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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.

education. Operational powers will be split across three independent councils, each dealing separately with regulation, accreditation, and academic standards.

It has been 10 years since the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (CoP-21), where 195 states made a historic commitment to work together to keep the long-term rise in global temperatures well below 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the rise to no more than 1.5° Celsius. France played its part in making this great moment of universal solidarity a success. A decade later, we can be proud of how far we have come.In France, we have reduced our greenhouse-gas emissions by 30% compared with 1990, including 20% between 2017 and 2024.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Listed plastic pipe makers are in a difficult spot. The much-awaited announcements on anti-dumping duty (ADD) and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) rules aimed at curbing low-quality polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resin imports did not materialize this year.

India recorded ultra-low retail inflation of 0.25% in October and 0.71% in November. A sharp drop in food prices was a major reason behind the disinflation seen in recent months. The recent cuts in goods and services tax (GST) rates also played their part, primarily in October, the first full month with the revised rates.A Mint analysis of the inflation basket shows that October 2025 saw a month-on-month decline in prices (consumer price index) in 40% of the items—the highest ever under the current 2012 series, which has item-wise data from 2014.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A complaint lodged in the Lok Sabha has brought Indian laws around vaping into focus. Vapes or e-cigarettes are banned in India, yet a Member of Parliament (MP) was allegedly using one openly in the premises.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you happen to be on a Texas highway sometime this summer, and see a 50,000-pound semi truck barreling along with nobody behind the wheel, just remember: A self-driving truck is less likely to kill someone than one driven by a human. At least that’s what Chris Urmson, chief executive of autonomous-vehicle software maker Aurora Innovation, insists.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When it came out in May 2025, Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination gave the world a new lens through which to look at the rise of Artificial Intelligence companies. In Hao’s framing, which occupies a central portion of the book along with tracing the growth of US-based OpenAI, modern tech and AI companies resemble the extractive colonial empires of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Beijing’s bid for AI supremacy has been hobbled by a reliance on imported semiconductors. To fix that, it is tapping homegrown startups as it looks for the DeepSeek of chip making.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Shares of InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, which runs IndiGo, are unlikely to stage a major recovery once the stock joins the Sensex on 22 December as investors await clarity on regulatory overhang, but its inclusion in the benchmark index could provide downside protection, several analysts told Mint.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) on Thursday allowed the National Pension System (NPS) to include gold and silver exchange-traded funds (ETFs) among its investment options. NPS subscribers can now invest in gold and silver ETFs offered by mutual funds, with exposure restricted to 5% of the scheme’s assets under management (AUM).

For pharmaceutical firms, watching lucrative patents on their top-selling drugs expire has long been part of the business cycle. There’s enormous pressure to find ways of covering the shortfall. For the first time, China has something to offer.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A ten-day turmoil and a compulsory flight reduction will slam the financials of IndiGo, three equity analysts said, even as the regulator stepped up scrutiny of India's largest airline. IndiGo, they said, may witness a 10% decline in full-year revenue and a 17-30% lower profitability in FY26, as it makes a halting recovery from its biggest disruption.

India’s food sector employs millions and is a major contributor to its economy. Food processing alone is valued at over $300 billion, reaching hundreds of millions of households daily. Globally, food and agriculture form a multi-trillion-dollar system, spanning farmland, fertilizers, cold chains and retail outlets.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI: Ola Electric Mobility founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal has pledged an additional 3% of his stake in the listed electric two-wheeler company to top up collateral against loans taken, as the stock continues to slide. Shares hit an all-time low of ₹33.20 per share on 9 December.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Legal tech is flooded with capital, but even as money pours in, structural roadblocks persist. The sector faces the unglamorous task of making legal data machine-readable through annotation and labelling—before the automation promise can truly be realised.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI: Automation tools are rapidly reshaping the economics of digital marketing and creative services. Tasks that once required teams of designers, website builders and editors are now being completed in minutes, cutting both billing cycles and the need for large production teams at some of the world’s biggest IT and advertising-linked firms.

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. The case for the artificial-intelligence trade is the technology is so revolutionary that eventually it will be well worth the trillions that have been invested to develop it. But that argument means many investors don’t bother to distinguish between AI-related companies with solid fundamentals and those on shakier ground.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. TOKYO—Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi says her $135 billion stimulus package will prop up the world’s fourth-largest economy. Some see a danger in swelling a debt pile that is already one of the largest globally.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : India is witnessing a significant surge in influenza cases, driven by the H3N2 subtype, clinically known to cause more severe infections and higher hospitalizations, according to the latest surveillance data from the country's premier medical research organization, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Taking cognisance of the situation, Union health minister J.P.