Startup Digest: PhysicsWallah to invest Rs 120 Cr in upskilling, Relief for cab aggregators in Delhi & more 

Profitable edtech unicorn Physics Wallah, aims to invest Rs 120 crores in the next 2-3 years to bolster its upskilling platform PW Skills.

"The first part of the investment will go into our tech. The second set of our investment will go into our community. We try to offer a lot of courses for free. We have launched over 10 popular programmes for our community. The third set of deployment will happen in our job platform. With our partnerships, we are trying to accumulate all jobs on a single platform," Sudhanshu Kumar, CEO, PW Skills told CNBC-TV18 in an exclusive chat.

The company claims to have reached out to almost 1.5 lakh students, of which 50,000 students are basically paid students. According to PW Skills, close to 85-86 percent of students are coming from the small towns of India.

In a major relief for cab aggregators Ola, Uber and Rapido, the Delhi High Court has stayed a government notice banning bike taxi services in the national capital, as per reports.

The court also directed the Delhi Transport Department not to take any coercive steps against Rapido and others till such time policy is framed.

In February, the Delhi government had banned the likes of Ola, Uber and Rapido from plying bike taxis in the national capital.

Info Edge has written off its entire investment in B2B marketplace Bijnis, worth Rs 76.6 crore, as per reports.

Info Edge said it wrote off its entire investment in Bizcrum Infotech, the parent entity of Bijnis, after due consideration of factors including continuing cash burn, limited availability of cash in proportion to unspecified liabilities with respect to buyback obligations (including liquidation preference) of the company towards investors and uncertainty of future capital raise.

This is the second such writedown by the company, after it wrote off Rs 276 crore of its investment in Rahul Yadav-backed 4B Networks in the previous quarter.

Lendingkart, a digital lending platform for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), has clocked a net profit of Rs 120 crore at a group level for the year ended March 31, 2023.

The company said it has grown its loan book by 44 percent during the year 2022-23. With 1,000 crore disbursal rate per quarter, Lendingkart added that it ended the year with a total disbursement of around 4,000 crores.

Recording profitable growth in the last six quarters, the group has disbursed around 14,000 crores empowering MSMEs across 4000+ cities and towns in 11,700 pin codes, a statement said.

Britain's competition watchdog said social media giant Meta had offered to limit its use of other businesses' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace service to address the regulator's competition concerns.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to accept the commitments, which include advertisers being able to opt out of allowing their data to be used to improve the Facebook Marketplace classified ads platform.

CMA executive director of enforcement Michael Grenfell said, "Reducing the risk of Meta unfairly exploiting the data of businesses who advertise on its platform for its own competitive advantage could help many UK businesses who advertise there.

OpenAI has no plans to leave Europe, CEO Sam Altman said, reversing a threat made earlier this week to leave the region if it becomes too hard to comply with upcoming laws on artificial intelligence.

The EU is working on what could be the first set of rules globally to govern AI and Altman on Wednesday said the current draft of the EU AI Act was "over-regulating".

"We are excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave," Altman said in a tweet.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu's CEO Robin Li said that the company will "very soon" officially launch Ernie 3.5, a generative AI large-language model that will power Baidu's ChatGPT-like app Ernie Bot and upgrade its search engine.

Li made the announcement at the Zhongguancun Forum, one of China's most well-known techology forums, around two months after Ernie Bot was first shown to the public to mixed reviews.

Since then, Ernie Bot and other products powered by the company's generative AI large-language model have remained in trial mode, with a select number of companies and users invited to test the products and provide feedback.

Social media platform TikTok said it is in the early stages of exploring a chatbot called "Tako" that can converse with users about short videos and help them discover content, and is conducting tests with select users in the Philippines.

TikTok said Tako is designed to help users discover "entertaining and inspiring content" on the app.

Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli-based app intelligence firm Watchful Technologies said it had found Tako on some versions of the TikTok app on Apple mobile devices.

Twitter is likely to pull out from a voluntary EU code of practice to tackle disinformation, but the move does not mean it will quit Europe, an EU official said.

The European Commission beefed up the code last year, requiring companies to submit regular progress reports with data on how much advertising revenue they had averted from disinformation actors.

New obligations include providing information on the number or value of political advertisements accepted or rejected and instances of manipulative behaviours detected.

Alibaba Group said it planned to hire 15,000 people this year, dismissing rumours circulating on Chinese social media in recent days that the company planned to cut 20 percent of its workers.

In a post on the firm's official Weibo account, Alibaba said that among the 15,000, more than 3,000 people would be newly-graduated students.

"Talent movement is what all enterprises have been doing. In Alibaba, talents have been coming in and out, moving normally," the company said in the Weibo post.