Transformer by Mint | AI rules face hurdles, Tata’s $1.3 bn electronics bet, and OpenAI’s India ramp-up

A quick recap: India’s proposed rules to crack down on deepfake content on social media platforms wanted every piece of content—be it text, audio, photos or videos—to be tagged by platforms if they were altered in any way by algorithms.

This has caused a challenge. Stakeholders of the industry told me last week that requiring any content modified by algorithms isn’t a sign of risks arising out of AI.

“Today, even if you take a photo and apply a basic colour filter on it, that also would need to be tagged as algorithmically modified. The question is, would this definition be fair?," said a senior policy consultant as India scrambled to submit their responses to the AI tagging rules.

Tech firms, on this note, said that the current format of the rules will create confusion, operational challenges, and potentially, make the process of posting content online much, much slower. “The ministry must listen to the feedback we’re submitting, and at the very least, offer a far more detailed series of definitions. Our goal is to crack down on content that deliberately conveys the wrong information—this current format somewhat penalizes everything," a second consultant added.

The IT ministry, as it stands, extended the window of feedback submissions until 13 November. What comes out of this will be crucial, for it will lay down a key precedent for how India will legislate and regulate technologies in a world that’s run by AI.

OpenAI India roles

Jas Bardia, my colleague in Bengaluru—who also happens to know the best food joints in the city—met Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI’s chief technology officer for business applications. In what was an interesting chat with one of the top executives, we learnt that the world’s most valuable AI startup today is stepping up engineer hires in India.

Why? The company is starting to hire solutions architects in India. These ‘architects’ are engineers who sit in between the sales and core engineering teams—and make a company’s product better adapted for what businesses need.

This means that OpenAI is taking Indian businesses more and more seriously, and in the long run, are taking a leaf out of Google and Microsoft’s books by tailoring its AI platforms for what businesses may want over the next five years.

This is great for engineers in India, for as India’s IT services firms cut down on hiring, AI could spell a boom.

Tata’s billion-dollar gamble

A tally of the three top private holdings under Tata Sons, India’s largest conglomerate by revenue, showed that the 157-years-old industrial group’s net investments in its electronics entity has crossed $1.3 billion.

This shows the rising importance of electronics manufacturing in India. Since setting up Tata Electronics in 2020, Tata has emerged as the single top assembler of Apple’s iPhones in India. The company generated $7.5 billion last fiscal, and employed over 65,000 people.

This is only the start. The entity is being led by former Intel Foundry president, Randhir Thakur. Last February, it announced an $11-billion investment to set-up India’s first private chip fab. Over the past 18 months, it also acquired the India operations of Taiwanese electronics assemblers—Pegatron and Wistron Corp, two of Apple’s top global partners.

Is this the next top company to emerge out of the house of Tata? It has all the makings, and analysts believe so too.

Flipkart’s fashion faux-pas

Our colleague Sowmya Ramasubramanian, who tracks startups actively, wrote a spiffing long story last week: on the steady decline of Flipkart’s stronghold on fashion e-commerce. Case in point: over the past three years, Flipkart’s fashion market share has fallen 18%. Myntra, owned by Flipkart, has declined by 17% too in the same time.

In ways, this shows rising competition among India’s top e-commerce platforms. Ajio, owned by the Reliance group, has more than doubled its market share during this time. Meesho, too, is a roving entity especially in the most value-conscious markets.

What does this say of India’s tech-laden shopping ecosystem? Here’s our 1500 words on what is a riveting read, if I may say so myself.

AI hits India’s tech jobs

Continuing in the same vein as OpenAI’s rising hiring, Jas also reported last week that while AI startups are looking for more engineers, the IT firms are taking a different trajectory.

India’s top IT firms, which have for decades been the biggest mass recruiters of engineers, are set to hire fewer engineers per dollar, going forward. This is a big concern: so far, the growth of jobs at the IT firms were directly linked to their own revenue growths. Now, however, AI is automating a lot of processes and operations. This means that in the near future, job growth is not necessarily going to be so.

Here’s our deep dive into what this means for the future of India’s tech workforce.

In other news: India’s tech safety standards, and MacBook Pro M5

At the start of the week, my colleague Jatin Grover and I found an interesting little development brewing over the past year: setting tech safety standards for electronics and devices across critical sectors. Think hospitals, space and other such sectors. This move from the Centre comes in light of rising cyber security concerns. But, the move to create minimum safety standards for India’s connected tech infrastructure isn’t without challenges. Here’s why.

Finally, we reviewed Apple’s top custom processor so far in its latest edition of the bestselling laptop, MacBook Pro. As it turns out, the laptop isn’t a big upgrade from its previous edition. However, the presence of neural accelerators means that the all-new M5 MacBook Pro of 2025 is the best laptop in the market so far for AI engineers. If you’re looking to build your own game on Unreal Engine, or training a small model based on a single-GPU framework, this is the laptop you’d want. In fact, its functional upgrades really mean that you appreciate its design consistency, too.

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.