Arvind's Newsletter

1.70,000 Gig Workers Registered on eShram

With onboarding of ten major e-commerce players, including Uber, Zomato, and Blinkit, more than 70,000 gig workers have registered with eShram portal to avail several social security benefits, a parliamentary panel has observed. 

Noting that nearly 35 lakh workers will be eligible to register for eShram in 2025-26, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour has suggested to identify aggregators and onboard them on the portal expediently to provide social security and healthcare benefits to gig workers.

The panel noted that as of February 19 this year, 70,306 platform workers of 36 states/UTs have been registered with eShram.

2.Alpha Wave and IHC join Temasek to invest in Haldiram’s

Haldiram Snacks Food (Haldiram’s), India’s leading snack and food brand, will come into the market with its initial public offer (IPO) in the next 18 to 24 months, according to a source in the know. This comes after it signed agreements to sell stake to International Holding Company (IHC), Alpha Wave Global, and Singapore-headquartered global investment firm Temasek at a $10 billion valuation.

3.Indians shift to gold investments as local equities flounder

Indians have become heavy investors in gold after a downturn in local equities, with a boom in exchange traded funds driving purchases as the commodity’s price hits record highs. Net inflows to gold ETFs in India reached a record Rs37.5bn ($437mn) in January and Rs19.8bn in February as the metal touched all-time highs, according to the Association of Mutual Funds in India.

Falling share prices have pushed Indians to an asset they have long been fond of, said analysts, with ETFs making it easier for retail traders to invest.

Although India’s gold ETF holdings are just 2 per cent of the global total, the country is the world’s second-largest investor of the commodity after China, according to the World Gold Council.

4.Musk merges X amd xAI

Elon Musk combined his xAI startup with his X social media service, he revealed on a post on X, stating that the combination valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, excluding X’s debt of $12 billion.

The announcement came as a surprise, although Musk had already connected the two companies by giving X a stake in xAI. The AI startup, founded two years ago, had trained its Grok AI chatbot on data from X, which Grok acknowledges on its website. In his X post today, Musk said that the futures of the two companies were “intertwined.”

The merger will “combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent” of the two companies. The combined enterprise will “deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people.” The merger will also reduce pressure on Musk to turn around X, whose revenue has fallen by nearly half since he bought it (then named Twitter) in late 2022.

5.US President Donald Trump said he was “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin for stalling on a Ukraine peace deal, and threatened new tariffs on Russia. 

On Sunday, Trump took Putin to task over Russia’s foot-dragging on a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatened to tariff Russian oil and impose more sanctions on the country.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault ... I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said. “That would be, that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States … There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”

So far, there’s been no reaction from the Kremlin, but Trump said he would be talking with Putin this week.

6.The first trial of generative AI therapy shows it might help with depression

The first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy bot suggests it was as effective as human therapy for people with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory grey area.

7.Apple is working to revamp its Health app.

The updated software would include a health coach powered by a new artificial intelligence agent that would replicate—to some extent—a real doctor. A release could come as early as spring or summer of next year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in the Power On newsletter.

• The plan fits into CEO Tim Cook’s broader vision—that the company will make its greatest contribution to society in healthcare. Consider, for instance, its work on a long-awaited no-prick glucose monitor. 

• Some of those efforts have proven successful—like a sleep apnea detector on the Apple Watch and features that turn AirPods into hearing aids. Others have fallen flat, such as a blood oxygen monitoring tool that was shelved after a patent dispute.

• The Health app plan first emerged a few years back. Right now, the tech giant is training the agent with data from on-staff physicians. It’s also opening a facility where outside doctors will shoot video content for the app. And another feature would let the AI agent use device cameras to study users’ workouts. 

• But it’s worth noting that Apple has struggled to catch up to peers on AI. The firm delayed promised updates to Siri for the foreseeable future.

8.Gemini 2.5 is the New SoTA (State of the Art) LLM : Zivi Mowshowitz

“Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America’s next top large language model.

That doesn’t mean it is the best model for everything. In particular, it’s still Gemini, so it still is a proud member of the Fun Police, in terms of censorship and also just not being friendly or engaging, or willing to take a stand.

If you want a friend, or some flexibility and fun, or you want coding that isn’t especially tricky, then call Claude, now with web access.

If you want an image, call GPT-4o.

But if you mainly want reasoning, or raw intelligence? For now, you call Gemini.

The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Many report Gemini 2.5 is the first LLM to solve some of their practical problems, including favorable comparisons to o1-pro. It’s fast. It’s not $200 a month. The benchmarks are exceptional.”

9.India’s VC-backed chess academy churns out champions across the board

When venture capital firm WestBridge invited one of the world’s most famous chess players for an “offbeat” talk with investors about chess patterns, it resulted in a partnership that six years later has produced several world champions.

This month 18-year-old Pranav Venkatesh became junior world chess champion, crowning a string of successes not just for Indian players, but also for a chess academy set up by Viswanathan Anand, five-time world champion, with WestBridge.

Gukesh Dommaraju, also 18, last year became the youngest player to win the world champion title. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa is ranked eighth in the world and his sister, Vaishali Rameshbabu, is ranked 14th among women chess players. All trained at the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy, known as Waca.

The venture capitalist firm, known for backing e-commerce platform Meesho and rideshare company Rapido, among others, said there was a clear logic to bringing business thinking to the philanthropic endeavour of training chess players.

While Anand brought in “everything related to excellence in chess” that effort and everything around it needed to be organised, said WestBridge managing partner Sandeep Singhal.

“Our daily business is to find an idea and scale it,” Singhal told the Financial Times. “One of the things that is lacking in India, or was lacking in India, is how do you take an individual who’s got talent and provide them with all the complementary assets that are required for them to make that transition.”