New Delhi:

Tech honchos Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and others hailed India’s historic win over South Africa in a nerve-wrenching final of the ICC T20 World Cup at the Kensington Oval in Barbados on Saturday.

Alphabet and Google CEO Pichai posted on X: “What a game, could barely breathe, everything that makes sports incredible. Congrats India, so well deserved! SA was incredible. Amazing.”

Congratulating the Men in Blue, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Nadella said, “What a final. Congrats, India, and well played, South Africa. Super World Cup… let us have more cricket in the West Indies and USA.”

Meanwhile, Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra asked ChatGPT to make a graphic image showing the Indian cricket team as Superheroes.

“Because they were SuperCool till the end. The greatest gift of this final to India was that it didn’t come easy. It almost slipped out of their grasp. But they never lost the match in their minds,” he posted on X.

“Reminding all of us that being a Superhero never comes without a fierce determination to win and a Never Give In attitude. Jai Ho!” Mahindra said.

Earlier, Hardik Pandya’s 3-20 and Jasprit Bumrah’s 2-18 helped an unbeaten India to come back and clinch their second title in the shortest format with a seven-run win at the Kensington Oval.

Talismanic batter Virat Kohli stepped up to end his lean run with a 59-ball 76 to help India post a competitive 176/7, the highest total in a Men’s T20 World Cup final.

Kohli’s 72-run stand for the fourth wicket with Axar Patel, who made 47 off 31 balls, and a 57-run partnership with Shivam Dube, who hit a 16-ball 27, helped India go past the 175-run mark, as they scored 42 runs off the last three overs.

In reply, South Africa were very much in sight to chase down the total. But Hardik taking out Heinrich Klaasen propelled India to come back into the match and end a long 11-year global trophy drought as they restricted South Africa to 169/8.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

At Microsoft’s recent Build 2024 conference, CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the keynote with a captivating story about how technology empowered an Indian farmer. This anecdote served as a springboard for a series of exciting AI advancements, including updates to Azure and Copilot, along with groundbreaking innovations from Microsoft partners like OpenAI.

Mr Nadella shared, “In January 2023, I met a rural Indian farmer who used GPT-3.5, in his own voice, to understand government farm subsidies he’d heard about on television. It was a powerful moment for me. It illustrated the incredible impact of a cutting-edge model developed on the West Coast of the United States, now being used to directly improve the life of a rural farmer in India.”

In January, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Mr Nadella in conversation with Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), cited the example of the Indian farmer. 

Mr Nadella shared that the farmer was trying to access some government programme. “He expressed a complex need in one of the local languages. This got translated and interpreted by a bot and a response came back saying go to a portal and here is how you will access the programme,” Mr Nadella revealed. 

The Microsoft CEO further shared that the farmer was initially hesitant to use the programme and asked the bot to do it on his behalf. “And, it completed it and the reason why it was able to complete it was that the developer building it had taken GPT [General Purpose Technology] and trained it over all of the government of India documents and then scaffolded it with the speech recognition software,” Mr Nadella added.

At the Build 2024 conference, Microsoft made a splash in the AI world with two key announcements. First, developers can now access OpenAI’s most powerful model yet, GPT-40. This cutting-edge tool promises to revolutionize AI capabilities.  Second, Microsoft introduced Phi-3-Vision, a new Small Language Model (SLM) with the remarkable ability to read and understand images.

These groundbreaking tools will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio, a one-stop shop for developers to leverage these advancements and push the boundaries of AI.

Microsoft didn’t stop there. They also unveiled powerful new virtual machines specifically designed for handling AI workloads with unmatched efficiency. Significantly, they became the first cloud provider to integrate AMD’s cutting-edge MI300X AI accelerator chip. This integration strengthens the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series, making it a powerhouse for running complex AI tasks.

New Delhi:

US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti recently claimed that in modern times, one cannot become a CEO in America unless they are of Indian descent. Mr Garcetti’s humorous quip came at the 2024 Indiaspora AI Summit at Stanford University recently. 

“The successes have happened, more than one in 10 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies now are Indian immigrants who studied in the US. The old joke was you could not become a CEO in the US if you were Indian, now the joke is you cannot become a CEO in America if you are not Indian, whether it is Google, Microsoft or Starbucks, people have come and made a big difference,” Mr Garcetti said. 

#WATCH | Delhi: US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti says, “The successes have happened, more than 1 in 10 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies now are Indian immigrants who studied in the US. The old joke was you could not become a CEO in the US if you are Indian, now the joke is you… pic.twitter.com/gTdvXng9mi

— ANI (@ANI) April 26, 2024

Google and its parent organisation Alphabet Inc. are overseen by Sundar Pichai while operations at Microsoft and Starbucks are led by Satya Nadella and Laxman Narasimhan, respectively. 

Speaking alongside Mr Garcetti, Indian-origin business leaders echoed similar sentiments while appreciating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, particularly his role in positioning India as a global hub of innovation and progress. 

“India is perceived very differently in the global space. It’s a space of innovation. It’s a space of human capital. It’s a space of progress and innovation. And as we look forward, what Modi has been able to do is put India into the global map as a credible innovator, leader for all countries to invest in and grow,” said Informatica CEO Amit Walia.

Similarly, Ashutosh Kulkarni, CEO of Elastic, commended PM Modi’s government for its openness to innovation and industry, noting India’s vast potential for progress. Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund hailed the “amazing” era under PM Modi’s leadership.

The Indiaspora AI Summit, besides global tech tycoons, was also attended by Rajya Sabha MP Satnam Singh Sandhu.

Microsoft Corp. was willing to hide its search engine’s “Bing” brand on Apple Inc. devices in order to secure an agreement with the iPhone maker and unseat Google, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella testified Monday.

Taking the stand at Google’s antitrust trial, Microsoft’s Nadella described the lengths his company was willing to go to become Apple’s default search engine, a position that Google currently enjoys. That included offering “strategic flexibility” on how to brand the search engine and encouraging Apple to look at its technology independently of the Bing brand.

The testimony was part of a Department of Justice trial against Google, which the government says has used its search dominance to quash competition and hurt consumers. The company’s agreement with Apple is central to that case. Google pays billions of dollars a year to be the default option for Apple devices, and Microsoft has tried – and failed – to offer a more attractive deal.

Getting that default spot from Apple would be “game changing,” Nadella said. “Whomever they choose, they king-make.”

Nadella did make inroads with Apple between 2013 and 2017, when the iPhone maker opted to replace Google as the search engine powering Siri and the Spotlight feature on its devices. Apple, however, never dropped Google as the default in its Safari web browser and reverted back to Google in the other areas after only four years.

The discussion about dropping the Bing brand happened during negotiations in 2018. The arrangement would have meant Safari search results were powered by Bing, but under an alternative brand.

Nadella said he has tried to replace Google as Apple’s default search engine every year since he became CEO in 2014. In earlier testimony Monday, he said Apple used Microsoft to “bid up the price” it gets paid by Google.

“Do you think Google would continue to pay Apple if there was no search competition? Why would they do that?” he said.

Apple services chief Eddy Cue has said he works with Google because the Mountain View, California-based company provides the best search results. The iPhone maker gets roughly $8 billion annually from the Google deal, which is structured as a revenue-share agreement.

Microsoft had even offered to sell Bing to Apple around 2020, Bloomberg News reported last week. Cue declined that overture.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)