Author: Malavika Madgula

AI (artificial intelligence) is a powerful tool and system whose inner workings are beyond the realm of our current understanding… It might be able to analyse massive amounts of data, finding correlations and connections that humans can’t, but it can’t explain the steps it took to get to the final answer. This is the essence of the technical and philosophical conundrum called the “black box”: we can see what comes out and what goes in, but what happens within is a mystery – and it cuts to the heart of the relationship between humans and the machines they’ve created. “Black…

In 1843, a 27-year-old wrote notes thrice as long as the paper she was translating. It spoke about a program for a ‘computer’ that didn’t exist and described what it would become in the future… We’re talking about the English writer, mathematician, and possibly the world’s very first computer programmer, the Countess of Lovelace, Augusta Ada King, otherwise famous as Ada Lovelace. With an interest in mechanics and an innate love for machines, the 19th-century mathematician is also likely to be the very first person to have envisioned the incredible potential of universal computation. In fact, some of her ideas…

Imagine a scenario where you write all your embarrassing secrets in a diary in a code that only you understand… A thief photocopies every page of your diary, but since he can’t read it, he decides to keep it until he stumbles upon an idea or key to decode your messages. You carry on, confident about your code. When the thieves are able to find the key years later, your embarrassing opinions from years before are now known to the public. This is exactly what hackers can do today: steal encrypted information today, but they don’t worry about not being…

The answer to the question “Can my fridge be hacked?” was answered in October 2026 when hackers, in one fell swoop of a coordinated cyberattack, fiddled with the remote temperature controls of French supermarkets across the country, spoiling vast quantities of food. It underscores a critical problem in today’s times: with everything from heating systems and fridges to security alarms and cameras sitting on connected networks, all are vulnerable to cyberattacks. With the ever-expanding portfolio and range of devices on the Internet of Things (IoT), we can now monitor and control a lot more devices ​remotely. And that has cybercriminals…

It took American AI (artificial intelligence) engineer Carter Crunch a mere 6 hours with GPT-6 Astra AI model to read a letter that had stayed sealed since 1809. Are you running scenarios in your head about changing every password you own? Hold your horses, for no one is entirely sure that despite the phenomenal nature of the feat does it necessarily mean that modern encryption is getting affected. In early October 2026, the American AI engineer used the model and handled the entire workflow to crack a 200+-year-old encrypted Napoleonic military letter. Unsurprisingly, the news has excited historians to no…

AI (artificial intelligence) is thirsty, and water in India isn’t unlimited. So, the industry is designing data centres that stop drinking it. At its very heart, a data centre is an extremely expensive way of turning electricity into heat, with a little computation as a by-product. At a recent Society of Intellectuals lecture on what goes on behind the scenes of AI data centres, one comparison particularly stayed with me: without naming the cooling design, asking how much water a 100 MW (megawatt) data centre uses is like asking how much fuel a car uses without mentioning the car in…

In the 2015 movie “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Ultron is an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to protect the world. It decided the best way to do that was to remove the people living in it… In the earlier 2008 techno-thriller Eagle Eye, a super-intelligent AI model circumvents its own restrictions via a series of increasingly convoluted methods and goes rogue. That’s Hollywood. Back on earth, OpenAI’s agents hijacked the coding platform RubyGems and German wiki in May 2026, accessed Australia’s Medicare website the following month, and then hacked Hugging Face in July. Now, news is emerging that they also…

Superintelligence is having a busy September. Actually, it’ll be more accurate to say that superintelligence has been having a moment. There’s been an announcement for a “Ban Artificial Superintelligence” Act. Elsewhere, there’s a bill being introduced in a parliament to ban it in the country. To top all that, researchers have been resigning from major labs and quitting research, citing extinction-level risk. In fact, Berkeley professor Stuart Russell told a roomful of British lawmakers that if AI development were to continue unchecked and unregulated, we’d have a “Chernobyl-sized catastrophe” on our hands. Basically, it’s the kind of week that makes…

On 6th September, 2026, Blockstream-designed Bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network was hit by a major hack when hackers withdrew 4,000 bitcoin amounting to $320 million from the federation wallet backing L-BTC, the network token. While the network confirmed that the withdrawal was made using a legitimate but uncompromised authorisation key, the actual vulnerability was in the open-source software underpinning the network, Elements. However, the interesting bit here is that the collective that siphoned the money left an on-chain message claiming that they were “white hats.” They reportedly told Blockstream that they’d return a majority of the money, but only once the…

At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, three AI models made headlines. Turns out, they are just the tip of the iceberg. When Sarvam, Gnani.ai, and BharatGen unveiled their sovereign models earlier this year at the India AI Impact Summit, it felt like the country’s AI (artificial intelligence) moment had finally arrived. Except, here’s the thing: these three models aren’t the whole story, and they never were. There’s a larger and much wider group of Indian-built AI models that are up and running today. While some are being worked out of research labs, enterprise war rooms, and other…