals are being subjected to a political climate that casts suspicion on foreign workers, tightening visa controls, and erecting bureaucratic minefields that threaten to break the very backbone of American tech. Visa battles and broken promises The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received over 780,000 applications for just 85,000 H-1B slots in FY 2024, according to USCIS data. The odds are absurd, the process increasingly punitive. A proposed beneficiary-based lottery model aims to curb mass applications, but it also risks shutting out legitimate talent. Add to that the rising wage thresholds, compliance red tape, and anti-immigrant rhetoric that predictably peaks during election years, and you begin to see why America's AI future is hanging by a bureaucratic thread. The tightening immigration policies might cast a shadow on the tech progress that America is witnessing right now. The Indian engine of the AI age The effect of this reliance is more pronounced in India. Post-liberalisation, our country developed an obsession with engineering, catalysed by the IITs and fuelled by social aspiration, creating a goldmine of global tech workers. Over the years down the line, India has lost its talent to offshore and, in a way, contributed enormously to building the American tech empire. The irony deepens: Indian engineering graduates built apps for the world, but couldn't find jobs at home. Their futures, and sometimes their families' fortunes, hinged not on innovation but immigration. A tectonic shift or a temporary snag? Today, that engine is sputtering. Visa regimes are unstable. The H-1B system is outdated. International students, once America's intellectual capital in waiting, now live under a cloud of uncertainty. And as Meta's immigrant-only team shines bright, the tech juggernaut is exposed well enough. If tomorrow, the gates narrow further, or worse, if talent stops navigating to the country, the US will not only lose developers, but with them the crucial direction as well. Already, there are numerous murmurs among graduates about staying back. Startup India, AI missions, and semiconductor initiatives, the incentives are growing. With the right policy push, India could convert its brain drain into a brain return. Maybe, the global tech power can be rescripted, this time from Bengaluru and not Boston. Innovation is not a nationality The American edge in AI owes a lot to the passports that have flown from distant countries with a utopian vision of building a future. They showed up with foreign degrees, accents that were often mocked, and dreams that carried enough weight. However, dreams need visas. And revolutions, especially technological ones, need the freedom to cross borders. The question before America now is simple: Will it remain the world's most powerful magnet for minds? Or will it build walls so high that even superintelligence can't climb over? If it picks the latter, it may soon find that the AI of tomorrow and the accompanied power may find an abode somewhere else and might not be in America.
The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
AI 171 crash: Air India refutes allegations of forcing bereaved families to declare financial dependency
Air India on Friday (July 4, 2025) denied allegations of coercing families of victims of the AI-171 accident into signing documents about their financial dependency on the deceased to reduce compensation payouts. In a detailed statement, the airline called the claims 'unsubstantiated and inaccurate.' The controversy surfaced following reports that some of the bereaved families were being compelled to disclose financial ties to their deceased loved ones — allegedly as a prerequisite for receiving compensation. However, the airlines clarified that the request for such information was a part of a standard process to ensure that interim compensation reached the rightful beneficiaries promptly. In an official statement, the airlines stated, "It has come to our notice that allegations have been made against the company claiming that families of the deceased in the AI-171 accident are being forced to sign papers disclosing their financial dependency on the deceased, in an attempt to slash compensation payments." "Efforts are being made by the airlines to process the payment of the interim compensation (also referred to as advance compensation) as soon as possible, to meet the immediate financial needs of affected family members, with the first payments having been made within days of the accident. However, Air India cannot process these payments in an information vacuum," it added. "To facilitate payments, the airlines have sought basic information to establish family relationships to ensure that the advance payments are received by those entitled to them. Whilst the questionnaire does ask family members to indicate with a "yes" or "no" as to whether they are "financially dependent" on the deceased, the airline believes that the process is entirely fair and necessary in order to process the payments to those most in need of assistance. Starting June 15, a Facilitation Centre was established by the airline at the Taj Skyline hotel in Ahmedabad, where the questionnaire relating to interim compensation was made available," it said. "In addition, families were sent communications informing them that the questionnaire was also available over e-mail, if families did not wish to visit the Centre. Air India staff present at the Centre explained the elements of the questionnaire to family members. There is no requirement for family members to complete the questionnaire at the Centre, and several families have chosen to complete the questionnaire at their convenience and submit it over e-mail. Families who chose to complete the questionnaire at the Centre were provided with copies of their submissions at their request," the airline further said. The airlines further stated that families of the victims, in addition to raising questions to the staff of the airlines, were also free to seek any legal advice if needed. Furthermore, the airlines had mentioned that the forms being filled by the bereaved families at the hospitals or morgues were completely unconnected with the compensation. However, some forms have also been filled out for official records. "No visits have been made by the airlines to the residences of the families solely to fill up the questionnaires connected to the interim compensation or for any other purposes. Additionally, an interim compensation has been disbursed to the 47 families so far, and the airline also remains in active dialogue to expedite the release of funds to the rest of the bereaved families. The documents relating to the rest 55 individuals have also been verified, and interim compensation is being released progressively to their families. We continue to be in dialogue with other families of the passengers and those deceased at the accident site, or their authorised representatives, to release the compensation at the earliest. As a part of the Tata Group, the airline upholds core values of integrity and responsibility and remains committed to serving the community, especially during challenging times," Air India said. "In addition to any compensation that will be provided by Air India, the Tata Group has announced a voluntary ex-gratia payment of Rs 1 crore or approximately GBP 85,000 to the families of each of the deceased. A trust with a corpus of around ₹500 crore or approximately GBP 43 million is being set up to manage and disburse this ex-gratia amount and provide long-term assistance to the families. These families will forever be part of the Tata family. All these efforts are voluntary and in addition to any compensation payable by Air India under law," the airline said. Additionally, Air India has also urged the public to be cautious of any misinformation and avoid the misinterpretation of facts.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Silicon Valley's new success is a $2-bn job platform with an Indian origin story
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha were college students when they first created their artificial intelligence (AI) interviewer. Initially, they were using the AI interview as a screening tool for engineers in India and matching those engineers with US startup jobs. Now, their AI interview has screened around half a million candidates, and their AI job marketplace, Mercor, is valued at $2 now works predominantly with some of the largest AI labs and tech companies in the world, including OpenAI and Meta, to screen talent using their AI interview and staff them on short-term contracts. 'Initially, we were just placing tech grads in India with startups run by our contemporaries,' said Virat Talwar, a product manager at Mercor, and its first employee, 'but not long after, we realised that we could generalise the products we had built to a much larger market.'. Products spearheaded by Talwar and the Mercor team have now processed close to 500,000 applicants, placing over 5,000 people around the world in part-time and full-time opportunities.A large amount of the contract work that members of Mercor's talent pool now do revolves around evaluating the capabilities of AI models, and working on projects that help cutting-edge AI researchers. Talent on the platform is global, while they have people from the US, Europe, and Latin America, a large part of the talent pool is based in India. In fact, around half of the company's internal team is based in India. 'The benefit of starting with an Indian talent pool is that we were able to attract and hire some of the best young Indian tech talent internally,' says Talwar, who is based in San Francisco but grew up in Delhi before moving abroad to study at Harvard of the members of the team based in India is Soumi De, the company's Head of Sourcing. She helps support the global sourcing strategy that fuels Mercor's AI marketplace, playing a pivotal role in building the supply engine that matches thousands of candidates to cutting-edge AI opportunities. 'Our goal is simple but ambitious: to deliver the right talent at the right time, every time,' said De. 'We've built an adaptive sourcing system that's designed not just for growth, but for precision and velocity.''Growing up in India and majoring in computer science, I saw how disconnected hiring often is from actual job performance first-hand,' said De. 'Top-tier talent would get overlooked because they didn't 'crack' the process, while others who performed well in interviews didn't always thrive on the job.'Mercor is now focusing on creating a talent experience shaped by a deeply practical approach to sourcing. 'Traditional recruiting needs to adapt. It shouldn't be about jumping through hoops; it should be about capability, clarity, and match. That's what we're building at Mercor.' De believes this shift isn't just progressive, it's inevitable. 'Companies can't afford the inefficiencies of outdated processes anymore. Mercor is ahead of the curve in shaping a modern hiring ecosystem, one where both companies and candidates win.'As the hiring landscape continues to evolve, Mercor's model is proving that a more equitable, performance-based approach isn't just idealistic, it's operationally sound and commercially necessary. Mercor is not just riding the future of work, it's helping build it.
