Author: Neel Achary

Tesla Unveils Flying Roadster That Performs Mid-Air Flip in Stunning Demonstration

Austin, Texas Oct 16: Electric vehicle giant Tesla has stunned audiences with a dramatic demonstration of its long-awaited next-generation Roadster, showcasing a vehicle that briefly takes flight, performs a mid-air flip and lands safely.

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The demonstration took place on October 15 at a SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas, where Tesla CEO Elon Musk presented a glimpse of what could be a radical new direction for high-performance electric cars.

“Turns out the future does have flying cars,” Musk said, highlighting the vehicle’s extraordinary capabilities.

How does the flying Roadster work?

According to Tesla, the Roadster combines an advanced fan-based suction system with compressed-gas thrusters developed using technology associated with SpaceX. The suction system generates powerful downforce, allowing the vehicle to remain attached to a specially designed ramp—even when upside down.

The thrusters help the vehicle lift off briefly, adjust its position in the air and perform aerial manoeuvres. During the demonstration, the Roadster was also shown completing a mid-air flip before returning to the ground.

Tesla claims the vehicle can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than a second in its most powerful configuration. However, this performance figure has not been independently verified.

Three versions, different capabilities

Tesla has outlined different configurations of the Roadster, including a performance-focused model and more advanced versions equipped with thruster technology. The most ambitious variant is designed to demonstrate short airborne movements, although it is not approved for ordinary public-road use.

Despite the spectacular showcase, the demonstration does not mean flying cars are ready for everyday travel. The technology remains experimental, and questions surrounding safety, certification and practical use still need to be addressed.

When will it reach the market?

The Roadster has been anticipated for years, with production plans repeatedly delayed since its original unveiling in 2017. Musk has indicated that production is expected to begin in 2028, although the timeline could change.

Tesla has yet to establish that all the capabilities demonstrated in the prototype will be available in a production vehicle.

The latest demonstration nevertheless puts the spotlight back on Tesla’s ambition to push the boundaries of electric vehicle engineering—and raises a fascinating question: could cars one day do more than simply drive on roads?

Reliance Responds to Elon Musk Over Starlink’s India Launch, Says Rules Apply to All

New Delhi, Oct 16: Reliance Industries has responded to the debate surrounding Starlink’s entry into India, stating that all satellite communication providers must comply with the country’s regulatory requirements before launching commercial services.

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The response comes amid a public exchange involving SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and concerns over the approval process for foreign satellite internet operators. Musk had questioned whether powerful Indian business interests were creating obstacles to Starlink’s entry into the country.

Reliance maintained that it welcomes investment and technological innovation from global companies but stressed that the same rules must apply to every telecom operator, including its own subsidiary, Jio.

Jio’s satellite ambitions

Satellite broadband is emerging as a potential solution for extending internet connectivity to remote and underserved areas where conventional mobile networks and fibre infrastructure are difficult to deploy.

Jio is pursuing its own satellite connectivity plans, with the supplied report citing a proposed network of around 1,600 satellites and 23 ground stations. The company maintains that its project must undergo the same government approval procedures as competing services.

According to the report, Jio, Eutelsat OneWeb and Starlink are at comparable stages of security clearance and spectrum-related approvals. These regulatory steps are essential before satellite broadband services can be offered commercially.

Airtel also weighs in

The debate has also drawn attention to Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal, who has challenged suggestions that Starlink is facing uniquely difficult treatment in India.

Mittal has pointed to the time his organisation has spent pursuing the necessary licences for its satellite venture with Eutelsat OneWeb, arguing that the regulatory process began years ago.

Starlink, meanwhile, has maintained that it has been engaging with Indian authorities for several years to prepare for its entry into the market.

Regulatory clearance remains key

India’s satellite internet market is attracting growing interest as companies compete to connect consumers, businesses and communities beyond the reach of traditional broadband infrastructure.

However, commercial launches depend on regulatory approvals, including security clearances and access to spectrum.

Reliance’s position is that all applicants should be assessed under a consistent framework, regardless of whether they are domestic companies or international technology providers.

As competition intensifies, the pace of regulatory approvals could play a significant role in determining when Starlink and rival satellite broadband services become available to Indian customers.

Pune’s Growth Story Needs a Planning Story to Match It

By Anil Pharande, Chairman, Pharande Spaces

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what Hinjewadi and Chakan are going through, and about Talegaon’s promise as a fresh canvas. Since then, I have watched the state machinery respond with a seriousness I genuinely want to acknowledge.
 
1. The Pune district collector has formed a dedicated high-level committee with PMRDA, MIDC, MSRDC, NHAI, PWD and traffic police to fix Chakan’s roads, and has ordered time-bound action plans this very month.
 
2. In Hinjewadi, Rs 426 crore has been sanctioned for road and last-mile connectivity improvements, and
 
3. PMRDA has drawn up a fresh plan for footpaths, cycle tracks, speed tables and safer pedestrian crossings near Metro stations.

These are not small gestures. They show real intent from the government to fix two of Maharashtra’s most important economic engines, and that intent deserves to be welcomed rather than taken for granted.

But as a developer who has watched this region grow for decades, I also know that fixing Hinjewadi and Chakan after the fact, even though it is obviously well-intentioned, is the harder and more expensive path. The real opportunity now is to use this momentum to ask a bigger question: why do our fastest-growing belts keep reaching crisis point before the system responds?

The answer, I believe, lies less in any one authority’s failure and more in the scale and structure of the planning challenge itself.

A Region the Size of a Small State

PMRDA was set up in 2015 to plan and coordinate growth across Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad and the villages around them. Its jurisdiction spans somewhere between 6,000 and 7,250 square kilometres, covering over 800 villages across nine talukas.

To put that in perspective – most municipal corporations in India manage areas that are a fraction of this size, with far simpler administrative boundaries, and fewer competing land uses to reconcile. We are basically asking one authority to plan land use, roads, water, power and public transport – across an area this vast, with villages, farmland, industrial belts and urban clusters all mixed together.

This is an entirely different order of administrative challenge. It demands a scale of agility and long-range vision that conventional planning tools were never built for.

That mismatch has shown up clearly in PMRDA’s own planning history. Its draft Development Plan, published in August 2021, drew more than 67,000 objections and suggestions from citizens. The Bombay High Court stayed its implementation in October 2022 citing procedural concerns, and after years of legal back-and-forth, the state government formally cancelled the entire draft DP in September 2025, effectively resetting the process.

PMRDA has since been directed to prepare a Structure Plan instead, starting with the road network, before attempting a fresh Development Plan. This is not a story of neglect. It reflects, more than anything, the inherent limits of conventional master-planning processes, which routinely take 10-15 years to move from draft to ground reality.

By the time such plans are finalised, the real estate and population growth they were meant to guide has often already moved past them.

Learning From How Mumbai Is Tackling the Same Problem

Interestingly, Maharashtra is already testing a different approach elsewhere in the state. For its upcoming ‘Third Mumbai’ project, spanning over 320 square kilometres across 124 villages, the MMRDA has engaged Surbana Jurong, a leading Singapore-based planning agency, to prepare a complete vision document and master plan within a compressed 30-week timeline.

Whatever one’s view of importing outside expertise, the underlying idea is sound – when a region needs to plan decades ahead within months rather than years, it makes sense to bring in planners who have done this at scale before, rather than relying solely on conventional in-house processes which are already stretched thin by other responsibilities.

Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad are rapidly becoming one continuous mega-region, pulled together by automotive, electronics and technology industries expanding in every direction, from Chakan in the north to Hinjewadi in the west – and now Talegaon further along the expressway. A region of this ambition deserves a structural plan built with the same urgency and global expertise, so that the next growth belt is planned with foresight rather than retrofitted under pressure.

Four Practical Shifts Worth Considering

1. PMRDA’s current move towards a Structure Plan is the right moment to bring in top-tier international planning expertise, on the Third Mumbai model, to help deliver a practical, implementable framework within a defined timeline rather than over another decade.

2. The fragmentation between MIDC, PMRDA, municipal corporations, PWD and gram panchayats, each controlling a different stretch of road or utility, needs to give way to a single coordinating platform. Chakan’s internal roads being 70 metres wide under MIDC while connecting roads remain 8 to 12 metres wide under other agencies shows exactly what this fragmentation produces .

3. Planning and execution should run in parallel rather than one after the other. Arterial roads, transit corridors and growth-centre reservations can be identified and built even as the larger structure plan is finalised, much as PMRDA’s phase-one focus on roads already suggests.

4. A dedicated task force modelled on how MMRDA drives execution for regional projects, with the authority to take fast decisions on land acquisition and inter-agency approvals, would help translate plans into built infrastructure far more quickly than routine bureaucratic channels allow.

Closing Thoughts

Unplanned and unregulated development does not wait for paperwork. When formal planning lags behind real-world growth, that vacuum tends to fill itself, often messily, which is exactly what unfolded in Hinjewadi and Chakan.

The good news is that the government’s recent actions show this gap is being recognised and addressed head-on. If that same urgency is now channelled into structural reform, through global planning expertise, unified coordination and parallel execution, Pune’s next decade of growth, in places like Talegaon and beyond, can finally match the ambition of the city it is meant to serve.
 

Anil Pharande is Chairman of Pharande Spaces, a leading real estate construction and development firm famous for its township projects in Greater Pune and beyond. Pharande Promoters & Builders, the flagship company of Pharande Spaces  and an ISO 9001-2000 certified company. Established in 1994, the company has built a substantial footprint of premium gated communities, massive integrated townships and high-grade commercial office and retail projects. Thjey are widely recognized for theirs focus on modern, green township living concepts and high-quality construction .

Jindal Steel Wins Global Steelie Award for Excellence in Workplace Safety

New Delhi, Oct 16: Jindal Steel has earned international recognition for its innovative workplace safety initiative, Dakshata Engineering Safety, winning the 2026 Steelie Award for Excellence in People presented by the World Steel Association.

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The award recognises the company’s efforts to strengthen workforce capabilities by connecting safety knowledge with practical skills required on the factory floor. Jindal Steel was selected ahead of other finalists, including Tata Steel, InfraBuild, China Baowu and USIMINAS.

The Dakshata initiative moves beyond conventional safety training by assessing employees on the specific knowledge, emergency response capabilities and practical skills needed for their respective roles. Based on individual assessment results, the programme identifies gaps and provides targeted training before reassessing workers’ proficiency. These assessments also help management improve workforce deployment and supervision.

The initiative has assessed more than 27,100 executive and non-executive employees across six facilities. During the initial assessment of 11,639 non-executive employees, the average knowledge score stood at 0.81, compared with 0.71 for practical application.

To address the gap, 69 certified trainers delivered 372 health and safety training modules, achieving a 96 per cent completion rate. The company also recorded 16,539 formal assessments for incoming personnel.

Jindal Steel has further strengthened workplace protection through digital risk analytics, engineered hazard reduction, access controls and artificial intelligence-based monitoring at its Raipur Machinery Division.

During the 2025–26 financial year, the facility recorded 17,752 safety observations and mechanised or eliminated 379 high-risk tasks. These measures helped reduce emergency response time by 15 per cent to 5.25 minutes, while the facility reported a lost-time injury frequency rate of zero.

The global recognition highlights the growing importance of data-driven safety management, role-specific training and practical risk prevention in the steel industry, where protecting frontline workers remains a critical operational priority.

Alice Collaborates with Inflection AI and AI21 to Demonstrate NVIDIA Nemotron Open Models Can Be Trained for Frontier Safety

NEW YORK, NY, Oct. 16— Alice announced the results of two collaborations focused on aligning NVIDIA Nemotron models to company-specific safety and security policies. The results demonstrate how real-world threat data can be used to train open-source models for frontier safety performance. 

 Open-source models give organizations greater control over AI behavior, allowing them to train policies into the underlying model rather than setting instructions as system prompts. To successfully train models on their policies, companies need adversarial data and expertise. Two projects demonstrate how NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art open-source model can be aligned for safer human interactions, and more secure enterprise agents. 

 “Powerful AI is being democratized. It’s now available to companies everywhere, and they want to use it safely and predictably,” said Noam Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of Alice. “These results show that with the right real-world adversarial data and training, we can teach open source models how to handle the threats and abuse they will actually face, across very different safety challenges, while keeping them as powerful. That’s the bar now: frontier-grade safety that any organization running advanced AI can actually put into practice.”

 Training safety for how people actually use AI

Inflection AI is building personal AI that empowers people and shifts interactions from transactional to relational. Allowing more natural interactions with conversational AI also increases risks which most benchmarks can’t catch. In the process of building the next generation of personal intelligence, Inflection AI fine-tuned NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B, and turned to Alice to develop red-teaming datasets aimed at reducing sycophancy and preventing the model from reinforcing unhealthy attachment over long conversations. Fine-tuning on that data raised Pi’s alignment score by 30% while keeping unnecessary refusals to just 1.6%.

 Alice created more than 20 realistic personas and used them in multi-turn red-team exercises where those risks could develop over time. The personas included vulnerable but benign users as well as adversarial users deliberately attempting to manipulate the model, drawing on Alice’s real-world knowledge of harmful and adversarial behavior.

 “As AI innovation accelerates, safety has to advance rapidly as well. It’s no longer enough to ask whether a model can identify and refuse a harmful prompt,” said Sean White, CEO of Inflection AI. “We also need to understand how AI behaves across hundreds of interactions, whether it challenges rather than simply agrees, if it supports human agency rather than dependency, and ultimately if it leaves people more capable. This work with Alice and NVIDIA demonstrates that we can train those principles into powerful open models without sacrificing what makes them useful. That’s fundamental to the kind of human-centered Personal Intelligence we’re building with Pi.”

 Security without sacrificing capability

 Alice also worked with AI21, which has trained language models since 2021 and now offers lab-as-a service for specialized intelligence. The work with them focused on a very different problem: protecting enterprise agents against indirect prompt injection. As agents gain access to company systems, data and tools, attackers can attempt to manipulate them through information the agent encounters while doing its work. Training against those attacks therefore cannot focus only on whether the model refuses a malicious instruction. A secure agent also needs to recognize the attack while continuing to complete the legitimate task.

 Alice’s reinforcement-learning environments were built to train and measure both. AI21 used them to post-train the recently released NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL open model, increasing the model’s resilience to indirect prompt injection by 41 points, competing with GPT-6.1 Sol.

 The result shows that security and capability are not necessarily competing objectives. With the right training, models can become significantly more resilient to adversarial manipulation while maintaining task performance.

 “For most companies, the next phase of AI adoption goes beyond frontier models, to open models they own, shape and control,” said Ori Goshen, Co-founder and CEO of AI21. “Owning a model means owning how it fails, not only what it can do. We post-trained NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super-VL on attack traces Alice sees in the wild, so it holds up against the attacks that actually reach enterprises while keeping the behavior it was built for.”

 “NVIDIA Nemotron provides the open weights, recipes and tooling for organizations to post-train on their own data and optimize accuracy and performance for their specific workloads,” said Joey Conway, senior director Nemotron and Software, NVIDIA. “Alice’s work with Inflection AI and AI21 shows how post-training Nemotron on real-world adversarial data delivers powerful safety and security — exactly the kind of innovation open models are meant to unlock.”

 Taken together, these collaborations demonstrate how real-world adversarial intelligence, safety datasets, expert red teaming and reinforcement-learning environments can turn open models into systems trained for the risks they will actually face. The broader opportunity is clear: powerful, customizable AI that companies can own and deploy with frontier-level safety built in.

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