Travel concierge
Mastercard, global card services corporation, this week announced that it will be launching its AI-powered travel and lifestyle concierge the ‘Lifestyle Navigator’ in India, in collaboration with travel and booking portal MakeMyTrip. India is the first market worldwide where this platform is being launched. The Lifestyle Navigator aims to provide curated travel experiences and global offers from Mastercard within MMT’s agentic AI trip planning assistant Myra. It will provide suggestions drawn from food, culture, adventure and retail specialists across global destinations.
Nvidia to offer AI tokens
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently announced that the company will be affording AI tokens worth more than half the base salary to its engineers on top of the regular annual pay. OpenAI employees and big tech employees across the board enquire about token budgets at hiring. AI tokens work much like currency — any prompt entered into an AI model, be it a word or a code, needs tokens to be further generated, which draws from the organisation’s token quota. Token use by employees is being increasingly tracked by companies as they are becoming increasingly more expensive. Reportedly, names in Silicon Valley have already begun investing in token budgets as part of employee compensation.
Next-gen AI data storage
Electronics giant Samsung and American semiconductor company AMD have signed a memorandum of understanding to expand their work on next generation AI memory and computing technologies. The two companies are collaborating on advanced memory technologies for AI and data centre workloads. This will help optimise AI infrastructure in devices for customers, as memory bandwidth and power efficiency are extremely important for the devices’ systems’ performances.
Grok’s fumble on Netanyahu
Amid rumours of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s death, a video of him at a cafe circulated on social media was flagged by Grok as being AI-generated. The video in question had been posted by Netanyahu himself, of a meeting between him and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. He later posted another video of himself interacting with civilians, another in a series of posts he has made to debunk the rumours of his death.
Mistral’s new platform
Artificial intelligence company Mistral AI has launched Forge, which is a platform that will help enterprises build and train AI models on proprietary data, rather than open internet sources. Should a company or enterprise wish to build their own AI system, Forge will enable it to learn and train the AI model based on the entity’s specific data, rather than what would be gleaned by a generic AI system from generally available data.
Fake image of West Bengal rally
An image of an extremely littered rally ground was circulated on social media after the conclusion of a political rally in West Bengal last week. The caption on the picture claimed that packets of gutkha, bottles of wine, plastic and garbage were found disposed on the grounds. A fact check using detection tools SightSeeing and HiveModeration revealed that the viral picture was in fact AI-generated, and was spreading fake allegations and information.
IGNOU learning module
Indira Gandhi National Open University plans to introduce an AI-driven learning module as a pilot for one of its courses within six months, with the intention of testing it for launch in its other courses as well. The university is in talks with various Indian Institute of Technologies regarding the implementation of the pilot phase.
The learning module will have built-in moderation mechanisms, accounting for biases, hallucinations, and other AI related challenges.
Insta AI voice filters
Instagram has launched its AI Voice Effects for voice notes and direct messages for users residing in India. This feature as part of Instagram’s growing AI feature ecosystem, allows users to apply eight different voice filters, enhancing chat creativity and user experiences.
The different voice filters included are chipmunk, demon, underwater, stadium, alien, robot, wobble and fishbowl. Instagram is also currently working on a ‘Create My Likeness’ feature.