It’s a wrap: News this week (Aug 26 — Sept 1)

There have been multiple developments on the tech front this week. From ChatGPT’s enterprise version to Google Cloud Next 2023 event, this is the list of the most important developments this week for a quick catch-up:

Smart city project in Tirupati

NEC Corporation India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese IT service provider NEC Corporation, on Thursday said, it has launched a smart city project in Tirupati, for Tirupati Smart City Corporation. Under this project, NEC India is implementing information communication technology (ICT) services throughout the city and setting up a city operations centre (COC) in Tirupati.  

ChatGPT enterprise

OpenAI released the enterprise version of ChatGPT this week. It is expected to address the privacy and security concerns associated with the generative artificial intelligence chatbot. This version of ChatGPT will not train on business data or conversations, nor will the models learn from the usage. OpenAI said in a blog that ChatGPT is SOC 2 compliant and all conversations are encrypted.

Google Cloud Next 2023

Google’s cloud division, Google Cloud, held its largest in-person event this week in San Francisco with an estimated 18,000 participants. The tech giant made a flurry of announcements around artificial intelligence (AI), and more specifically generative AI at Google Cloud Next event. Some of the key announcements include Duet AI for Google Workspace, updates to Vertex AI, general availability of the A3 virtual machines running on NVIDIA H100 GPU, and advancements in its AI-optimised infrastructure.

Lastly, Google has introduced generative artificial intelligence to its Search tool for users in India and Japan that will show text or visual results to prompts, including summaries. The India-specific version will offer users the ability to search in English and Hindi and also allow both voice readouts of search results, and voice inputs for search queries.

The new AI-powered search feature, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), was first launched only in the U.S. and announced at this year's Google I/O Developer Conference in May. 

Isro’s Solar Mission

The Indian Space Research Organisation is scheduled to launch the first solar mission Aditya L1 on September 2. The launch follows the successful soft landing of Isro’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the lunar south-pole. 

Aditya L1 will be placed in the L1 Lagrangian point in the Sun-Earth system which is about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth. The goal of the mission is to provide remote observations of the solar corona and in situ observations of the solar wind at L1 

Aspirants for IT Hardware PLI 2.0

Top multinationals such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, Dell, Foxconn, Acer, and Thomson, and domestic companies including Dixon Technologies (India) Ltd, VVDN Technologies, and Netweb Technologies, are among 40 aspirants for India’s IT Hardware Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) 2.0 scheme. This government scheme with an outlay of ₹17,000 crore for six years aims at incentivising local manufacturing of laptops, tablets, and servers.