Technology
The Digital Wallet Decade: How eSewa, Khalti and FonePay Rewired Nepali Money
From topping up Rs 100 on dial-up-era eSewa to scanning QR codes at street tea stalls โ how three wallets built the rails half of Nepal now stands on.
Can AI Actually Speak Nepali? We Stress-Tested the Big Models on Devanagari
Translation looks fluent until you ask for a Bikram Sambat date, a Preeti-font legacy string, or a Newari idiom. Failures, surprises and scores from our informal evaluation.
Fiber in the Valleys, Satellites on the Peaks: The Next Decade of Nepali Internet
Nepal built fiber faster than anyone expected and stalled exactly where geography gets hard. What 5G rollouts, rural backhaul economics and the Starlink question mean for the next ten million users.
Local LLMs Are Finally Cheaper Than Cloud APIs
Open-weight models on commodity GPUs have crossed the price-performance line for a growing share of production workloads.
Vertical AI Agents Are Eating the SaaS Layer
Generic CRM and ERP are being bypassed by AI agents trained on one industry's workflows.
Agents That Actually Work: The Rise of Tool-Use Models
The agent hype cycle is cooling into something useful: models natively trained to call tools, verify results and retry.
The MCP Gold Rush: How Model Context Protocol Is Remaking AI Tools
Anthropic's open protocol turned every SaaS tool into a potential AI plugin โ and startups are racing to build the plumbing.
The Laptop-Bag Economy: How Remote Work Is Rewiring Kathmandu
Time-zone arbitrage, dollar salaries in rupee cities, and the cafes quietly becoming offices โ what the remote-work wave is really doing to Nepal's capital and its young workforce.
RAG Is Dead, Long Live Graph Memory
Vector search alone can't answer questions that span relationships. The next retrieval paradigm thinks in graphs.
Small Language Models Beat GPT-4o on Three Surprising Benchmarks
Compact 3โ8B models are quietly outperforming frontier flagships on tool-calling, instruction adherence and latency-bound tasks.
Fine-Tuning vs Prompting: Where the ROI Actually Is
Prompt engineering has diminishing returns. A targeted fine-tune on 500 examples often beats a thousand hand-written prompts.
AI Coding Assistants Just Hit 40% of Merged PRs
Across a sample of 200 engineering teams, AI-generated code now accounts for two in every five merged pull requests.
The Inference Cost Curve: Why Token Prices Keep Falling
Speculative decoding, MoE pruning and purpose-built silicon are pushing effective token prices down an order of magnitude per year.
Multimodal Agents: Beyond Chat Into the Real World
The next frontier for agents is perceiving and acting on screens, sensors and documents โ not just text.
The Open-Weight Model Tipping Point
Open-weight models have reached parity on a widening set of tasks โ and enterprises are starting to leave closed APIs for them.