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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As India’s telecom firms weigh the timing and need for tariff hikes, Reliance Jio Infocomm, India’s largest operator by market share, has ruled out any immediate increase, signalling confidence in organic growth in its average revenue per user (Arpu), driven by rising 5G usage. This contrasts with the stance of rival operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea that have repeatedly flagged the need for tariff correction to improve their returns on capital deployed.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Email overload has always slowed down workplace, personal productivity. Consider these examples: You're hunting for the plumber's quote from last year, buried in hundreds of emails.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Here's what caught our eye this week: Apple, the company that prides itself on building everything in-house, just handed over the keys to Siri's brain to its longtime frenemy, Google. Yes, you read that right.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: On Monday, Alphabet became the fourth-ever company to hit a market capitalization of $4 trillion, after announcing a deal with iPhone-maker Apple to power the latter’s AI assistant, Siri. In the week leading up to it, Google’s parent also overtook Apple to become the second-largest company in the world.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously declared in 2011 that “software is eating the world." This year, Silicon Valley will be looking to feast on artificial intelligence, as the relentless hype that’s driven the creation of nearly 40,000 AI startups crashes into the cold logic of business economics. US companies spent $37 billion on generative AI software in 2025, up from $11.5 billion the year before, according to venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.

Mint review of usage practices and public policies across X, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT found that safeguards on such content are not uniform across companies.As MeitY’s notice put X under scrutiny, policy and AI experts pointed to a key policy gap that appears to have placed Grok in the government’s firing line even as other platforms have so far avoided similar action.On 2 January, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) issued a notice to X seeking details on how the platform acts against objectionable content and how it plans to address sexual content. The move followed concerns over how Grok, which is embedded within X (formerly Twitter), can be used to modify photographs into content that could be deemed sexual, obscene, or violative of a user’s privacy.Mint has seen a copy of the notice which had set time until Monday for X's reply.X has sought more time to respond to Meity's notice, meanwhile.

On Christmas Eve, Nvidia announced a deal to license technology, acquire assets, and hire key team members from AI chip startup Groq. Valued at $20 billion, the deal is one of the largest in the sector and has reignited concerns about a possible AI investment bubble and ‘circular financing’ by companies in the space.However, there are positive signs as well.

Agentic AI.The seeds for Agentic AI were sown in 2025. We saw Google Gemini access (with permission) Gmail to triage inboxes and draft context-aware replies, link to Calendar. and keep and manage agendas and to-do lists.

How to access: https://slides.new (requires Google Workspace or Google AI Premium plan)• Generate professional infographics from your data: Turn your existing content and data into polished infographics using simple prompts—no external design tools needed.• Create custom images that match your content: Generate contextually relevant visuals connected to Google Search for accurate real-world representations.• Edit images without leaving Slides: Remove backgrounds, replace backgrounds, or expand image backgrounds directly in your presentation.You've created a basic slide with bullet points about Q4 sales targets. Prompt “Beautify this slide” and Gemini instantly transforms it into a professionally designed visual with enhanced layouts, colors, and graphics all while keeping your text intact and matching your deck's overall style.You need to present customer satisfaction trends.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The AI hack we unlock today is based on a tool—Google Mixboard. Product marketers constantly battle the “vague-to-visual" gap.

prompts may be obsolete. Here today, gone tomorrow. An ‘agentic’ style AI will make prompts almost obsolete as they plan, decide and take action autonomously—a far cry from just Google answering questions.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. OpenAI is aiming to raise as much as $100 billion as it seeks to pay for ambitious growth plans in a market that has cooled recently on the artificial-intelligence boom. The fundraising round, which is in the early stages, could value the company at as much as $830 billion, if it raises the full amount it is targeting, people familiar with the matter said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: A plan by the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) to restrict an app to a little over a third of the overall transactions on fast payments platform UPI by the end of 2026 is a tough ask, regulators and financial sector experts said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: Google Pay has been distributing personal loans on behalf of its lending partners for several years and has now expanded its product suite to include credit cards. However, while personal loans are a third-party product, the credit card launch is the first native product introduced by the payments giant, which aims to go beyond distribution and create a credit ecosystem on the platform.

As Big Tech companies look to expand beyond English-speaking users, developing artificial intelligence (AI) expertise across a wider range of languages is emerging as the next major hurdle.Google’s latest effort has seen the company embed 29 Indic languages and dialects into Gemini, its foundational AI model, as it looks to scale AI adoption across India’s hinterlands, three years after it began work in the area. A foundational model is one that can accept user queries and respond in human-understandable languages.According to Manish Gupta, senior director at the company’s research arm, Google DeepMind, and its spearhead in AI language research efforts in India, proficiency in Indic languages is critical for last-mile applications such as agriculture and healthcare, where AI must interpret region-specific context to function properly,“For instance, Google’s Gemini powers an agricultural analysis model that is currently being deployed at the last mile, where it is imperative for our AI models to have contextual understanding of local tongues in order to perform with high efficiency,” he added.Google’s agriculture app processes information in local languages to offer soil analysis, crop prediction and more to farmers at subsidized costs through government and private sector companies.To be sure, by “embedding 29 languages”, Google means it is training, fine-tuning and benchmarking Gemini’s performance across these languages.

It was a far better thing that Google did than it had ever done. So might future historians write of the moment this tech behemoth, long criticized for a lack of singular focus, quietly ignited two existential contests to reshape the tech landscape in 2026 and beyond.These are the Two Races of 2026, officially declared not by proclamation, but by two ‘firebombs’ thrown by Google. They target two tech giants that appeared almost unassailable till recently: the king of frontier AI models and the monarch of AI hardware.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. This week Amazon pledged to pour billions into India, while fight disruptions at IndiGo led to regulatory interventions and a potential revenue hit. Meanwhile the US Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points, the fall in prices of home-cooked vegetarian meals slowed down, and Delhi experienced slight relief from pollution.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the dramatic call for a “code red" last week to beat back a rising threat from Google, he put a notable priority at the top of his list of fixes. The world’s most valuable startup should pause its side projects like its Sora video generator for eight weeks and focus on improving ChatGPT, its popular chatbot that kicked off the AI boom.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : Larsen & Toubro Ltd. aims to establish a sovereign cloud as part of its initiative to build data centres in the country, becoming the third homegrown company after Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Bharti Airtel Ltd.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The message out of Big Tech these days is that even the CEO’s job is at risk with the rise of artificial intelligence. We’re accustomed to all of the talk about superintelligent AI vacuuming up office jobs and robots replacing workers on factory floors.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. BENGALURU: As automation seeps further into workflows across industries, India’s largest IT services companies are feeling the pressure, not just on revenue, but also in their standing among the country’s corporate elite. Simply put, four of India’s largest IT services firms—Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Infosys Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd, and Tech Mahindra Ltd—once held a “villa" in the BSE Sensex.