It’s a wrap: News this week (July 1–July 7)

There have been multiple developments on the tech front this week. From Union Cabinet approval on the Data Privacy Bill to HPE’s plans to start manufacturing servers in India, this is the list of the most important developments this week for a quick catch-up:

India’s Data Privacy Bill approved by Union Cabinet

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill. The Bill will be taken to Parliament in the upcoming Monsoon Session to be passed as a law and once passed, it will be India’s first law on data privacy and data protection. 

The Bill entails penalising private as well as government entities ₹250 crore per instance in case of a data breach, which can be raised to ₹500 crores by the Data Protection Board that will be constituted as the appellate body under the law, as reported by Mint. The penalties will be decided on a case-to-case basis, depending on the severity, the scale and number of people impacted by the breach, and the clauses that have been specified in the Bill.

Chandrayaan-3 set for July 14 launch

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) announced that the lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 will be launched on July 14. Last week, Isro chief S Somnath told the media that the space organisation was looking at mid-July as the possible timeline for the mission launch. Chandrayaan-3 is built at a cost of ₹615 crore. The mission aims to successfully land on the lunar surface, followed by deploying the rover to study and conduct different experiments related to the Moon’s thermophysical properties, lunar seismicity, lunar surface plasma environment, and elemental composition.

Twitter-rival Threads is now live

After long speculation, Meta released its text-based app Threads to the public yesterday. Popularly positioned as a rival to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, Threads breached the 44 million registered users mark in under just 24 hours. Users can create text-based posts with a limit of 500 characters and share photos and videos of up to 5 minutes. 

In the blog, Meta said that Threads will soon be made compatible with ActivityPub to make Threads interoperable with other apps that support the ActivityPub protocol, for example, Mastodon and Wordpress “allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today”.

OpenAI’s GPT-4 API generally available

OpenAI has announced the general availability of GPT-4 application programming interface. It is now available to existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8K context. The API access will be offered to new developers by the end of this month and then apply rate limits depending on compute availability.

This week OpenAI also announced the formation of a new team, led by Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and co-founder to focus on developing methods to steer and control Superintelligent AI systems.  

HPE to manufacture in India

On Tuesday, US-headquartered Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to start manufacturing in India. In partnership with domestic manufacturer VVDN Technologies, HPE will produce high-volume servers worth $1 billion in the first five years.

These high-runner servers will be manufactured at the VVDN Technologies plant in Manesar in Haryana, the company said in a statement.