Author: Shabbir Chunawalla

We are already witnessing the fifth industrial revolution. The revenues of the Indian manufacturing sector will increase by 6.42 per cent over the next two years (PwC study — over 2025 and 2026).

Industry 5.0 is the next level of industrialization that focuses on collaboration between humans and machines. The aim is to create sustainable products and services. It is a tech-heavy revolution. Still, humans will be an integral part of it. In addition, it is not going to be human vs. machines. The revolution is sustainability driven.

C-suite executives from chemical, cement, textiles and clothing sectors believe that these industries would see the most significant gains from the adoption of Industry 5.0.

The industry would be vulnerable to cyber threats and hence the focus would be on building capabilities aimed at protecting from cyber threats.

Consider the smart cars. They carry a code of 100 million lines. By 2030, the code is expected to reach 300 million lines. Thus, cars are sophisticated containers of software. These provide mobility, entertainment and buying. Of course, they will be prime targets for cyber-attacks. There should be cyber security management system for the vehicles.

As we know Nandan Nilkeni is one of the founders of Infosys and is now the chairman of the company. He is also an architect of Aadhar. Recently at Build with AI Summit October 23, at Bangalore, he asked India not to be a party to building LLMS as they do in the (Silicon) Valley but focus on small language models which are cost effective, and which could be trained easily by using appropriate data. India should build infrastructure, according to Nilkeni, for collecting appropriate data. India could be made the use case capital of AI.

He projected that India would have high quality, accurate inference at very low cost in a year or year and a half. Nilkeni was all praise for Facebook’s Open source LLM which has become a game changer for India. Llama 3.2 launched in September 2024 has multimodal capabilities. It understands text and images at the same time. There are vision versions and separate text-only versions which are light weight.

Open source contributes to Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). India too is building DPI and would accelerate our march to exploit AI. Indian language models could be made digital public goods. India would not like to stifle innovation by heavy regulation and should adopt thoughtful guardrails.

The right approach, according to Nilkeni, is to use open-source foundation model and fine tune it to deploy it for specific applications across various domains.

OpenAI’s senior advisor for the readiness of AGI Miles Brundage left the company on Wednesday, 22nd October 2024. It shows that none is ready for AGI, including OpenAI itself. The world too will not welcome AGI with open arms. Brundage while he was with OpenAI for six years shaped its safety initiatives.

Previously, Jan Leike, a renowned researcher too left since he felt that safety culture has taken a backseat. Similarly, Ilaya Sutskever , a cofounder, also left to start his own AI startup. As we know, the company in past has disbanded its super alignment team formed to mitigate AI risks. The latest victim is the dissolution of AGI Readiness team of Brundage. There is a conflict of interest between OpenAI’s non-profit objectives at the start and its later commercialization in a couple of years. It had the latest funding round of $ 6 billion. Brundage had his reservations in 2019 when OpenAI established its for-profit division. His research was constrained, and his publishing freedom too was constrained. He called for independent voices free from biases and conflicts of interest. He feels he could contribute more to AI by remaining outside the organization.

OpenAI is now a product-driven company. Researchers are interested in generic research. Resource allocation has become controversial. Despite this, Brundage admits that OpenAI has promised to support his future work.

Intel, once a leading chipmaker whose chips were the brains in most computers, has been left behind in AI. In fact, it has missed opportunities. It has become a victim of an organisational culture (OC) born out of decades of success and high profits when Intel chips and Microsoft’s Software defined the PC industry. Investments in new chip designs took a backseat and focused on money-spinning PC-era blueprint x86 architecture.

Nvidia is now the central player in AI chipmaking, and has become the most valuable corporation of the world — its market value is more than $ 3 trillion, roughly 30 times more than Intel’s, its struggling Silicon Valley icon, which has fallen below $100 billion.

Intel has lately designed an AI chip for laptops. However, ironically, these chips are not made in Intel factories but in TSMC, in Taiwan.

In 2005, Intel’s Chief Executive advised the Board to buy Nvidia, a startup then, for $20 billion. The idea was to get the technology for graphic chips. However, the Board acted as a damp squib. The then chief executive who put forward the idea of buying Nvidia passed away in 2017. The very proposal and its rejection were a fateful moment.

Today Nvidia is unrivaled AI chipmaker.

Time and again, marketing witnesses unfair practices, and one such practice relates to an exaggerated or false claim of environment friendly products being marketed by them. Consumers too prefer eco-friendly choices and therefore brands use greenwashing to project a false image of sustainability. This term has been coined by American environmentalist. Jay Westerveld on the lines of ‘whitewashing’ indicating the hiding of flaws or issues deliberately.

Greenwashing refers to exaggerated or vague/unverified environmental claims or omits relevant information.

Companies now will have to provide verifiable evidence for eco-friendly assertions such as organic, pure or recyclable in their product ads as per the new guidelines. The facts could also be disclosed through a QR code, URL or another digital medium.

The words used must be backed by credible certification, scientific evidence or third-party verification.

The violations of greenwashing guidelines are governed by the CPA, 2019. The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) has the power to penalize the violations. It consists of fines as well as imprisonment. In addition, the company’s corporate reputation is damaged.

In the European Union, Directive 2024/825 governs the greenwashing. In the UK, there is Green Claims Code. In the USA, the FTC is revising its Green Guides. S. Korea is on the verge of passing anti-greenwashing law. China targets misleading ads. Australia too cracks on false green claims.

The consumer attitudes are being shifted towards sustainability. Most of the consumers want sustainable products. They are willing to pay more for this.

The ASCI finds that Indian advertising mostly violates greenwashing guidelines. There is a necessity for stricter regulations.

As we know, Nvidia is the world’s largest chipmaker. It intends to tie up with Indian tech and telecom firms to build large scale AI infrastructure in India. These tie ups will be mutually beneficial. It provides a large market to Nvidia for its GPUs which are essential to build AI models.

It will collaborate with Reliance to build an AI infrastructure and an innovation center. A major data center by Reliance will use the latest Blackwell AI chips of Nvidia.

There will be work on several Hindi-language AI models. India in future wants to be an AI exporting country.

There will be efforts to make tailor-made solutions of AI across industries to speed up AI adoption. Industry is going through a seismic change due to AI advances, and India is poised to become a leader in AI exports in the future.

India is a country of youngsters — the median age of the large segment of population being 28. These people are inclined towards gaming as a choice for entertainment. Two generations back, people listened to the radio. One generation back, people watched movies in theatres. We are a generation which browses internet. The next generation is choosing games. The growth is triggered by smartphones and affordable data access.

India is home to 40 per cent of world’s gamers. However, we generate only 1 per cent of the gaming revenues. India is not able to convert its gaming habit into an economic prospect. There are no suitable monetization strategies. Indian gamers prefer free-to-play games and in-app purchases. Premium gaming options have not become popular. Gaming industry is also slow on adopting new methods of monetisation such as subscriptions, advertising and virtual goods sales. Gaming company should devise monetisation schemes that resonate with Indian audiences. There could be tailored content, competitive pricing and enhancing gaming experience so as to promote spending.

The industry must invest in infrastructure and technology. There should be state-of-the-art gaming studios, R&D centers and training facilities. There should be conducive environment for startups. There should be clear and supportive regulatory framework. The issues related to data privacy, cybersecurity and fair play must be addressed.

It is an opportunity to tap this vast market. India could emerge as a formidable player on the global scene. All that is required are concerted efforts. The rewards are worth the efforts. India is going to be an unshackled giant of the gaming world.

Quantum computers have changed drastically in less than a decade. These today have become breakthrough tools across industries — healthcare and life sciences, high energy physics, optimization, material development and sustainability. In fact, the industry is witnessing a computing revolution.

Quantum computers involve a new branch of computation and are based on different rules. They can access and discover new types of results.

An issue while using quantum computers is factoring large numbers, making these computers ‘cryptographically relevant’ risk to many.

India’s National Quantum Mission would like to create a vibrant eco-system for quantum technology. Of course, there are risks passed by bad actors by availing of quantum computer’s ability to decrypt data. They have access to cryptographically relevant data.

It is a tough thing to avoid in cybersecurity field. There are post-quantum cryptographic standards and these could be leveraged.

These days we can have quantum safe technologies. To illustrate, IBMz16 is the industry’s first quantum-safe system that protects against attacks from both classical and quantum computers.

In just a decade, we have to resolve the issues of risks. Policies should be developed to adopt quantum safe computers. There should be financial commitment to research on cryptography. There should be adoption of post-quantum standards. There is research on QKD — quantum key distribution leading to green field quantum communication in the future. The existing systems could be protected by post-quantum cryptography.

There should be upgradation of the existing systems to quantum-safe levels. We are at the thresholds of a new computing revolution, and there is no time to waste.

Since it has been established now that Google dominates the market of search engines, digital advertising and the wider internet eco-system, one of the potential remedies the government could consider is to break up Google and to force it to share data with third-party competitors. Both these measures would weaken the market dominance of Google. Let us consider too previous anti-trust cases — the break-up of AT&T in 1984 and the confrontation with IBM in the 1970s.

In 20th century, AT&T was a monopoly in telephone services across the US. There was little room for competition. There was litigation and the Department of Justice (DOJ) ultimately forced AT&T to divest its local telephone service provider into seven ‘Baby Bells’. This split-up dramatically changed the telecommunication landscape, allowing competition and innovation in both telecom and internet.

In the 1970s, IBM faced accusations of monopolising computer market. However, unlike AT&T, DOJ did not succeed in breaking up IBM. At the same time, IBM was forced to create a subsidiary with independent management to manage technology services. It resulted into competition sneaking in — Microsoft and Intel which reshaped computer industry.

It is now Google’s turn. However, there is a distinction. The previous break ups were about the dividing of physical assets. Google’s power emanates from the vast data it has at its command. It has collected data of billions of consumers. Its data reservoir powers its ad targeting algorithms and product improvements. The level of personalisation that Google can offer or precision it can offer to target the ads, its competitors such as Bing or DuckDuckGo cannot offer in the absence of treasure trove of information.

It is a vicious circle — more users lead to more data and more data lead to more users. The competitors would remain strugglers in digital advertising, unless Google’s data advantage is curtailed.

The idea of forced data sharing comes in here. Google could be forced to share its data to its competitors. Other digital advertisers, smaller search engines and web-based businesses can be given access to Google’s data so that they can offer better products. However, this is easier said than done. Google’s data consists of search histories, locations and the likes and dislikes of consumers. Though Google itself faces issues of protecting this data, it has a comprehensive infrastructure to ensure data security and privacy. If this is shared with third-party companies despite guidelines and oversight, there are risks of data breaches. Smaller competitors may not have robust data protection protocols. It is like putting millions of users’ private information to new threats. It may violate the principles of Europe’s GDPR creating a legal clash in different jurisdictions.

Google’s success could be attributed to users’ trust. Multiple players complicates the matter. While trying to weaken Google, we are creating a bigger problem.

Thus, break-up rather than forced data sharing is a better option. There are suggestions of separating advertising and online searches. There are suggestions that YouTube could be run independently. However, these are structural changes. These do not limit Google’s ability to leverage the data it has.

Even a break-up of Google can create problems. There is so much integration in its services. Break-up can mar the experience of users. It can affect the underlying technology infrastructure. There are significant legal challenges and logistical issues.

The DOJ has to take a holistic view with an aim of benefiting the consumers. The idea is not to break up a monopoly and create a new set of problems. Though a tall order, it will define the progress of technology in future.

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India is likely to reserve a portion of the crucial 6GHz band for telecom operators to provide 5G and 6G services.

The upper portion of the band — 6425-7125 MHz — may be reserved by the end of 2024 or early 2025. A high-powered committee is examining the matter.

Telecom and Tech firms have different views on the band. Telcos would like to have the band for 5G/6G services, tech firms are advocating its use for public WiFi.

The 6GHz band includes frequency in 5925-7125 MHz’s. It provides faster speed. The band is used by ISRO for satellite operations. ISRO raises interference issues with satellites if the band is allotted.

China has allotted the band for 5G/6G. Therefore, other countries would also like to do the same. It could create a whole eco-system.

The government can satisfy ISRO’s concern by vacating Ku band for satellite operations. (12GHz). The US has delivered 6GHz band for WiFi. China, on the other hand, has given it to telecom operators. It is an issue of co-existence between telecom and satcom.

There is no decision on lower 6GHz band. It is open to be given either for WiFi or telecom services.

If the band is reserved for Telcoms, it will be advantageous for Chinese equipment makers such as Huawei and ZTE. This raises the security issues.

If in 6GHz, 1200MHz is not utilized for telecom, the cost of infrastructure will increase as there would be a need to have towers at short distances. 5G is requires 2GHz or 2000MHz. There is a deficiency of 1200MHz.

Telcoms contend that administrative allocation of 6GHz would result in a potential loss of Rs.3 lac crore. It is objectionable.