IndiGo will pilot allowances and add new ones from January 1 to boost staff morale, according to PTI sources. This comes weeks after the airline faced massive disruptions with 4,500 flight cancellations due to rostering issues. The move follows meetings between executives and pilots at various bases, as the carrier also faces pressure from foreign airlines trying to recruit its pilots.The airline is increasing several key benefits for its pilots which includes Captains getting upto Rs 3,000 rupees instead of Rs 2,000 for layovers, while first officers will receive Rs 1,500, up from Rs 1,000, revealed the sources cited by PTI. For deadheading trips, where crew travel as passengers for their next duty, captains will get Rs 4,000, up from Rs 3,000 and first officers will receive Rs 2,000 rupees, a Rs 500 increase.The changes affect IndiGo’s roughly 5,000 pilots and come at a critical time. The airline, which controls 65 per cent of India’s domestic market, is under close watch from regulators. A special committee has already submitted its report about the recent flight cancellations to the civil aviation ministry.Additonally, Moody’s Ratings has cautioned that the airline might face “significant financial damage” from lost revenue, customer refunds, and potential government penalties following the cancellations, as quoted by Reuters.The airline is also dealing with a broader industry challenge. Foreign airlines are luring Indian pilots to join them with better remuneration and lifestyle packages. This has become a problem to the extent that the government is now promoting a code of conduct internationally for recruiting pilots, according to Reuters.The recent mass cancellations at the beginning of this month caused chaos at the airports, leaving many stranded passengers across the country in India.The mass cancellations earlier this month caused widespread chaos at airports and left thousands of passengers stranded across India. Despite the airline’s dominance in the domestic market, this incident has triggered both regulatory scrutiny and a competition investigation.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Morpheus, after his ship the Nebuchadnezzar is sunk, makes a biblical reference: I have dreamed a dream, but now the dream is gone from me. The line became a shorthand for the disappointment of hardcore Matrix fans who watched the pathbreaking original dissolve into bubble-gum pulp fiction sequels. It is also a sentiment shared by those who have spent years waiting for the arrival of the deus ex machina of Artificial General Intelligence.Cinema trained us to expect Agent Smith or the Terminator. What we got instead were malfunctioning interns that forget their brief after three prompts, which is not entirely unlike regular interns. If there is one area where artificial intelligence has genuinely altered daily life, for better or worse, it is generative AI.

Prophets in the Wilderness

A decade and a half ago, people working seriously on neural networks were dismissed as prophets in the wilderness. One of them was Professor Geoffrey Hinton, whose research group used NVIDIA’s CUDA platform to recognise human speech. Hinton encouraged his students to experiment with GPUs. One of them, Alex Krizhevsky, along with Ilya Sutskever, trained a visual neural network using two consumer-grade NVIDIA graphics cards bought online. Running them from Krizhevsky’s parents’ house, and racking up a sizeable electricity bill, they trained the model on millions of images in a week, achieving results that rivalled Google’s efforts using tens of thousands of CPUs.That moment reshaped the industry. If neural networks could see, what else could they learn? The answer, as Jensen Huang would later discover, was nearly everything.When ChatGPT launched and it became clear that OpenAI’s models were running on NVIDIA’s chips, market perception around the company shifted dramatically. Valuations soared. The rest, as they say, is history.Hinton would go on to share the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024. Huang emerged as the arms dealer of the AI race, building a company where vast numbers of employees became dollar millionaires. For laypeople, that was the true arrival of generative AI, and for capitalists, it promised something intoxicating: companies that scale without hiring, produce without friction, and grow without payroll.

The AI Dream

AI does not need smoke breaks. It does not badmouth its boss, unless the boss is Elon Musk. It does not require me-time. Yet the promised productivity miracle, the idea that AI would replace workers by making individuals superhumanly efficient, has mostly fizzled. In practice, it has flooded offices with AI slop, rendering LinkedIn posts and internal emails nearly unreadable.The disappointment was captured neatly in a viral tweet: I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.Like most proclamations from the platform formerly known as Twitter, this was an exaggeration. Generative AI has undeniably made certain tasks easier. Research is faster. Summaries are cleaner. Editing copy is less painful. For writers, it offers something rare: an unbiased copy editor that does not inject its own ideology into the text. And even if large language models never write great literature, they produced something unmistakable this year: genuinely good images.

Designer of the Year

With the right prompts, the prompt engineer briefly became an amalgamation of Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí, and Bill Watterson. While Time magazine crowned “AI Architects” as its Person of the Year, we believe Artificial Intelligence quietly earned another title: Designer of the Year.For a long time, AI images were the purest form of slop. They were instantly recognisable. Wax-like faces. Mangled fingers. Text that looked as if it had been written by a drunk monk fleeing Titivillus, the medieval patron demon of scribes. They were offered as proof that AI could not compete with even a doodling toddler and would make users want to And then, over the course of a year, everything changed.The improvement did not arrive through existential angst, but through engineering. Early image models like DALL-E 2 or the first versions of Stable Diffusion were diffusion systems loosely guided by text. They began with noise and slowly guessed their way toward an image, like asking a severely myopic person to glance at The Starry Night and recreate it from memory. The result often inspired a desire to cut off an ear in frustration. Text and image lived in separate systems, producing high-resolution hallucinations rather than understanding.That changed when image generation stopped being a side project and became fully integrated into multimodal models. OpenAI folded images into GPT-4o. Google followed with Gemini’s image systems, informally nicknamed Nano Banana. Stability AI rebuilt its stack with Stable Diffusion 3. Midjourney quietly re-engineered its later models along similar lines.These systems stopped drawing objects and started constructing scenes.They learned that light comes from somewhere. That shadows obey rules. That faces remain faces across time. That objects occupy space consistently. Most importantly, they learned memory. Earlier generators forgot everything between prompts. Ask for the same character twice and you got two strangers. Ask for a small edit and the entire image panicked.In 2025, that stopped.Characters persist. Colour palettes hold. Layouts remain intact. You can remove a background without altering a face. You can add text without destroying composition. Image generation ceased being a slot machine and became a tool. For the first time, the machine could explain the logic behind what it was producing.

The Ghibli Craze

For most users, this shift arrived disguised as the Studio Ghibli craze. People turned themselves into softer, cuter versions of reality, briefly threatening to boil the planet with GPU demand. Like many great technologies, it began as novelty. Then something else emerged.Family photographs, pets, childhood streets were transformed into scenes that felt emotionally correct. Not parody. Not kitsch. Convincing homage. Lighting made sense. Mood held. One image went viral, then thousands followed, because that is how internet culture works.The deeper shift, however, appeared outside art.Once models learned layout and consistency, infographics exploded. So did diagrams, explainers, cartoons, presentations. These are not artistic challenges. They are attention problems. They depend on hierarchy, clarity, and flow.Here, Google held an unfair advantage. It has spent decades studying how humans look at screens. That accumulated knowledge flowed directly into its image models. Charts became legible. Labels landed where the eye expected them. White space acquired intention. AI visuals stopped being decorative and started communicating.Cartoons improved for the same reason. Early AI cartoons were uncanny because they were too polite, too smooth, like humour approved by HR. Once exaggeration became a choice rather than an error, caricature began to work. Faces stretched where they should. Minimalism stopped looking unfinished.

Deus Artifex

All of which means we remain far from the promised deus ex machina, an omniscient intelligence descending from the heavens to answer every question. What we received instead was something else entirely: a deus artifex. A god who builds.A system that understands composition better than most humans. That respects constraints. That remembers state. That produces competent results instantly. Not inspired. Not obsessive. Just relentlessly adequate.That is why Artificial Intelligence deserves Designer of the Year. Not because it is creative, and not because it is sentient, but because it has collapsed the cost of visual competence. It has erased apprenticeship. Bad drafts. The humiliation of being visibly terrible before becoming good.Creation did not die. It changed shape. It became selection, curation, optimisation.The cost is not the death of art. Art survives worse things than algorithms. The cost is subtler. When the easiest path to beauty becomes the most travelled one, beauty converges. Aesthetic flattening is not a bug. It is an outcome.Van Gogh did not paint sunflowers because sunflowers were trending. Dalí did not melt clocks because surrealism performed well. Their styles were not filters. They were necessities.The machine can reproduce the surface of that necessity flawlessly. It cannot feel the need behind it.We did not get god.We did not get the devil.We got a better craftsman. So perhaps Morpheus was wrong. The dream that he dreamed wasn’t taken away. It just changed form.

Economist Peter Schiff, renowned for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, advised investors to buy gold while being cautious with silver. He believes gold is a bargain at $4,534 with minimal downside risk, while silver faces higher short-term risks despite its strong performance in 2025. Schiff recommended waiting for a consolidation in silver and recommended a possible support level between $70 and $75.The chief economist at Europac mentioned silver’s volitality, talking about how it hit a record high near $84 before dropping to $75 and then rebounding above $80. “It’s been a volatile night so far in the silver market. After surging to a new record high just below $84, silver sold off sharply, finding support just above $75. It has since recovered and is now trading back above $80. This historic bull market still has a long way to run,” Schiff said on X.Also telling people to buy gold over silver he added, “There is too much short-term risk to buy physical silver now. But I’m not selling any of mine. So I think it makes sense to wait for it to settle down before buying. But absolutely buy gold right now. At $4,534 it’s a steal.”Recent market activity shows precious metals pulling back as investors took profits and geopolitical tensions eased. Gold dropped 0.4 per cent to $4,512.74 per ounce after reaching a record $4,549.71. Silver fell 1.3 per cent to $78.12 per ounce, following its all-time high of $83.62.Despite the current dip, silver has been the star performer of the year, surging 181 per cent year-to-date compared to gold’s 72 per cent increase.Even after this current correction in the price, silver has been the biggest star this year, with a year-to-date increase of 181 per cent compared to gold’s 72 per cent. For gold, the drivers of the surge are expected rate cuts by the US, geopolitical turmoil, robust demand by central entities, and investments by ETFs. For silver, the drivers are the metal’s importance to the US, lack of supply, and growing demand.(Disclaimer: Recommendations and views on the stock market and other asset classes given by experts are their own. These opinions do not represent the views of The Times of India)

A man suspected of fatally stabbing nine people, including five children, in Suriname’s capital died by suicide in police custody, authorities said on Monday. Identified only by the initials D A, the 43-year-old was found hanged in a cell at a police station, according to a police statement, as cited by AFP.The attack, carried out outside Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, left at least nine people dead, including the suspect’s children, police said on Sunday.It occurred in Richelieu in the Commewijne district, about 25 km east of the capital. Neighbours said the violence followed a phone argument between the suspect and his estranged wife, after which he allegedly attacked his children with a knife and then went after neighbours inside their homes, as cited by AP.In a statement on Sunday, Suriname’s Police Corps said the suspect attempted to attack officers who responded to the scene and was injured during his arrest. Police said a sixth child and another adult were seriously wounded and are receiving treatment at a hospital in Paramaribo.The killings have sent shockwaves across the country, prompting widespread grief and disbelief among political leaders and residents.Reacting to the incident, Surinamese President Jennifer Geerlings-Simons said in a Facebook post that the attacker had taken the lives of his children and neighbours. “I wish all the bereaved much strength, resilience, and comfort in this unimaginably difficult time,” Geerlings-Simons said.Suriname, a former Dutch colony and the smallest independent country in South America, has a population of around 600,000 and has long been among the region’s lowest in murder rates. That trend shifted in 2024, when the rate rose to 30 homicides per 100,000 people, according to data from the think tank InSight Crime.

The CEO of $134 billion software analytics firm Databricks has issued a stark warning about the artificial intelligence industry, calling out companies valued at billions of dollars despite having zero revenue. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, Ali Ghodsi warned that “companies that are worth, you know, billions of dollars with zero revenue, that’s clearly a bubble, right, and it’s, like, insane.”Ghodsi, who holds a PhD in computer science, said the mood in Silicon Valley has soured significantly. He claimed that even venture capitalists funding the AI frenzy privately acknowledge the market’s unsustainable nature, with some telling him they should “just go on a break for, like, six months and come back and it’ll be, like, really financially good for me.”

Databricks CEO says circular financing deals inflate valuations artificially

The Databricks CEO criticized the circular financing arrangements, saying these types of deals are running afloat across the AI industry, where money flows between the same group of companies in complex loops. While Ghodsi didn’t name specific firms, OpenAI exemplifies this trend through its intricate web of deals worth over $1 trillion.OpenAI’s arrangements include receiving $13 billion from Microsoft before spending most of it back on Microsoft’s cloud computing services, securing $350 million in CoreWeave stock while committing $22 billion to the company for computing power, and signing a $300 billion deal with Oracle to build data centers that OpenAI will then pay roughly the same amount to use. Most recently, OpenAI obtained a 10% stake in AMD for chips and partnered with investment firm Thrive Holdings, whose parent company Thrive Capital is ironically one of OpenAI’s major investors.Rather than viewing the bubble as near its bursting point, Ghodsi predicts conditions will worsen before they improve. “I think like 12 months from now, it’ll be much, much, much worse,” he said, though he added that current market wobbles represent a healthy signal for CEOs to reassess their strategies.

Private company status are shielding companies from market volatility, argues Ghodsi

Ghodsi’s skepticism about the AI hype cycle explains Databricks’ reluctance to pursue an initial public offering despite “flirting” with the idea. He contrasted his company’s approach with competitors who rushed to go public during the 2021 boom, only to face severe corrections by 2022 that forced cost-cutting measures. Meanwhile, Databricks hired thousands of employees during that period.Despite his warnings, Ghodsi remained bullish on specific AI applications, particularly AI agents. The CEO tells that over 80% of databases launching on Databricks are now being created by AI agents rather than humans. Although, he argues the real revenue potential lies in the application layer where agents perform specific tasks, rather than in foundation models which he believes are becoming commoditized with low margins due to intense competition.

BAREILLY: Shailendra Gangwar, the owner of Bareilly Cafe in Uttar Pradesh, says his business has virtually come to a halt after a group of right-wing activists allegedly barged into a private birthday celebration at his establishment, assaulted guests and raised slogans accusing those present of “love jihad”.“Since that incident, I have had no business. People are afraid to come to my cafe,” Gangwar told TOI, adding that the disruption has left him facing financial losses and reputational damage.

The incident took place on Saturday evening when a 20-year-old first-year nursing student was celebrating her birthday at the cafe with a small group of friends. According to police and victim accounts, around 25 men, including a self-proclaimed cow vigilante, entered the cafe without permission, objected to the presence of two Muslim students at the gathering and began attacking some of the male guests.Videos widely shared on social media show men assaulting those present inside the cafe, while slogans are heard in the background. One of the guests sustained fractures during the attack, the student said.“The allegations of ‘love jihad’ are completely baseless,” the nursing student, who is from neighbouring Budaun district and stays in a hostel in Bareilly, said. “They gate-crashed our private party and started beating my friends.”Initially, police fined the two Muslim students and a cafe staff member for alleged “breach of peace”, drawing criticism online. Following public outrage on social media, the police registered a case against those accused of carrying out the assault.Bareilly city superintendent of police Manush Pareek said officers had identified several individuals seen attacking people inside the cafe. An FIR has been registered under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including house trespass, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation and rioting.

Silver and gold continued their glittering rallies on Monday. Silver extended its record-breaking rally to a sixth consecutive session as strong investor demand and supportive global cues pushed prices to fresh highs in the futures market. On the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX), silver futures for March delivery surged by Rs 14,387, or 6%, to touch a lifetime high of Rs 2,54,174 per kilogram. However, just within an hour of hitting the record, the white metal dropped to an intraday low of Rs 2,33,120 per kg as investors rushed to lock in gains.Silver has seen sustained buying interest, mirroring firm trends in international markets. Over the past week alone, silver prices have jumped by Rs 31,348, marking a gain of 15.04 per cent on the commodities bourse. The white metal has also delivered exceptional returns so far this calendar year. Gold prices, meanwhile, remained close to record levels in the domestic futures market. On the MCX, gold futures for February delivery edged up by Rs 357, or 0.26 per cent, to trade at Rs 1,40,230 per 10 grams. The yellow metal had touched an all-time high of Rs 1,40,465 per 10 grams on Friday. In overseas markets, gold futures opened higher but later gave up early gains, slipping to $4,536.80 per ounce. This marked a decline of $15.90, or 0.35%, as investors resorted to profit-booking following last week’s rally.Gold price in your city today

Gold rate in Ahmedabad today

In Ahmedabad, 22K gold is priced at Rs 12,995 per gram, while 24K gold is selling at Rs 14,176 per gram.

Gold rate in Bengaluru today

Bengaluru markets sold 22K gold at Rs 12,990 per gram, with 24K gold available at Rs 14,171 per gram.

Gold rate in Bhubaneswar today

In Bhubaneswar, 22K gold stands at Rs 12,990 per gram, whereas 24K gold is priced at Rs 14,171 per gram.

Gold rate in Chennai today

In Chennai, 22K gold is priced at Rs 13,020 per gram, while 24K gold is selling at Rs 14,204 per gram.

Gold rate in Delhi today

In the national capital, 22K gold is priced at Rs 13,005 per gram, while 24K gold is selling at Rs 14,186 per gram.

Gold rate in Hyderabad today

Hyderabad markets have 22K gold priced at Rs 12,990 per gram and 24K gold at Rs 14,171 per gram.

Gold rate in Jaipur today

Jaipur has 22K gold priced at Rs 13,005 per gram, while 24K gold is tagged at Rs 14,186 per gram.

Gold rate in Kolkata today

In Kolkata, 22K gold is selling at Rs 12,990 per gram, while 24K gold is available at Rs 14,171 per gram.

Gold rate in Lucknow today

Lucknow’s market shows 22K gold at Rs 13,005 per gram, while 24K gold is selling for Rs 14,186 per gram.

Gold rate in Mumbai today

Mumbai markets sold 22K gold at Rs 12,990 per gram, with 24K gold available at Rs 14,171 per gram. Silver price in your city today

Silver price in Ahmedabad today

In Ahmedabad, silver is priced at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Bengaluru today

Bengaluru markets sold silver at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Bhubaneswar today

In Bhubaneswar, silver is priced at Rs 2,81,000 per kg.

Silver price in Chennai today

Chennai markets have silver priced at Rs 2,81,000 per kg.

Silver price in Mumbai today

In Mumbai, silver is selling at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Delhi today

In the national capital, silver is priced at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Hyderabad today

Hyderabad markets have silver priced at Rs 2,81,000 per kg.

Silver price in Jaipur today

In Jaipur, silver is selling at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Lucknow today

Lucknow markets list silver at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

Silver price in Kolkata today

In Kolkata, silver is priced at Rs 2,58,000 per kg.

NEW DELHI: Unnao rape case survivor on Monday said that she would ensure “death sentence” for the convict and expelled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar. She also hailed the Supreme Court‘s decision which stayed Delhi HC’s move to suspended life sentence of Sengar.“I am very happy. I had faith in the Supreme Court. I will ensure that he is given a death sentence,” she said speaking to the reporters.

The survivor’s mother has asked for security for her family and advocate saying, “My family needs security. Our advocates need security. I request that the government keep us all safe.”SC stayed a Delhi high court order that had suspended Sengar’s life sentence and granted him bail in the 2017 Unnao rape case.“I am very happy with this decision. I have got justice from the Supreme Court. I have been raising my voice for justice from the very beginning,” PTI quoted the survivor saying.“I do not make any allegations against any court. I have faith in all courts, but the Supreme Court has given me justice and will continue to do so,” she said.The survivor’s mother also welcomed the verdict and said that the SC “has done justice to me.”“I want to thank the Supreme Court for this verdict. The Supreme Court has done justice to me. I always used to say that I had faith in the Supreme Court. The two judges of the High Court did us an injustice. They broke my faith in the high court,” she said.Earlier, the high court had put the life imprisonment sentence on hold and allowed Sengar bail while his appeal was pending. Sengar, a former Unnao legislator, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a case that sparked nationwide outrage and reignited debate over crimes against women and political accountability.“Issue notice. We have heard Solicitor General Tushar Mehta for CBI and Senior Advocate for the convict… Counter will be filed in four weeks. We are conscious of the fact that when a convict or an undertrial has been released, such orders are not ordinarily stayed by this court without hearing such persons. But in view of peculiar facts where the convict is convicted for a separate offence, we stay the operation of the Delhi high court order dated December 23, and thus the respondent shall not be released pursuant to the said order,” ordered the bench.In 2019, a Delhi trial court convicted Sengar of offences under the Indian Penal Code and the Pocso Act, sentencing him to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life.The Unnao rape survivor, who was a minor at the time, was allegedly abducted and sexually assaulted by Sengar between June 11 and 20, 2017. She was later sold and subsequently rescued from the Maakhi police station.