It’s a wrap: News this week (Dec 2 — Dec 8)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) new cloud facility to Tech Mahindra’s new business unit, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

RBI’s cloud facility

The RBI is working on establishing a cloud facility for the financial sector in India. The Central Bank mentioned this is a note detailing developmental and regulatory policies on December 8. The apex bank mentioned that in view of the increasing volume of data maintained by financial institutions, it has proposed the facility to enhance the ‘security, integrity and privacy of financial sector data’. It will also help in scalability and business continuity. The facility will be rolled out in a calibrated fashion in the medium term.

Google’s ‘most capable’ AI model

Alphabet-owned Google introduced its self-admittedly ‘most capable’ artificial intelligence model Gemini. For now, Google has optimised the first version of the model Gemini 1.0 which comes in three different sizes — Ultra for highly complex tasks; Pro for scaling across a range of tasks; Nano for on-device tasks. As the name suggests, these three versions are in descending order of size. Gemini is flexible and can efficiently run across infrastructures from data centres to mobile devices. 

Tech Mahindra’s new business unit

Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra announced on Thursday the launch of a new business unit called Navixus within its Tech Mahindra Business Process Services (BPS) division.  

Navixus will combine Tech Mahindra's automation, analytics, and consulting capabilities with Eventus’ customer experience (CX) and transformation capabilities to provide a comprehensive digital transformation suite to customers. The suite will include consulting, operational excellence, intelligent automation, generative artificial intelligence, and CX technologies. Navixus will also offer Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS), advanced analytics, managed services, and guidance for customers looking to optimise and transform their businesses. 
Air India shifts IT infra to cloud

Indian carrier Air India announced on Tuesday that it has migrated its computational workload to the Cloud and shut down its two data centres in New Delhi and Mumbai. The move is expected to save Air India $1 million annually. 
The migration to Microsoft Azure was managed by Air India's teams in Silicon Valley, Gurugram, and Kochi. The computational workloads were transferred from mainframes, servers, data, and equipment. The now-closed data centres were previously used for innovations and automation in the airline's commercial and financial functions. 

IBM Quantum Summit

Global technology company IBM recently held its IBM Quantum Summit 2023 in New York. The event saw several announcements pertaining to quantum-related hardware and software innovation from IBM. The company showcased Quantum Heron, the first in the series of the company’s utility-scale quantum processor.

IBM also announced the expansion of its Quantum Development Roadmap up top 2033. As part of the newly expanded plan, IBM highlights the improvement in the number of gates in the processors, for instance, Heron is expected to reach 5,000 gates by 2024. To be sure, the number of gates on a processor is indicative of its speed and capability.

In related news, this week IBM and Meta announced AI Alliance. An international coalition, this alliance consists of organisations such as AMD, NASA, CERN, and Intel and is aimed at promoting open innovation and open science in AI.