IDLI and #chAI are the source code of this AI bonding - ETtech

When Mukundhan Srinivasan ran a startup a few years ago, he could not find enough people to discuss machine- #chAI hosts one session almost every month with two speakers -- one from the startup world and the other from academia. It was still a nascent concept in India. So he began a small community, Deep Learning Bangalore (DLBLR), that in a couple of years has drawn in more than 2,250 enthusiasts. Srinivasan's startup failed to take off but his passion to grow the community has stayed. "It might be hard to relate to this but in 2013-14, it was very lonely to be doing machine-learning in India, let alone Bengaluru. The problem was to find people who were in the same community at the same level -- developer to developer, data scientist to data scientist," said Srinivasan, now a solutions architect for machine learning at chipmaker Nvidia, which lets him run the community's sessions at its Bengaluru premises on weekends.