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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Meta Platforms just offered a glimpse at what it thinks the future of work looks like: training and supervising artificial-intelligence systems to do what used to be your job. And that’s if you still have a job at all.The social-media company has been unusually aggressive, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, at pushing to incorporate AI into its employees’ workflows and using it to streamline and accelerate its operations.Already this year, it has started grading employees in performance reviews on their AI use; created ultraflat teams with almost no managers; and begun to develop a so-called CEO agent to assist Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in performing his job.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Over the past decade, India’s digital economy has increasingly relied on open-source software to power its core digital infrastructure and governance systems. From banking to government platforms, the code behind payments and public services is shared, modular and visible.While this approach delivers scale, lower costs and reduced vendor lock-in, new AI systems developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and others are exposing its soft underbelly. Old unpatched gaps are showing up in widely used open-source software.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.MINING A CRYPTOCURRENCY can be an expensive business. Producing new coins, also known as tokens, can require computers to solve cryptographic puzzles, which takes large amounts of power. One way to keep costs down is to relocate mines to wherever electricity is cheapest.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.BENGALURU: HCL Technologies Ltd’s (HCLTech) weak growth outlook and client-specific challenges triggered a sharp investor selloff a day after its earnings announcement.Shares of the country’s third-largest IT services company fell nearly 9.5% to ₹1,304 on Wednesday, marking their steepest intra-day decline in over a decade, according to a Mint analysis.The reaction puts HCLTech alongside Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) and Wipro Ltd, whose shares also declined after recent earnings, as all three companies flagged growth pressures with two of them ending the last fiscal year with a revenue decline.HCLTech clocked a 5.95% year-on-year rise in revenue to $14.66 billion for FY26, beating Bloomberg estimates, but net profit fell 4.05% to $1.96 billion. TCS and Wipro, meanwhile, reported revenue declines of 0.54% and 0.32%, underscoring the broader slowdown across large IT services firms.Despite the topline growth, investors focused on HCLTech’s miss on its full-year guidance and a weaker outlook for FY27, which drove the selloff.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Indians are holding on to their smartphones for a record period of nearly four years, data from three independent market researchers showed, as exchange offers and interest-free loans fail to offset soaring prices in a challenging economy.Brands have been nudging buyers towards the premium end, where the average smartphone now costs over ₹26,000, against ₹17,000 in 2021. The devices themselves have become sturdier and offer extended software upgrades, making phone purchases more discretionary and less urgent.“Our business used to thrive on enthusiasts and high net-worth individuals, who would previously upgrade their smartphones every year.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.NEW DELHI: South Korean tech companies Krafton Inc. and Naver Corp.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.THE IRAN war may end up teaching America many lessons. One that it has learned the hard way is the woeful economics of using traditional weaponry against cheap Iranian drones.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.China is making strides in open-source artificial intelligence. Eighty percent of developers worldwide who use open-source AI tools are building with Chinese models, according to an estimate by our colleague Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Research from our firm and OpenRouter shows a significant increase in the use of Chinese open models last year, reaching in some weeks a high of 30% of all AI usage.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Sam Altman, the chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI, said at a finance conference in October 2023 that he and his “CEO friends” were running a betting pool on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would be created thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). He didn’t divulge their identities nor their precise predictions.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Every few years, a sector comes into focus and goes from nice to becoming a non-negotiable.Cybersecurity hit that inflection point a while ago, during the pandemic, but the surprising thing is, it’s not going back any time soon.In 2024 alone, we saw headline-grabbing incidents that rattled entire industries, from the CrowdStrike outage that disrupted airlines, hospitals, and businesses globally, causing estimated losses of over US$5 billion, to relentless ransomware campaigns targeting healthcare and government infrastructure.If anything, those events didn't slow down the investment in the sector, but they accelerated it.The numbers clearly back that up. Global cybersecurity spending is projected to hit $248 billion in 2026, a 12.5% jump, even as broader tech stocks face a rough ride this year.On top of this, worries around AI deepfakes continue to surge, following a 250% rise between 2024 and 2025.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mahek Mody and his wife were looking forward to having their first child. But the couple knew they would have their hands full once the baby arrived, juggling late-night feeds, diaper changes, soothing the infant to sleep, and managing workplace demands. Mody runs Upliance, a hardware startup, and his wife had her own demanding business to return to as a co-founder.And so, they turned to a smart crib, made by Cradlewise, a company they already knew from the hardware world.“It’s a fairly expensive purchase and we thought about it 20 times,” Mody said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Last week, Anthropic announced that its latest artificial intelligence (AI) model, Claude Mythos, was too dangerous to release. In testing, the company discovered that the model could unearth thousands of hitherto unknown security vulnerabilities in many of the software applications, operating systems and web browsers that the world depends on.

American multinational technology company Oracle, founded by Larry Ellison, is executing the largest layoffs in its history, cutting up to 30,000 jobs or about 19% of its 162,000 global workforce. In India, where it employs around 50,000 people, about 10,000-12,000 roles are being eliminated.At the same time, the company has raised its restructuring budget by $500 million to $2.1 billion in FY26 (June-May), mainly for severance. Oracle attributes part of the reduction to AI coding tools that allow smaller teams to build software faster.

full Q4 earnings report by Jas Bardia.Inside Anthropic’s Project Glasswing: Can AI outsmart hackers before they strike? That’s the big idea that powers Anthropic’s Project Glasswing—a coalition using advanced AI to detect hidden software flaws even experts miss.With cyberattacks rising and a shortage of skilled professionals, this could be a game-changer. The AI can not only spot “zero-day” vulnerabilities but also suggest fixes, potentially transforming how cybersecurity works.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Thursday reported a 1.6% net-profit fall in the January-March quarter from the preceding quarter to $1.5 billion on a revenue rise of 1.5% to $7.6 billion. India’s largest software services company also reported three large deal wins worth $12 billion in contract value.

Mint explains how.Anthropic cofounder and chief executive Dario Amodei said the company created a cybersecurity coalition after observing how capable its new ‘frontier’ artificial intelligence model, Claude Mythos, is. Anthropic tested the latter to discover thousands of critical software flaws, technically known as ‘zero-day vulnerabilities’, within an unspecified period of time.A ‘zero-day’ vulnerability means a glitch in a software’s code that no one has discovered to date.

There is usually a lull before a storm. Financial markets often mimic such natural phenomena, displaying blink-and-miss signs of disturbance before a full-blown crisis. In many advanced economies, nascent signals of trouble have arisen that could—if left unaddressed—hit global finance and send several players to the sick bay.

American technology major Oracle Corporation’s decision to part ways with 30,000 employees globally—almost 19% of its total workforce—has sent shockwaves through the organization. It has also deepened concerns about the sustainability of software product companies in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.Employees across sales, human resources, engineering and developer roles faced the axe after receiving an email from the company’s leadership at 6 am (in all time zones) on Wednesday, citing “broader organisational change”.

software companies, which often billed clients by the number of hours an engineer spent on a task, are now forced to redefine what is worth a developer’s time.This shift is being felt by young Indians across the workforce, from final-year students appearing for placements to entry-level software engineers and mid-level engineers at information technology (IT) companies.Ansh Masand, a final-year MBA tech engineering student at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, is witnessing this shift firsthand.Masand, who also works at a Bangalore-based AI startup, says he began freelancing in his second year despite not having the skills to build full-fledged software applications at the time.“I didn’t really know how to make production-ready software,” he says. “But I could ask questions, use AI and deliver something that worked.”Masand says what stood out to his clients was not how the code was written, but how quickly it was delivered.“I was building things in a day and solving problems that existed in their current workflow” he says.

India’s technology market has often served as a proving ground where global platforms compete both for users and influence over the digital set-ups of industries. The rise of GenAI models is setting the stage for a similar contest. Winning revenue from Indian enterprises will soon become one of their most consequential battlegrounds.

The Iran war has laid bare a paradox: Gulf money is helping underwrite America’s effort to win the artificial intelligence race, and now the US has started a conflict that could destabilize those investments. Some estimates have projected $2 trillion in long-term pledges from Middle Eastern nations to the AI boom, money that now looks precarious.