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The four key startups leading the race to build India's first LLM
Aashish Aryan Avik Das New Delhi/Bengaluru
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India will be ready with its first indigenously developed artificial intelligence large language model (LLM) in six to eight months, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, on January 30 this year.
The move was seen as India's response to DeepSeek, an open-source LLM developed in China, reportedly at a fraction of the cost it took to create other models globally. (LLMs are AI programmes trained on vast amounts of text data to understand, generate, and process human language.)
But Indian government officials say they are not merely reacting to events elsewhere. A plan to develop indigenous

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Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
Foxconn's Chinese engineers called back, disrupting Apple's India expansion
Over 300 Chinese engineers and technicians have been sent back from Foxconn's iPhone factories in India, raising concerns about a potential slowdown in Apple's local manufacturing push. According to a Bloomberg report citing sources, the recall began nearly two months ago, with the majority of Chinese staff at Foxconn's southern India facilities asked to return home. Most of those who remain are Taiwanese support personnel. While Foxconn has not issued any statement on the move, it aligns with recent informal efforts by Chinese authorities to discourage the transfer of skilled labour, technology, and equipment to countries like India and Vietnam. Apple's dependence on Chinese expertise Apple CEO Tim Cook has often praised the proficiency of China's assembly workforce, attributing the company's reliance on the country to their expertise rather than just cost advantages. While the withdrawal of these staff from India is not expected to affect product quality, it could impact assembly line efficiency, a source told Bloomberg. The development comes at a crucial moment for Apple, which is working with manufacturing partners in India to scale up production of the upcoming iPhone 17. So far, Apple has not issued any comment on the development. China tightens grip on tech exports Foxconn's decision appears to align with recent efforts by Beijing to limit the movement of technology, skilled professionals, and specialised equipment out of China. These measures are seen as a response to growing interest from countries like India and Vietnam, which are working to attract global tech manufacturers amid ongoing tensions between the United States and China. Recently, China even halted the export of key rare earth metals. This shift in supply chains began during Donald Trump's first term as US president, when Apple started shifting some of its device production to India and Vietnam. The trend has continued, especially as Trump pushes forward with new tariff plans. In response, China has tightened its grip on exports of rare earth materials, technology, and labour. Foxconn's presence in India Although Foxconn still produces most iPhones in China, it has steadily expanded its operations in India, as earlier reported by Business Standard. To support this growth, the company had deployed many experienced Chinese engineers to help speed up production and train Indian workers. Chinese supervisors have played a key role in guiding Foxconn's Indian workforce. Large-scale iPhone production in India began just four years ago and now contributes around 20 per cent of global output. Apple aims to manufacture most iPhones destined for the US market in India by the end of 2026. However, Trump has criticised this move, saying Apple should make phones for American users within the US. High labour costs in the US make this idea difficult to implement. And if China restricts the movement of its skilled engineers, setting up advanced manufacturing in the US would become even less viable. India-China relations Meanwhile, India and China continue to share a strained relationship. While tensions have eased slightly over the past year, and high-level meetings have resumed, direct flights between the two countries remain suspended. India still enforces strict visa rules for Chinese nationals and maintains bans on Chinese apps like TikTok. On the other hand, China continues to block exports of fertilisers to India, even though such restrictions have been lifted for other nations.


The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
Kerala regains lost ground to emerge second in National Achievement Survey
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Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
India must act: Publishers sound alarm on AI's ‘theft' of news content
As leading publishers in the US and UK clamp down on artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraping news content without consent, Indian digital media houses are ramping up pressure on the government to step in and protect journalistic work from being 'exploited' by commercial AI models. The development follows a sweeping move by major global players, including the Associated Press, The Atlantic, Sky News, Time, Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, and DMGT, to block AI bots from crawling their websites by default. The effort is being supported by Cloudflare, one of the world's largest internet infrastructure firms, which has announced a new system that gives publishers granular control over AI access to their sites. Indian publishers say the problem of unauthorised AI scraping has reached alarming proportions with no legal safeguards, licensing systems, or enforcement mechanisms in place. 'The situation in India is becoming increasingly untenable,' said a spokesperson for the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), a key industry body. 'While global players are waking up to the importance of permission and fair compensation, Indian news content continues to be freely exploited without dialogue or safeguards. We urge the Government of India to take immediate steps to take necessary measures against such unauthorised and rampant data scrapping,' the spokersperson said in a press statement. According to Cloudflare, OpenAI's GPTBot alone accounted for nearly 30 per cent of all AI-related web scraping in May 2025, a sixfold increase from just a year earlier. Other major scrapers include Meta's External Agent and Anthropic's ClaudeBot. Cloudflare's new approach gives publishers the option to allow or block AI crawlers and even tag them based on intent, whether the bot is scraping for model training, search indexing, or inference purposes. Crucially, the company is also testing a 'pay-per-crawl' model that could allow news outlets to charge AI firms directly for accessing their content. 'This is a game-changer for publishers,' said Roger Lynch, CEO of Conde Nast. 'When AI companies can no longer take anything they want for free, it opens the door to sustainable innovation built on permission and partnership.' But in India, publishers have few tools at their disposal. Unlike in the US and UK, where AI companies now face increasing legal scrutiny and regulatory pushback, Indian media houses are still operating in a grey zone. The DNPA and other digital publishers have now jointly called on the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to urgently act on the following demands: 'India has the potential to be a global AI leader – but not by trampling on the rights of its own creators,' said a senior editor from a leading digital news platform. 'We must innovate responsibly, with laws that value original content and protect public trust.'