Is DeepSeek bursting the AI bubble?; What the tech sector wants from Budget

Hello,

India’s appetite for food services is growing, with estimates suggesting the market could reach $144-152 billion by 2030, according to a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants.

Dining out and food delivery, thanks to convenience and the growing popularity of diverse cuisines, remain hot segments. However, it is a tough market to crack. The report found that only 1-2% of companies in India have surpassed Rs 500 crore in revenue, with multi-brand operators leading the way.

Foodtech startup Zomato, one of the leading players in the sector, is paying close attention. It has appointed its former head of growth, Shalin Bhatt, as head of its dining-out business, as the company looks to strengthen the segment amid moderation in food delivery.

Sources have also told YourStory that Zomato might start pilots of its 10-minute food delivery programme next week. The company, however, declined to comment.

Moving on, in a story that would make Popeye the Sailor Man proud, a woman entrepreneur from Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu has built a business by making readymade mixes that use spinach as the main ingredient. 

An easy and tasty way to incorporate leafy greens into the diet.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Is DeepSeek bursting the AI bubble?
• What the tech sector wants from Budget
• Using robotics to end manual scavenging

Here’s your trivia for today: Which South American country borders both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean?

Artificial Intelligence

Is DeepSeek bursting the AI bubble?

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI landscape. Through ingenious engineering, the Chinese startup has drastically reduced its computing power needs, sparking concerns about the future demand for Nvidia’s high-end chips in the West.

Tech investor Marc Andreessen has described this as “AI’s Sputnik moment.” This is mainly due to two underlying reasons—the cost-effectiveness of DeepSeek’s AI models and their ability to run efficiently by opting for lower-cost hardware. 

Breakthrough:

• DeepSeek’s engineers, in their research paper, have revealed that they used approximately 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips—less advanced than most AI chips—to train the model. 
• It rolled out a preview of its reasoning model, R1, and v3, an advanced LLM with a 700GB size and 685 billion parameters—outpacing any model previously available for free download. DeepSeek’s v3 has 685 billion parameters, meaning it can handle more complex tasks compared to Meta’s Llama 3.
• “This model’s success challenges the dominance of Big Tech … For India and other emerging markets, this represents a unique opportunity to build context-specific AI solutions, leveraging this democratised frontier to solve local problems,” says Jaspreet Bindra, Co-founder and CEO, AI&Beyond. 

Funding Alert

Startup: Leap

Amount: $65M

Round: Series E

Startup: Gallabox

Amount: $3.5M

Round: Seed

Union Budget

What tech sector wants from Budget

India’s technology industry, valued at over $250 billion-plus, is hopeful that the upcoming Union Budget will introduce essential tax reforms and announce measures to boost investments in R&D.

Great expectations:

• NASSCOM has recommended that the safe harbour regime should be made available. The safe harbour rules offer a framework where the authorities accept the taxation declared by the companies.
• “We strongly believe that the government’s sustained emphasis on incentivising investments in R&D and creating a conducive ecosystem for technology-led advancements can unlock immense potential for engineering services firms,” said Amit Chadha, Managing Director, L&T Technology Services.
• There is a suggestion that the government should create a dedicated DeepTech fund (in the form of Fund of Funds) structured with flexibility for longer gestation (10 years with extensions). 

Startup

Using robotics to end manual scavenging

In 2016, a tragic incident in Kozhikode, Kerala, claimed the lives of three men while they were cleaning a sewer. 

The incident shook Rashid K, Arun George, Vimal Govind MK, and Nikhil NP and veered them towards innovation to eliminate manual scavenging with Genrobotic Innovations. They created Bandicoot—a fully functional robot capable of mimicking human actions to clean manholes.

Machine holes:

• Bandicoot was first deployed in Kerala and soon spread across 19 states and three union territories. “Today, 300 Bandicoots operate 37 sites and have cleaned over 6,000 manholes,” states Rashid.
• Through collaborations with the Ministry of Social Justice, Genrobotics has trained over 3,000 sanitation workers so far, and transformed the roles of more than 1,000 workers into robot operators.
• Genrobotics has expanded its innovations to other critical areas. Wilboar to clean wells in sewage treatment plants, G-Crow application monitors manhole cleaning activities, and G-Gaiter assists patients with stroke-triggered paraplegic conditions.

News & updates

• AI model: Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model that it claimed surpassed the highly acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
• Rising profits: Norway’s sovereign wealth fund—the largest of its kind in the world—posted a full-year profit of 2.5 trillion kroner ($222.4 billion) on Wednesday, fuelled by a tech rally. The fund’s 2024 profit surpassed the record set a year earlier when it achieved a full-year profit of 2.22 trillion kroner.
• Gloomy forecast: The German government slashed its 2025 growth forecast for the country’s economy, Europe’s biggest, to just 0.3% after it shrank for two consecutive years. The new projection is much lower than the government’s previous forecast of 1.1% growth, issued in October.

Which South American country borders both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean?

Answer: Colombia

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