Today’s Cache

27 March 2024

Top tech news of the day, curated by The Hindu’s Tech writers.

Today’s Cache | Musk offers Grok AI chatbot to premium X users; Intel India on democratizing AI; Social media influencers become India’s election campaigners
Elon Musk has announced that his company’s AI chatbot, Grok, will be available to premium subscribers on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) later this week. Previously, only Premium+ subscribers could access Grok, created by Musk’s AI company xAI. Musk has also made Grok open source, enabling access through GitHub. xAI stated that Grok-1 is a 314 billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch. It is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023. The move to make Grok available to premium subscribers signifies a broader rollout of the AI chatbot, which has the potential to enhance user experiences on the social media platform.

Intel India on democratizing AI
Intel has been striving to catch up with its rivals in advanced chip manufacturing. CEO Pat Gelsinger launched an ambitious chip development roadmap three years ago, aiming to produce five nodes in four years: 7, 4, 3, 20A, and 18A. Back then, Nvidia’s market capitalisation was below a trillion dollars, and ChatGPT wasn’t yet in existence. Fast forward to 2024, Nvidia leads the semiconductor industry with a market value exceeding two trillion dollars. They produce chipsets for power-hungry machines that train large language models, while OpenAI’s chatbots have sparked an AI revolution few anticipated just two years ago .In an exclusive interview with The Hindu during the ‘Intel AI Summit’ in Bangalore, Gokul Subramaniam, President and VP of Intel India’s Client Computing Group, discussed how the company is executing its roadmap, India’s role, the significance of AI in PCs, and the competitive landscape in the chip business.

Social media influencers are India’s new election campaigners
Indian social media influencer Chandni Bhagat has blended politics with her daily dose of religion, creating devotional Instagram videos for three years. She’s one of many influencers mobilised by political parties ahead of elections to attract a young and ever-online India .Last year, 18-year-old Bhagat, with over 200,000 Instagram followers, was among 100+ content creators in Indore invited to meet workers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since then, her Instagram, dominated by Lord Shiva, featured at least five BJP-promoting posts, backing its women’s health scheme and showing a selfie with a former party minister. With India having over 800 million internet users and leading in Instagram and YouTube use, courting influencers for political outreach is strategic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP has engaged hundreds of influencers with clout on these platforms.

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