India has a young population that is driven by entertainment. It constitutes a large market for game publishers. It is as big as Mumbai film industry right now. Here a game is downloaded, and then paid for. In a game, you have to overcome challenges. By doing so, you get the feel good factor. There is multi-player gaming. The outcome in each game is unique, and the experience is fresh. It is thus a very engaging entertainment format. By contrast, content is watched just once or twice. China has a market worth $ 1.4 billion and the US worth $ 9 billion. South Korea and Japan generate $ 5 billion plus revenue.

There are several verticals here — gamified learning, e-sports, telco subscriptions and fantasy sports. Nazara Technologies, India operates in all these five verticals.

If machines could understand the language we humans use, it will be a step in the direction of accomplishing the tasks. This is what we mean by NLP which uses a lot of machine learning. Here a pre-trained language model (PTLM) is used. A machine is made to read a lot of text, possibly in billions, to understand the syntax and come out with better responses to a question. The size of the language model is measured by the size of training data. In 2018, Google’s BERT was trained in 3 billion words. GPT-2 by OpenAI, San Francisco was trained in 40 billion words. GPT-3, its advanced version is based on 500 billion words. All areas of NLP benefit from these models. Information extraction, question-answer and summarisation all use PLTMs.

Chatbot is another example of NPL. It is able to read a conversation, understand what the user said, and construct new sentences to keep the conversation going.

Information extraction is another example of NLP. Here input is converted into information.

NLP can do sentiment analysis — understand the mood of the user. It can do topic modelling — discovering abstract topics. It can do text categorisation — arrange text in organised groups.

These days there is research in progress on multi-lingual NLP where systems converse or understand or interact in multiple languages at the same time.

In the US, Bitcoin ATMs, which are brightly lit have been set up at various places such as gas stations and smoke shops. Customers can buy or sell digital currency here. At times, these are used to extract cash. These have been installed by kiosk operators such as CoinFlip and CoinCloud. In January 2021, there were 30000 ATMs in the US. In the last six months, 10000 plus new ATMs have been set up. The growing popularity of Bitcoin drives such installation. Some are exclusive Bitcoin machines, whereas some deal in various digital currencies. Very few dispense cash. The charges to use these machines are high — 6 to 20 percent of the transaction value.

India’s maiden 5G spectrum will be on sale — 300 MHz mid-band spectrum. It starts from 3.3 GHz to 3.6 GHz. TV broadcasters use a chunk of frequency spectrum close to this — 3.7 GHz to 4.2 GHz. With this, they downlink TV services from satellite. There is an apprehension that the guard band of 100 MHz between 5G and broadcaster’s band will not be sufficient and could lead to out-of-band interference from telecom services.

The frequency between 5.9 GHz to 6.5 GHz is used to uplink TV services. It should be protected for broadcast and not assigned to 5G. Frequency up to 3.6 GHz only should be allocated to for 5G.

It is necessary to maintain adequate separation as the interference from telecom operations could affect the satellite TV operations. There should be a safe gap 100 MHz between the 5G services and TV services. 5G operators should use filters to restrict out-of-band emissions.

Human beings do show biases, and AI can aggravate these biases. It causes immense harm if the decisions are made on the basis of such algorithms. AI may work on learning. Algorithm accesses data and trains models on the basis of data. It results into intelligent algorithm. It is a combination of given data, its training algos and models selected. A bank has to distribute loans. The approach is to enquire about income level and education. However, if AI is used, it can overlook the fact that women have less income and less education than her male counterparts. Treated as data, it will incorporate historical bias — women earn less and are educated less than men. It is biased in favour of men to grant loans. Such biases have been propagated widely over the years.

To avoid such biases, we have to create fair algorithms. The methods used are classification, clustering and personalisation.

On social media, algorithms control the content we see. It is carefully picked and ordered and is not randomly chosen. Thus social media has the potential to create polarisation since its algorithms have a bias, for one kind of content or view. It offers more of such content. It makes you think that this is the truth.

Traditional media influences the audience, but it does so by promoting nuanced thinking. Social media has a single goal. It makes you engaged in one type of content. There is no layered thinking. It makes people fast, but more mechanical. AI changes our attention span too. To produce great art , you require focus, attention and practice.

AI has several areas — learning, reasoning, planning, vision, speech, language and so on. It has become ubiquitous in search engines, news feeds, content recommendations, stock market trading, fraud detection, digital assistants and smart speakers. Soon there could be autonomous cars. AI has the potential uses in education. Creating human-level or super-human level intelligence in machines could be risky. The approach these days is to have machines that could solve a fixed objective. Such an approach could make us lose control over AI. It is to be seen how the outcome of AI could be beneficial to mankind. Machines have to defer to humans. This is Stuart Russel’s recommendation. This is simply ‘humbling’ of the machines. AI influences our mental habits. We tend to spend less time on memorisation, mental arithmetical calculations and navigation with aids. At the same time, AI teaches us new ways to address the problems. The tendency to shirk hard work and learn due to the presence of AI must be overcome. There are ethical issues too. Can we ask the AI to destroy the human race? There are lethal weapons which can locate, select and attack targets. These must be banned.

Bitcoin is not just a currency for drug mafia, but has the potential to be the foundation for future finances. Japan recognised Bitcoin as legal tender in 2017. Coin base is a US-based cryptocurrency exchange. It is set for an initial public offering in 2021. Europe has also developed crypto regulations that allow banks to sell cryptocurrencies.

The right set of regulations would require a few iteration. It is not possible to have the perfect regulations in the very first attempt. The technology keeps on evolving.

The hot topic all over these days is the potential of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. These have the potential to impact the way the world operates. It is changing the way people transact and have embraced the cryptocurrency.

The salient features of this technology are decentralised open protocols. You must have only an internet connection. This technology can assist the governments and non-government organisations to build better systems.

A general network is created by the client and host nodes. There is a combination of host nodes and client nodes. This client application is connected to the network. Bitcoin and Ethereum have client application. These allow users to download the entire blockchain to take part in the node network.

Though there are misgivings, the open decentralised network will survive, and will come centrestage.

A non-fungible token or NFT is a unit of data on a digital ledger (blockchain). Each NFT can represent a unique digital item. As these are not exchangeable, these are blockchain assets that are designed not to be equal. A movie ticket is a non-fungible token as it cannot be used for any movie any time.

These digital files could represent art works, games, audios, videos or any type of creative work. Any object can potentially be tokenised and put on sale, including this write up, if there is a market and price for it.

In today’s world, even digital homes have been sold for a hefty price and have been paid in ethereum, a leading cryptocurrency. Thus there is an NFT market on which NFT can be bought.

Digital files are definitely reproducible, the NFTs representing them can be tracked on blockchains. These provide buyers unique proof of ownership of the NFTs. These cannot be held in hand. They are just certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets. NFTs can be used to commodify the digital creations.

NFTs work on proof-of-work blockchain, rather than proof-of-stake blockchain. The former is less energy efficient. An NFT is cryptographic token, and is similar to cryptocurrency, except the fact that it is not interchangeable mutually. (not fungible). Cryptocurrencies are fungible tokens as one Bitcoin or Ethereum can be exchanged for any other token.

In auction market of NFTs, there are marketplaces like KnownOrigin, Rarible, OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Decentraland.

The buyer of NFT does not get exclusive access to the work. NFT can be used to create artificial scarcity of the digital work.