Writing
Nikhil writes about technology, business, artificial intelligence and public policy.
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About a month ago, YouTubers privately began complaining about copyright strikes from ANI (Asian News International) about clips they’ve used in their videos. Such complaints are not new: MediaNama has reported on…
Everything is fine until companies collapse: vendors remain unpaid, customers don’t get deliveries or can’t access services. Users of BlueSmart, an EV cab service, have reported that money they loaded into the…
You remember that old saying that “if something is available for free, you’re the product”? In the age of AI, even if you’re paying for something, you’re still the product. A few…
I suppose the process of bringing up a child is also about growing up yourself. You start looking at things, and yourself, differently. If you set aside the sheer exhaustion of running…
I have 2 resolutions for 2025: I’ve had no resolutions for the last few years. Only targets. I’ve done well with some of the targets: primarily the financial ones, and they’ve brought…
A perfect storm is brewing in the world of Internet platforms: in the last 10 days, Pavel Durov, the founder of messaging app Telegram has been arrested in France; in Brazil, a…
I remember clearly the day I told Amitabh Kant about my preference for bright coloured socks: It was late in the evening at Udyog Bhawan on May 15, 2014, a day before…
The withdrawal of this secretive draft of India’s Broadcast Bill is welcome, but it shouldn’t have existed anyway. We need more transparency and accountability from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which…
26 year old Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast, runs the world’s most subscribed YouTube channel with 307 million subscribers. Known for generosity and stunts, he has spent 24 hours in an ice…
The shuttering of Koo, a microblogging website similar to Twitter (now X), has rekindled discussions about why India doesn’t have its own Google, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and whether a protectionist approach is…
So, #ShameOnMetaAI was trending on Twitter because MetaAI was used to generate jokes on Hindu gods including Lord Ram & Lord Vishnu. Some tweets say it declined to crack jokes on Prophet…
Yesterday, I built a custom AI chatbot to help me pack for travel, starting with making plans for an upcoming long trip to South America. I’ve typically used spreadsheets for this, with…
I wrote this paper for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation on the steps that India has taken for its technology decoupling from China, covering changes in the regulation of investments, telecommunications, ecommerce, handsets,…
Perplexity is a fascinating AI application that I sometimes use to read the news, but it has me worried for a while now. It takes a Wikipedia-like approach to compilation of news…
At a discussion we held in June last year, someone threw the cat among the pigeons by saying that Open Sourcing AI is like giving everyone a nuclear bomb. It’s not a…
Two things stood out for me from our discussion on deep fakes and democracy on Wednesday: Firstly, Gautham Koorma pointed out that detection of deep fakes becomes much difficult when they’re published…
OpenAI has quietly changed its terms to allow it to work with Military and for Warfare. This is a worrying development, especially since OpenAI has scraped a large amount of publicly available…
In terms of Netflix removing Annapoornani, why are we even surprised? This is the rule of the mob, and we’ve seen this before when theaters used to be attacked in India, for…
A journalist for another publication just rang me up asking about what can be done in India for addressing online abuse against the LGBTQI community. I really don’t have community specific solutions,…
I was on an excellent panel discussion a couple of days ago organised by CCAOI, about India’s Broadcast Bill which seeks to change the way online streaming services like Netflix and Amazon…
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