Bölümler
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First came hesitation. Naturally, given both guests are filmmakers.But once the threshold was crossed, there was no looking back. For Shakun Batra — director of Kapoor & Sons, Gehraiyaan, and Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu — the tipping point was a traffic jam shot that cost one-tenth of what they'd built on set. For Kobayashi, it was a car commercial that he hadn’t attempted before.
Shakun went on to build an AI division at his production house Jouska Films and collaborate with Google to make a small film using Veo 3. Kobayashi built Bait Society, an AI-native production company, from scratch.
One augmented an existing practice. One rebuilt entirely. We assumed these were diverging paths. But at the core, both are simply people who love using technology to make things they'd love to see.
In this episode of Zero Shot, we get into who gets credit when AI is in the pipeline, what happens to the crews and guilds being left behind, and why craft and voice still matter. We also go into the writing process in the AI age, the limits of the tools, and what it actually takes to make a feature film with AI today.
Both agree on one thing: production is getting easier. The bar for storytelling is going higher.
Tune in!
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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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 [email protected]. We are all ears!
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Additional material:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2439708/https://www.baitsociety.ai/kobayashi-reel
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If you have been paying attention, something has been happening within tech companies. And it has to do with tokens. But not what you think.
After killing its AI leaderboard, Meta announced a new platform to track AI usage and spending. Microsoft has started cancelling the Claude Code licenses of its employees. Uber said it ran out of its token budget for 2026. And then came the latest news of Anthropic disabling Fable 5's access following the US government's directive.
These four developments signal a shift underway. For the past year, the game was tokenmaxxing: use as much AI as possible, as often as possible, on everything. Enterprises are now asking whether this obsession was worth it. We are giving that question a name: "yieldmaxxing". Our thesis is simple. The big challenge now is this: how we will use AI safely and reliably without lock-ins and exploding bills, while remaining strategically nimble?
To figure out what the token burn and its aftermath looks like, we have Gaurav Mishra on this episode of Zero Shot. Gaurav worked across many companies we are talking about. He was at Yahoo, Meta, and headed product for Uber AI. He is now the CEO of Proshort, an AI-powered contextual sales platform.Tune in!
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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 [email protected]. We are all ears!
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Recommended Reading:
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-ai-costs-spike-company-225410935.html
https://www.projectflux.ai/p/blown-by-april-why-uber-s-3-4-billion-r-d-budget-could-not-hold-the-line-on-ai-coding-spend
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-sends-shocking-message-to-employees
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Eksik bölüm mü var?
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Think of an action or crime film. At some point, when all of the different threads and plots converge, you witness a high-stakes scene. Three characters are locked in a fight. You don’t know who emerges a winner. This is what is loosely called a Mexican standoff.
Apply this analogy to physical AI. There are currently three players in the game. America has BigTech and big models that only seem to be getting bigger. China has actual manufacturing capabilities and a sharp-minded executional focus on hardware. And then there are places like India and Nigeria that provide the data for some of these robots, especially “humanoids”.
In this episode of Zero Shot, host Praveen Gopal Krishnan talks to The Ken reporter Sakshi Sadashiv who wrote about the mushrooming gig economy around data collection to create robots that perform human tasks. We are also joined by Pramod Ghadge, the co-founder of Unbox Robotics, an Indian company that has deployed 700 robots across nine countries for a specific use-case: warehouses.
Each has a take on who wins. But more importantly, this episode takes you inside the growing Physical AI market. Tune in!
Additional Material:
AI product differentiation, living with robots, world models, and extreme leverage
Tesla and Figure AI are building robots to act like humans. Indian workers are teaching them how
The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here
https://unboxrobotics.com/
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It’s the end of 2025, so we don’t have a full episode of Zero Shot for you today.
This podcast launched in September, and we’ve produced 14 episodes for you so far. We’ve covered a wide range of topics, and our conversations—between Praveen, Rohin, and Brady—only work because you’re willing to sit with the complexities we wade into.
We know artificial intelligence will move fast in 2026, so we’ll keep asking the questions that matter in this AI hype cycle. We’re glad you’re coming along with us.
So, thank you, and we’ll be back next week.
As always, if you’d like to get in touch with any or all of our hosts, please drop us a note at [email protected]. We respond to all messages.
The cover art of Zero Shot is generated by AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
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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.
