How a Dinner Joke led to The Game of Thrones of AI
- Abhi Gune
- Feb 21
- 3 min read
I was supposed to be writing about something else entirely this week. There's always a newer, shinier thing in the AI world demanding your attention — and I had one lined up. But then last week happened. The India AI Impact Summit happened. And I found myself reaching into a folder I'd half-forgotten, pulling out a slide deck I'd made months ago as a joke over dinner with friends, thinking: this isn't a joke anymore. The Game of Thrones has already begun. Let me rewind.
It Started Over Dinner
A few months ago, a group of us were sitting around a table, the way you do when the food is good and the conversation drifts from the mundane into the unexpectedly profound.
We were talking about AI, about automation, about how fast everything was changing. And one of my friends — completely unbothered, completely sincere — said he still preferred writing his own emails. By hand. The old way.
"They feel more authentic," he said. "More real."
Someone across the table grinned and said what we were all thinking: "Mate, you're going to be Ned Stark."
The table erupted. But the laughter lingered in my head long after dinner ended. Because beneath the joke was something true — a quiet, creeping recognition that we were all, in some way, characters in a story we hadn't fully read yet. Some of us adapting, some of us resisting, some of us blissfully unaware of what was gathering beyond the Wall.
That night, I opened my laptop and did what I do when an idea won't leave me alone: I made slides. A whole deck — The Game of Thrones of AI — mapping the AI landscape onto the characters of Westeros. I shared it with few. They loved it. We moved on. I filed it away.
Then last week happened.
New Delhi, February 2026: The Show Has Begun
The India AI Impact Summit was billed as a landmark moment — the first global AI gathering held in the Global South, a chance for India to plant its flag in the emerging world order of artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Modi on stage. Sundar Pichai. Sam Altman. Dario Amodei. Heads of state from over a hundred countries. $200 billion in investment pledges. Grand declarations about AI being "for all, for the welfare of all."
It had all the makings of a triumphant new chapter.
And then, almost immediately, it became unmistakably, undeniably, Westerosi.
Consider the spectacle of Altman and Amodei — CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the most powerful AI companies on earth, locked in an intense commercial and philosophical rivalry — standing on stage together for a group photo. Everyone else linked hands. The two rivals held the hands of the people on either side of them, but not each other's. The awkwardness was so visible, so perfectly legible, that the image went around the world. Two kings, standing side by side, refusing to bend.
If that wasn't enough, an Indian university was asked to leave the summit after a staff member passed off a robotic dog developed by a Chinese company as one the university had built itself. A robotic dog, paraded before a summit whose entire premise was India's technological sovereignty. The opposition wasted no time calling it out. The wrong dog wearing the wrong house's colours. Westeros taught us that borrowed power has a way of being found out.
On the final day, Indian Youth Progress party workers staged a shirtless protest at the summit venue — the anger of unemployed youth breaking through, the very people whose futures were ostensibly being shaped by the conversations inside. While leaders spoke of AI lifting millions out of poverty, the people whose jobs might vanish first were being detained outside by police.
And Bill Gates, scheduled to deliver a keynote, withdrew hours before he was due to speak — his exit shadowed by the release of Epstein files. A quiet disappearance. Another layer of complicated silence.
I looked at all of this and thought: I need to dust off those slides.
This Is Not the Prelude
This is not the prelude. This is the Game of Thrones of AI. The houses are moving. The allegiances are forming and fracturing. The spectacle is already playing out on stages both literal and metaphorical. Winter — whether you call it automation, disruption, or simply change — is not coming. It is here.
In Game of Thrones of AI, I dust off the slide deck and break down who the real characters are, what roles are dying, what new thrones are rising — and most importantly, what any of us can do about it.
Game of Thrones : AI Edition - The Realm, the Characters, and How to Survive the Winter
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