Solving the strawberry problem will probably require a model that just works with bytes of text. There have been a few attempts at building this [1] but it just does not work as well as models that consume pre-tokenized strings.
It's interesting how all focus is now primarily on decoder-only next-token-prediction models. Encoders (BERT, encoder of T5) are still useful for generating embedding for tasks like retrieval or classification. While there is a lot of work on fine-tuning BERT and T5 for such tasks, it would be nice to see more research on better pre-training architectures for embedding use cases.
For JIT-ing you need to know the sizes upfront. There was an experimental branch for introducing jagged tensors, but as far as I know, it has been abandoned.
Yes, you can get a waiver if you apply for something called the "Letter of Undertaking" which allows you to not pay anything for exports. This was not available at the start.
Back when GST was introduced, they asked all exporters of software services to pay the 18% GST and then claim a refund because exports are exempted. This was before they introduced a process to apply for a "NOC" (which must be renewed periodically I think). So, I duly paid GST for the first couple of months.
5 years later, I'm yet to receive the refunds. First, they said that they were authorized to only sanction refunds for exporters of physical goods and then they said that this is handled by the State government, who said that it was handled by the Central. Finally Central accepted that they are in-charge of the refund, but by then COVID happened and I could not follow up for 2 years. In May, when I tried to claim the refund again, they said that this refund pertains to 2016 and it's difficult to "reopen" the accounts for that year and that's handled by yet another department. So, they have written to them to ask for the process. No replies after two emails. Story continues...
To offer a counter view: paper ballots were a huge source of fraud in India's elections until electronic voting machines were introduced. I don't wish to ever go back.
Have you looked at TinySeed? But they don't operate at a Series A scale in terms of cash deployed per investment. I suspect that the power law of returns in VC model requires really large outsized returns that cannot be achieved Without an all or nothing model.
There are many large arid, desert-like land available in almost every part of the world which can be put to use for Solar. I don't think cost of land is a huge issue.