Arvind's Newsletter

1.India’s defence procurement strategy is pivoting away from Russia and towards the West.

New Delhi and Moscow’s joint plans to develop helicopters and fighter jets have been shelved, and a proposal to lease a nuclear submarine from Russia is unlikely to go ahead. 

The shift reflects India’s efforts to reduce reliance on Russian weapons and “move closer into the US defence orbit” in order to strengthen relations with Washington as Donald Trump’s tariff threats loom, Bloomberg wrote.

In 2009, 76% of India’s arms imports came from Russia, compared with 36% in 2023, while New Delhi has signed contracts worth nearly $20 billion with US manufacturers. However, India continues to buy cheap energy from Russia.

2.India signs large deal for academic access

The Indian government bought subscriptions to 13,000 academic journals, allowing researchers and students to access their content through a single portal. India is the third-largest producer of research in the world. But journals charge high subscription fees, making access unaffordable for most Indian academics.

The $715 million, three-year deal is the largest of its kind: The UK and Germany have similar but much smaller agreements with individual publishers. While many researchers cheered the move, saying it would enhance work at India’s universities and institutes, some believe the ultimate goal is to force journals into open-access business models that do not hide research behind a paywall. “At best, this is a short-term measure,” one researcher told Science.

3.Fairfax India To Buy Additional 10% Stake In Bengaluru Airport Operator BIAL

Canada’s Fairfax India Holdings is set to buy another 10% stake in Bengaluru airport operator Bangalore International Airport Ltd., increasing its overall shareholding to 74%. BIAL is a joint venture between  India, Airports Authority of India and Karnataka State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd. with the latter two having a 13% stake each. "The transaction is expected to expected to close in first quarter of 2025, upon which the additional 10% equity interest in BIAL will be acquired by Fairfax India for, in aggregate, $255.0 million." Indian origin billionaire is the founder and main owner of Fairfax.

4.Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence weather prediction model outperforms the best-in-class forecasting system. 

Google's DeepMind yesterday unveiled an AI model capable of predicting the weather more accurately than existing forecasting systems. The breakthrough marks an advancement in the field, promising quicker and cheaper results. 

DeepMind researchers trained their model, GenCast, on data from 1979 to 2018 to predict the weather for 2019. In a study published in Nature, they found GenCast outperformed the world's leading atmospheric predictor—the ensemble system from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts—over 97% of the time on factors like wind speeds, temperatures, and precipitation. GenCast was also fast, producing 15-day predictions in eight minutes rather than the hours conventional systems can take. GenCast also outperformed in predicting fast-changing hurricane paths but underperformed in predictions of hurricane intensity.

At least 35 countries rely on Europe's ensemble system, which forecasts weather using room-sized supercomputers that calculate global observations from satellites and weather stations. In contrast, GenCast runs on smaller machines and uses historical data to spot patterns and present scenarios.

5.Bitcoin hits $100,000 as Trump era hopes grow

Cryptocurrency has climbed more than 50% since US election on bets president-elect will bring in pro-crypto regulation

Bitcoin has surged above $100,000 for the first time, extending a dramatic rally as investors bet on greater political and regulatory support from US president-elect Donald Trump.

The price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency climbed as much as 6.1 per cent on Thursday to $103,800, up more than 50 per cent since Trump’s November election victory.

On Wednesday, the former president nominated crypto advocate Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, the main market regulator, raising hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate for the industry.

Trump, who has vowed to make the US “the bitcoin superpower of the world”, has nominated several crypto enthusiasts to top roles, including Howard Lutnick to run the commerce department and Elon Musk to co-head a cost-saving effort dubbed the “department of government efficiency”.

6.The OPEC+ grouping of oil exporters is expected to extend output cuts when it meets today, cautious of US President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming policies as well as projections for lower prices.

 The bloc is artificially curtailing about 6% of global oil supply, and wants to see how Trump’s priorities — from tariffs, which should hurt prices, to new sanctions on Iran, which should help them — play out.

“The prudent course of action would be to continue to watch and wait,” one analyst told the Financial Times. The longer-term outlook is bearish: Slowing economic growth in China, new supplies from Canada and Guyana, and global efforts to decarbonize are forcing downward pressure on oil prices, Bloomberg noted.

7.India's 'blockbuster' drugs to take on deadly superbugs

Antibiotics are hailed as medical saviours.

But they are increasingly facing a crafty adversary: bacteria that mutate and adapt and outwit the very drugs designed to defeat them and cure the infections they cause.

These antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" directly caused 1.14 million deaths worldwide in 2021, according to The Lancet, a medical journal. Antibiotics - which are considered to be the first line of defence against severe infections - did not work on most of these cases.

India is among the countries hardest hit by "antimicrobial resistance". In 2019 alone, antibiotic-resistant infections caused around 300,000 deaths. They alone are responsible for the deaths of nearly 60,000 newborns each year.

But some hope is on the horizon. A number of promising locally-developed new drugs show potential to combat antibiotic-resistant pathogens. They also offer a game-changing solution to preserve last-resort treatments.

8.DeepMind unveils Genie 2: AI model creating immersive 3D worlds from text prompts - how it works

DeepMind has introduced Genie 2, an innovative artificial intelligence model capable of generating playable and immersive 3D worlds. Building on its predecessor, Genie, which could transform single images into interactive environments, Genie 2 takes this concept further by crafting dynamic and realistic virtual worlds from text prompts or images.

In a recent blog post, Google’s DeepMind described Genie 2 as a large-scale foundation world model designed to create intricate 3D simulations. A simple prompt like "a warrior in snow" can result in an expansive interactive world where users explore a snowy environment as a warrior character. The generated settings even include physics-based interactions such as jumping, swimming, and object manipulation, all while maintaining realistic lighting effects.