Chandrayan 3 touching the lunar south pole is a creditable achievement of Isro. A soft lunar landing is by no means an easy task. There is scant atmosphere on the moon and its gravity is 1/6th of the gravity of the earth. Therefore, a safe descent is an extreme-precision event. The descent involves bringing the craft from horizontal to vertical position as it nears the lunar surface. They must fire the engines giving an upward thrust to the craft so as to slow down it, and avoid a free fall leading to a crash. All the cameras and sensors must work properly. There are craters on the south pole. Comparatively the equatorial landings are easier. There is rough terrain. Some areas are in perpetual darkness as the sunlight does not reach them. There a trenches. The temperatures are extreme — as low as – 250 degree centigrade. All this is not conducive for electronics. The decent is guided by algorithms and AI.

The achievement demonstrates India’s technological prowess. It also reaffirms the value of public-private co-operation. The lander and rover has been built by a consortium of private firms, in collaboration with Isro. The ground control systems too were a result of such collaboration.

There is private participation of space agencies at other places — NASA, Europe, Japan and Israel.

The cost effective execution of this project is also a remarkable feat.

The Artemis Accords (AA) from the US conceive colononisation on the moon. Space resources must be utilised safely and in a sustainable manner. This is to comply with Outer Space Treaty. There should global consensus on the commercial exploitation of the moon’s resources. India too has become a signatory to AA in June, 2023.

Chandrayan will analyse the soil and plasma density at the surface, study sub-surface temperature conductivity and the seismic conditions.

Isro already provides a wide range of commercial services, say launching of satellites of other countries.

It plays a role in India’s communication infrastructure. It provides key inputs for weather services, geographical and geo-mapping information.

Softmax function is activated in the transformer model. It is applied to the output of the self-attention layer ( which calculates the relevance of each input token to each other token). Softmax function normalizes the output, so that its values amount to 1. Each value thus represents the probability that the input token is relevant to the output token.

The model learns long-range dependencies between the tokens. Softmax allows us to identify these relationships and to learn how to predict the next word in a sequence.

Consider a sentence, A dog sits on the mat. The self-attention layer will calculate the relevance of each word to the other word. The output of the self-attention layer will be a matrix of numbers, where each row represents the relevance of one word to the other two words.

The Softmax function normalizes the output of self-attention layer so that the value sum up to 1. Each value in the output matrix is thus a probability that corresponds to the relevant word in the output.

In our example, the Softmax function is likely to give the highest probability to the word ‘dog’ being relevant to the word ‘mat.’ Softmax is likely to give high probability to ‘sat’ since it is relevant to ‘mat.’ Both these words are related in the sentence.

Softmax is a tool that enables the transformer to learn long-range dependencies between tokens. It is essential for NLP tasks such as translation and text summarization.

Softmax function is defined as follows:

softmax (x) =exp(x) /sum(exp(x))

where

x= a vector of scores

Softmax function first exponentiates each element of the vector and then divides each element by the sum of all elements.

The output of a the Softmax function is thus a vector of probabilities. Each probability represents the likelihood that the corresponding token is the most relevant token in the input sequence.

This model allows to focus on the most relevant tokens in the input sequence. It does not need to compute the full attention matrix.

The model, however, attends to one token at a time. It is less flexible. It can be computationally expensive.

According to Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform, investments in crypto in India have reached nearly $40 billion. There are crypto exchanges such as ZebPay, WazirX, CoinSwitch Kuber. These allow buying, selling and trading of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Crypto exchanges advertise without standardised disclaimers. The matter is sub judice in Delhi HC. This is an emerging area of concern. ASCI is contemplating to issue a set of guidelines to protect interests of consumers through consultations with different stakeholders.

IBM acquired Red Hat, one of the biggest open source technology companies. It is enterprise open source solutions, including Linux.

Red Hat deals with storage, operating system platforms, middleware, apps, management products and support and consulting services.

It creates, maintains and contributes to many open source projects. It earns money by selling services.

Red Hat is CLI-based. For beginners, Ubuntu is easier and more convenient.

Red Hat is here since the dawn of Linux era. Its focus is on business apps rather than consumer use.

Google Cloud has built hybrid cloud with Red Hat. Since November 2013, it is Red Hat Certified Cloud provider.

Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. This company was founded in 2008. It is the costliest acquisition at a price of $7.5 billion. It is a provider of internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It is on this platform that most open source projects and collaborations happen. It is a watershed moment for open source software for Microsoft to acquire GitHub.

Git is Global Information Tracker. It keeps track of your source code history. It tracks changes in any set of files used for co-ordination among programmers collaboratively developing source code.

GitHub is a cloud-based hosting service that lets you manage Git repositories. It carries open source projects that use Git. Original Git code base is entirely written in C.

GitHub archive was introduced in July, 2020. Users browse public repositories. Only registered users can contribute content to repositories. It offers unlimited private repositories at no cost since 2019.

All core GitHub feature are free for everyone since 2020.

The fundamental software is Git itself. It is written by Linus Tovalds, creator of Linux. The additional software providing interface was written by Wanstrath, Hyett, and Preston-Werner.

GitHub’s main purpose is to facilitate version control. There are pull requests to propose changes to the source code. There are tracking aspects of software development.

Users can see the changes and approve them. It is called committing. A history of commits is kept.

The competitors of GitHub are Bitbucket, GitLab and SourceForge. Its mascot is octocat with five octopus-like arms.

A chip called graphics processing unit (GPU) is the fastest and most efficient way to run the calculations that allow AI companies to analyze big data. This year tech companies are desperate to get GPUs. The demand rose since last year when chat bots like ChatGPT brought in excitement over AI. Startups and the investors in them are after these tiny silicon bits since they provide the crucial compute power.

AI-chip market is monopolised by Nvidia. Tech companies typically buy access to chips and their compute power through cloud computing services offered by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Such an arrangement does not make it necessary to have their own data centres with computer servers. AI explosion has led to a long wait list which extends to a year in some cases to access those chips through clouds. It has created a roadblock.

Big Tech firms have deep pockets to lay their hands on GPUs, but that has left the startups and researchers scrambling for chips.

Audiences are fond of shorts of 60 seconds. These videos not only entertain but also market a product or convey a message. YouTube started shorts in India in 2021.The videos uploaded to YouTube as shorts grew dramatically in 2022. These are consumed by 2 billion people globally on a daily basis. The product becomes exciting to both the viewers and creators. Shorts have revived interest in culture. There is appreciation of sharyri and poetry. These provoke interest in science and GK. Advertisers utilise shorts to pitch their products to the users. The format thrived after TikTok, the Chinese app which was banned in India in 2020. Shorts provide an opportunity of monetisation worth $8-$12 billion by 2030. YouTube introduced shorts first in India.

India is a different market on account of its diversity. As there are many languages, content creation is a challenge. There are shorts of superheroes, pop culture and comics. These resonate with the audiences.

YouTube continue to invest in shorts making them more accessible to their viewers. They encourage mobile content creators. Some shorts are of 15-seconds duration. Some shorts extend to a 15-minute video. There are 15-hour live streams too. The format could be modified to satisfy the creative requirements. It cannot be held back by format limitations. Viewers too love to watch videos in different formats.

YouTube Partner programme has been simplified to allow easy earnings for creators. If a creator has 1000 subscribers and the short video gets 10 million views over the past 90 days or is viewed up to 4000 hours over past 12 months, the creator will be eligible for payments from YouTube.

Meta’s Reels, Chingari, Roposo, Moj are some other apps which compete with Shorts.

Superconductors are certain metals or alloys that can conduct electricity without resistance. However, this happens when the temperatures are very low, just a little above the Kelvin temperature of – 273 degree centigrade. Superconductors are used in operations such as levitating trains and MRI machines.

Researchers are after superconductors which are capable of superconductivity at room temperatures. That can lead us to more powerful computers.

David Pines, the theoretical physicist was studying the metal strontium ruthensate. He predicted in 1956 a demon particle. Seventy years later after this was predicted, researchers at the University of Illinois recently discovered a demon particle that could lead to the making of superconductors that can operate at room temperature.

The demon particles do not have mass, and so they can blend with any energy at room temperature. The experiment was not specifically related to superconductors. They were studying metals similar to high temperature superconductors. They studied electronic properties of the metal by blasting it with electrons. That led to the discovery of the demon.

Demons are not mainstream. They took sometime to realise that they have found the demon.

AI may affect the jobs of stunt performers in movies. It could be a cost reduction move on the part of the studios. Computer-generated background figures have been used to reduce the number of actors needed for battle scenes.

The rise of AI means cheaper and more powerful techniques. The car chases and shoot outs could become more exciting without the use of those pesky but expensive stunt men.

Stunts could be seen right from silent movies to the latest Tom Cruise starrer Mission Impossible. Such stunts could now shrink since technology is doing the work faster and better.

Studios do body scans of stunt men without explaining how and when these images will be used. There is a possibility of not having 10 people where they could be added later through special effects and AI.

AI could reach a stage where it generates photorealistic footage like high speed crashes on a director’s instruction.

Semi-conductors have significant business segments — there are fab units; assembly testing, marking, and packaging units((ATMPs), outsourced semi-conductor assembly and test units (OSATs); and design units.

Micron, the world’s largest player in memory and storage technologies with 11 manufacturing sites spread across different geographies, is interested in making an investment of $1 billion for ATMP facility in India. ATMPs are captive packaging and testing centres for a company. The government offers 50 per cent of fiscal support for the capital expenditure to eligible companies to set up ATMPs and OSATs.

Micron is the world’s 5th largest semiconductor firm. It will use the proposed Indian plant as captive unit.