India Wants to Be the Center of AI - DTNS 5208

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 18th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and gosh darn it, help each other understand. Today, India makes a play to become the center of AI for the global south. Go India. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. All right, so there is a big old AI Summit happening in New Delhi. AI Summit 2026 going on through February 20th. This is, I believe, the fourth AI summit. There was one in Paris last year. Before that, there was one in Seoul and then one in London.

0:43I think that was the first one. And they have all previously focused on AI safety. Now, there's a lot of safety stuff going on at this one in India, but the India summit is more focused on bringing infrastructure and investment and startups to the global south. So let's run through some of the big news coming out of there. Alphabet announced the America India Connect initiative to build new undersea fiber optic cables between the US, India and other countries. The idea there is to improve speed and reliability. If you don't remember, Alphabet is the parent company of Google, so this is basically Google doing that.

1:25OpenAI announced a partnership with six Indian education institutions to provide access to ChatGPT-EDU, the educational version of ChatGPT. That'll include IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad, AIIMS New Delhi, and should serve about 100 ,000 students. Microsoft's going to throw down$50 billion on infrastructure in the global South, not just India, by 2030. It spent$17.5 billion on data infrastructure in India last year. So this is in addition to that. NVIDIA plans to work with Indian venture capital companies, including PeakXV, Excel India, Z47, to fund startups. And cloud provider Yata is going to spend$2 billion on NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs in an attempt to create one of the largest AI superclusters in Asia at its data center in Noida, India.

2:20uh nvidia also partnering with competitors of yada including larson and tubro and e2e network india's sarvam ai introduced models that are tailored to indian language and culture they are meant for feature phones so bringing llms to your feature phone not to your smartphone also to cars and smart glasses it's partnering with hmd to bring its assistant to hmd and Nokia branded phones, and it's partnering with Bosch for cars. And just in general, to kind of give you the context of India's approach to this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has set goals for India to grow into what is variously described as a global tech superpower.

3:04They would like to be mentioned along with China. Are they not already? A global tech superpower. So they would like to be mentioned along with China and the US when you're talking about who is leading with AI. They want it to be not, is it China or US? They want it to be, is it China, US, or India? So the government of India hosting this summit under the India AI mission, that's within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The ministry works to promote investment, not just to regulate. I found a post from economist Shruti Rajagopalan describing India's regulatory approach on the substack Get Down and Shruti.

3:45Do not regulate the technology itself. That's what Shruti says India is doing. Govern its applications through the regulators who already understand those domains. Build incident databases so you learn from failures instead of pretending to prevent them through preemptive compliance theater. Use techno-legal mechanism, standards, system architecture level controls, provenance tools, so that compliance scales without needing armies of auditors. Create sandboxes so regulators can see what actually goes wrong before writing the rules. The explicit preference for innovation over restraint listed as a core principle that is rejecting the EU's precautionary posture.

4:30Both committees looked at Brussels and decided that regulating AI the way you regulate pharmaceuticals before you know what the side effects actually are is a bad trade for a country where AI adoption is still nascent and unevenly distributed. It's meant to be written, not read. But I took away from that, that India is trying to take the best of what the United States has done to encourage innovation, the best of what China has done to encourage efficiency, and some of what the EU has done to encourage safety and cobble it together and what it thinks is the best way to regulate this kind of stuff.

5:08My first reaction to innovation over restraint is not necessarily that that's a bad thing, but it sounds like move fast and break things. Yeah, I think - A la Facebook. If I'm picking up, it's right. India is saying move fast, but don't break things. Let's move forward. Let's prioritize innovation, but let's put some guardrails in there. I really liked what it said about creating sandboxes where you figure out what's going to break and then you create your regulation around it. Yeah, indeed. I found the OpenAI partnership with the Indian education institutions interesting because, again, serving more than 100 ,000 students or thereabouts.

5:57and that's using ChatGPT-EDU, which I don't actually use. So I don't know totally how that differs all that much from the ChatGPT that I use, but it's obviously focused more on the educational sector. And I think that's actually very smart for OpenAI to be having this partnership. Yeah, just looking it up real quick, basically what OpenAI pitches ChatGPT EDU as is a way for universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, etc., without having to spend as much money. So there's a way for them to do it that fits within university guidelines and doesn't cost as much as they would charge, say, an enterprise.

6:50there's some spreadsheet somewhere where it's like if you ask this then edu says i can't help you with that but i can definitely help you with your trigonometry exam i would guess it's less that it's it's i'm sure there's some you know non-cheating stuff in there but it's the same model you would get otherwise it's more about your your queries aren't going to be stored or you know privacy is protected and things like well like you know like any class right it you're you're going to ask certain questions in one class and not in the other class. Yeah. And nobody's keeping a record of them at open AI of all the questions you asked in class.

7:28So that's what they say. Well, DTNS is made possible by all of you listening or watching right now. Thanks to Erwinster, Ken Hayes, and Philip Shane. All right. There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Let's get to them. We've mentioned before that Apple announced an experience day for the press on March 4th, but Daring Fireball's John Gruber noticed that was a Wednesday, an unusual day for Apple announcements, and suspects that Apple may announce products in a press release on Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday being that hands-on day for the press. While there will probably be videos introducing the new products, we probably won't get a long Apple keynote speech.

8:15Not expecting it anyway. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote on X, Gruber's spitball guest is exactly what I'm expecting based on what I've heard. So we, yeah, right. Gurman has weighed in. Gurman has entered the chat. So the potential new products are a low cost MacBook running on an A18 Pro chip, a new M5 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. I'm actually really interested in the M5 MacBook Air. New Mac displays, iPhone 17e, a base iPad running on an A18 chip, and an M4 iPad Air. Now, Gurman says later this year, we may get AirPods and a pendant, both with camera sensors focused on new Siri features and next year smart glasses.

9:02So this is not necessarily like the big announcement for Apple this year. This is like, hey, you want a new MacBook Air? We got one for you. I'm definitely looking at the MacBook Pro as I sit here with my M1 MacBook Pro. I have an M1 MacBook Air. I love it, Tom. It has never done me wrong. No, mine either. That's the problem. I'm like, but I want to see what the M5 is like. But I want an M5.

9:33What's going to happen? I don't know. This is an interesting way to do it, to say, look, these are not the new pendant that you can talk to. They are not smart glasses, but they're good updates that people want, obviously. So let's approach it differently. Let's not overdo it with a big keynote announcement. I kind of appreciate that. Give me an announcement on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and then the reporters can all tell me what they think of the stuff they've had their hands on. it spreads out Apple's coverage across several days instead of it all happening on one day all makes sense to me well and you know we don't need a whole like live from you know Apple campus and Cupertino it's you know I mean yeah those are fun but it's like they they can't do that four times a year I mean they could but they don't want to and I think a lot of this is like here's some updates good updates um i have a friend uh just the other day like two days ago pinged me and was like i need a new macbook you know what should i get and i was like i think you might want to wait you know if you can wait a couple weeks because we might get something that you know is really speaking to you yeah you know otherwise i would just tell you to get a 14-inch macbook pro because if not you want to wait a week just hang in there yeah yeah right uh google announced the Pixel 10a with a slightly brighter display, flatter back, 10 watts wireless charging that's up from 7.5.

11:09It did not add a magnet to that, by the way. It increased the wireless charging, but you still can't snap it, so it's Qi ready. Otherwise, it's about the same as the 9a. It'll get seven years of software and security updates and is available now. Pixel 10a is$499 shipping on March 5th. They also announced green and red versions of the Pixel Buds 2a for$129. And for those of you who are still on the Pixel 9 and want to keep it, Google announced the Quick Share support for Apple's AirDrop, rolling out now for the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL, and 9 Pro Fold, meaning that you can AirDrop between iPhones and more Pixels now.

11:50Now, I don't want to be a negative Nancy here, But do we care about colors for earbuds? I mean, that's the new announcement is we've got new colors. But I guess, I mean, I don't know. Maybe people do. I don't personally. But if you want to, if you're like, oh, I wanted green because it goes with everything I wear or something. I don't know. Well, I wonder about this because as we move forward with a variety of smartphones that have lots of colors. but then you can use a case and make it whatever color you want. And obviously we all wear colors on our bodies that, you know, we, you know, like for ourselves.

12:33There's no reason to not have colors for earbuds. It just, it, it feels a little silly to me. Yeah. I mean, sure. It's one of the reasons I no longer tell you there's like three colors of the pixel 10 a two, but I feel like, yeah, if you're that interested in the colors, you can go find out what they are. It's just like that, that was the new thing. These, these pixel buds are not new in any other way, except, Oh, it's two new colors. In case you're interested. Right. Right. And, you know, and again, nothing wrong with that. You know, if you want red or green, you know, Christmasy, you're, it's very Christmasy.

13:07Um, I did, I did see some red in one ear, green in the other. Oh, interesting. Yeah. You could, you could, you know, get asymmetrical with that. Um, one thing I, I heard some grumbling about, you know online is like oh it's more like the 9a that yeah very similar more like the 9a you know it's it's it's there's some like very increment upgrades and you know that happens sometimes yeah i and honestly uh that's fine you don't need to get it this is for the person who who needs to get a new phone the new phone yeah exactly so they that flatter back is pretty cool it can you know lay flat without the bump it's nice i would i would like that i hate the Uh, Microsoft says the Microsoft 365 co-pilot data loss prevention had not been working properly for items in the co-pilot work tabs, sent and draft folders.

14:01So co-pilot is supposed to ignore items with confidentiality labels, but it was summarizing them as if they were in those folders. A fix began rolling out this month, and Microsoft is working with affected users to verify the fix is working. It hasn't given a timeline on when to expect the issue to be marked as fully resolved. Yeah, I don't know how serious of a vulnerability this is. If you really want to make sure that Copilot isn't summarizing confidential stuff, you know, make sure to pull them out of the sent and draft folders as soon as possible. Right. the worry is that, well, if they're getting summarized, then Copilot is processing those, which isn't great in company.

14:45You don't want that data going anywhere it shouldn't be. So maybe you shouldn't be using Copilot's work tab for confidential stuff until this is fixed. Depends on how sensitive your company is about confidential information. Microsoft is taking a slow approach to fix it. They don't consider it a high critical vulnerability. Well, and probably because they don't feel that many people are affected. You know, if you were working at a legal firm or, you know, there's a variety of reasons that confidential stuff is being sent back and forth over email, then I can see where this could affect you. Or you could at least be like, oh, Spidey senses, this doesn't sound good.

15:25But yeah, I suspect because of Microsoft's stance on this, that it doesn't feel like a lot of people are affected more, more like, all right, let's change some things. I'm guessing that a lot of companies that have very confidential information have not been allowing their companies to use Copilot's work tab for them, even with the protections. And so they're not feeling a lot of pressure from companies to fix it because the companies are like, yeah, well, we had a policy against that anyway. So it's not - Well, and then Microsoft gets to say, if you have a policy against it, I mean, we're not making you use this.

16:01Well, and what they don't want to do is make it like they would like them to use it. So they need to fix this faster. But, you know, it's time is a flat circle. Google's Gemini can now create a 30 second music track for you based on text, photos or videos you give it using DeepMind's Lyria 3 model coming to the desktop version of Gemini first for users older than 18. available in multiple languages, and should arrive on the mobile app within the next few days. Nano Banana can also be used to generate album art, if you want. The Lyria 3 tool is also coming to Google's DreamTrack toolkit for YouTube Shorts.

16:40Google says, of course, as you might expect, it respects copyright and its partner agreements, which I definitely believe it does. So if you name an artist in a prompt, it will be used as a broad creative inspiration. It's not meant to duplicate Taylor Swift, if you tell it to. I mean, I don't know. This sounds kind of fun. I'll give it a whirl. I don't really know what I would do with it. I feel like this is kind of like this is for like TikTok videos. Yeah, yeah, maybe. Because you can only do 30 seconds. You can go to Udio or Suno and do full songs if you want. Same kind of thing. But I guess if you're in Gemini and you're like, oh, I just want a jingle to go with my short or in YouTube, even better.

17:23Then, yeah, I guess it could be useful for that. I'm, you know, in general, if someone was like, how do you feel about AI music? I'd be like, you know, I mean, there's so many humans out there trying to make good music, you know, do we really need this? But at the same time, you know, when's the last time that you, you know, scrolled through your, you know, your feed on, you know, whatever place and it's like, everyone's using the same song. Yeah, right. And, and sometimes that's on purpose. It's like, oh, this is the meme of the week type thing. But other times I'm like, don't we have another song that we could use?

17:59So this would be kind of fun for that. In YouTube, I run into vloggers all using the same royalty-free music. I'm like, oh, I know that song. That was in the other vlogger that I saw. And so being able to have unique, just background music, right? We're not talking about great pieces of art, but just kind of mood setting music. It adds to creativity, personal creativity, for sure. Well, if you would like honest and creative reviews from anybody who actually buys and lives with tech, well, you've come to the right place. You need live with it in your life. Every episode, I sit down and talk about a product, service, something that either I or my guest of the week has been using in their daily life for a long enough period of time that we really feel like we understand if it's right for us and if it might be right for you.

18:55In fact, the latest episode is about the Fi Pet Tracker. I was about to say Otis. My dog is named Rex. Otis was my previous dog, who's been wearing the Fi Tracker for some time now, and I've got some thoughts on it. So if you have a pet, a dog or cat or perhaps a rabbit, I guess that would work as well. Listen to Live With It wherever you get your podcasts or watch at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

19:27And now some quick headlines that are just good to know might make you look smarter in the future. Listen in. Google announced that its annual developer conference, Google IO will take place May 19th and 20th. Samsung continues to release teasers for the upcoming Galaxy S26, this time touting the camera in the phone as the brightest and easiest to use yet. Speaking of Samsung, its one UI 8.5 update lets you record 24-bit audio through an external microphone, thanks to new high-quality audio input feature. meta ceo mark zuckerberg has taken the witness stand in the ongoing trial in los angeles in which a 20 year old woman accuses instagram and youtube of harming her mental health that woman reached settlements with snap and tiktok which were originally named in the case if you were wondering like why aren't we hearing those names anymore yeah a study of 6 000 executives in australia germany the uk and the u.s by the national bureau of economic research or enber in Massachusetts found that 89 % of managers say AI has had no impact on volume of sales per employee over the past three years, but do expect that their companies to become more productive by 1.4 % over the next three years.

20:51So you're saying there's a chance. The California Department of Motor Vehicles will not suspend Tesla's manufacturing license after the company stopped using the terms autopilot and full self-driving capability in its marketing materials. It has replaced them with full self-driving supervised. Okay. Well, you know, you got to keep the DMV happy. Audible launched a feature called Immersion Reading in the Audible app that lets you see the text of the book while you listen. If you purchase the e-book anyway, The features already existed in the Kindle app. China's Neurocess, Neurocess, N-E-U-R-O-X-E-S-S.

21:40I want to say NeuroXS, but then that doesn't sound right either, because why would it be an excess? Anyway, that company is starting human trials for its brain-computer interface, with one paralyzed patient reporting the ability to control a computer cursor within five days of implantation. seagate and western digital told investors that hard drive stock is completely sold out through 2027 thanks to motang for posting the story in our subreddit yeah it just keeps spreading this is gonna get uglier before it gets better snap announced it has reached one billion dollars in annual revenue and has more than 25 million subscribers for its paid snapchat plus service anthropic announced the release of its mid-sized sonnet 4.6 which will be the default model for free and pro plan users perplexity executive told the financial times that the company has no plans to revisit its test of ads in perplexity services it did test them briefly in 2024 it seems to be the trend now to say we're not doing ads yeah ever since open ai said it everybody else is like, not us, not us.

22:51Nope. Yep. Not doing no, no plans until we have plans. A federal district court in California ruled that open AI has to stop using the term cameo for its Sora video app function after a lawsuit from the video message service cameo word up. And a Pili on CEO, Matthew balls, state of video game. 2026 report notes that global video game content sales grew 5.3 % in 2025. We like to end every episode here on DTNS with some shared perspectives, and that means you. Today, Steve relates his own experience with Vibe Coding. Yeah, thank you, Steve. This is really interesting. Steve writes, Recently, I've heard about loop coding, where you use a tool like Codex to do the full coding from start to finish.

23:43The only input is a specification and the tool will loop through evaluating what needs to be done, coding, testing, and repeating the process. That piqued my interest because I spent 20 years as a business analyst for a startup fintech SaaS company writing functional and technical specifications for our products and features. As boring as it sounds, I love writing functional specifications. As a proof of concept, I decided to use Codex to write a simple web app that can take a csv of my bank and credit card transactions and help my wife and i divide up shared household expenses chat gpt helped organize a spec in minutes that would normally take me a few hours i then handed that spec over to codex and it created the runtime environment wrote the code wrote the tests and produced a usable application in minutes it wasn't perfect but through a series of updates to the spec which it helped write and a few other interactive Q &A sessions, I had a workable prototype within a few hours.

24:42If I had this technology available when we began our startup, I would have easily sped up our time to market for enhancements and features. It would be simple to spin up multiple prototypes that we could touch and feel rather than using the tedious wireframes and user journeys we would draw by hand. I'm now looking at every problem I have as an opportunity to do something new and use an LLM to help me figure it out. It is quite empowering. Just sharing my experience, Steve. Oh, Steve, that's awesome. I know so many of, I was going to say all of you out there, but me too. Sometimes I'm like, all right, there's a tool that I can use to make my life easier, but for what?

25:28When I have to invoice somebody, can I make the LLM, make the invoice for me type thing. And this is a really, really good specific note of why this worked for Steve and his wife and their household and how he was like, it wasn't perfect, but I cared enough to tinker enough to make it actually work for us. And he got it done faster than he would have otherwise. Exactly. I think the other thing that was interesting about this to me was Steve likes writing specifications. And I think that's a part of this that gets missed is the LLMs don't magically read your mind and make things happen. You still have to be good at prompting it.

26:15You still have to be good at explaining what you want. I think we aren't going to see some of the revolution of this until it gets good enough to intuit what we want, if it ever can. Otherwise, it's going to be a skill you have to learn, which Steve already kind of has because he spent his whole career doing it. Right. But a lot of people are not naturally able to do that. So I think it works really well for Steve because he has a bit of an advantage there. It kind of reminds me of like, if you and I were to meet for the first time, Tom, and you were like, hey, Sarah, what kind of person are you?

26:50I'd be like, what? What kind of question is that? None of your business. But this is actually what you have to tell the model. The model has to know a lot about you to give you the thing that you wanted to do with your own brain. Yeah. And it can learn about you and kind of speed that up, especially if you do something like, you know, with Gemini being able to look at your email and stuff, but it's still not going to know everything. It's still not going to be able to know like what is truly important to you about this particular thing that you're trying to get done. Indeed. Well, again, thanks to Steve.

27:24If you out there are thinking about something we've talked about on the show, something that we might talk about on a future show, share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. We read every single email. Thanks to Steve for contributing to today's show. Thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business, folks. Become a patron if you haven't already. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon.

27:53The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.