Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani gets emotional as he listens to his son Anant Ambani’s address during the Jio Platforms IPO ceremony.

I got emotional when I learned that Qualcomm is to lay off more than 1,000 jobs in India next month, according to a report from ET. Anger is an emotion too, right?

I got even more emotional when I read that Microsoft will offer voluntary buyout (severance) packages to about 60,000 employees in India, US, UK and Canada. This is after the company has spent billions on AI infrastructure and related costs, and is now looking to control costs. This is bad – in many ways it’s worse than news about layoffs. It means that more layoffs are to come, and those who did not take this severance pay will be laid off without severance pay.

Anyway, Jio Platforms is now officially public. The biggest IPO, and already the second biggest Indian company (by some sort of measure) behind only – wait for it – Reliance Industries Limited. This announcement was made by Reliance themselves, so take it for what you will.

Headlines

• From November 1, all incoming calls from unknown numbers in India will display the caller’s name and phone number. This is as per the Government’s new caller ID rule that was announced much earlier.
• WhatsApp and Telegram’s sim-binding rule to take effect on January 1, 2027. That means if your phone does not have a valid SIM (or eSIM), you won’t (should not) be able to use WhatsApp or Telegram.
• Bengaluru-based eMudhra will exit its global SSL/TLS certificate business after eight weak cryptographic keys raised security concerns, prompting Google and Mozilla to block affected certificates. These certificates help verify website identities and secure online connections. The company said it revoked the affected certificate authorities within 14 hours of discovering the issue, adding that no data had been breached.
• IIT Kharagpur is setting up the Benjamin Gupta School of Physical AI, an initiative aimed at integrating AI with physics, engineering and biological sciences. The ₹35 crore project is being funded through a ₹12.5 crore contribution from the Vinod Gupta family, ₹10 crore from an anonymous alumnus and the remaining amount from the institute.
• US based AI services company Immobile lays off nearly 550 employees in India without notice. Literally without notice – some employees stepped
• Sarvam AI signs an MoU with the Ministry of Defense to drive AI adoption across armed forces. The Karnataka Government can take note.
• SBI suffered a data breach – preliminary analysis of around 3.75 Lakh records on the dark web identified 3,897 customer records containing personal information. SBI has engaged an independent CERT-In-empanelled cybersecurity agency to investigate and said its core banking operations remain unaffected.

And finally, Adani tries to sue Indian tech legend Sabeer Bhatia (the OG founder of hotmail), who gave a fitting reply. I won’t link it here, but go look him up on X.

Book Recommendation of the Week

Kevin Roose is out with a new book – called AGI Chronicles. The timing of this could never be better.