Govt ban impacts loan apps🚫, Paytm📈, Pichai explains newly introduced 'Bard'🤖

Government ban impacts non-Chinese lending apps, Paytm says profitability ‘sustainable’, What is Bard? Google CEO explains, Funding Deals and more.

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Feb 07, 2023

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Government ban impacts non-Chinese lending apps LazyPay, Kissht🚫

Not just China-origin apps, a bunch of Indian lending apps too have been taken down after the Centre banned 94 lending apps with foreign links.

PayU’s buy-now-pay-later service LazyPay and Kissht are some of the apps unavailable to customers. Kissht, in which Chinese conglomerate Fosun owned more than 17% stake but has since divested to Singapore funds, says it is working to resolve the issue.

A senior IT ministry official said some loan apps without Chinese links were also a part of the 230 banned apps.

Paytm says operating level profitability ‘sustainable’📈

Paytm’s parent entity One 97 Communications Ltd, which last week reported positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation and employee stock option costs of Rs 31 crore for the quarter that ended December 31, said on Monday that the operating level profitability was “sustainable".

Paytm’s reported operating profit improved by Rs 424 crore from the year-ago period, and margins improved to 2% of revenue from a year ago.

One 97 Communications' shares ended 6.3% higher on the BSE at Rs 558 on Monday.

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What is Bard? Google CEO Sundar Pichai explains the newly introduced AI chatbot🤖

Google has introduced a new experimental AI chatbot named ‘Bard’, a conversational service apparently aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft.

Bard comes in less than two weeks after Microsoft disclosed it's pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blogpost wrote, “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models."

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