Arvind's Newsletter

1.Indian economy to bounce back for 3 big factors: Here's what Morgan Stanley forecasts

With government spending picking up, consumption set to recover, and food inflation moderating, India’s economy is likely to regain momentum in the months ahead, bringing growth back on track for the remainder of FY25.

Morgan Stanley analysis suggests that while the economy faced challenges in Q3, it expects India’s GDP growth to improve to 6.7 per cent YoY in the December 2024 quarter and 6.8 per cent in March 2025, from 6.3 per cent YoY in the September 2024 quarter.

2.5G subscriptions in India expected to account for 74 percent of mobile subscriptions by 2030

270 Million is the total number of 5G mobile connections expected in India by the end of 2024, accounting for 23% of the country's mobile subscriptions, as forecast by the Ericsson Mobility Report. This signifies a substantial increase from the 119 million 5G users recorded at the end of 2023.

Despite India's swift 5G rollout, the quality of 5G service has been a concern, particularly in terms of average and median speeds. Speedtest provider Ookla reported in October that India's median download speeds fell by 15%, from 107.03 megabits per second (Mbps) in April-June to 91.7 Mbps in July-September, the lowest since October 2023.

3.Russia’s troops are advancing faster in Ukraine than at any point since the earliest days of the war, Reuters reported.

Moscow’s urgency may be driven by US President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent accession: He is expected to demand the conflict freezes along existing front lines, making territorial gains permanent. Russia controls 18% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

Both sides have suffered horrifying casualties, Economist reported: Between 100,000 and 200,000 Russian soldiers have died in the three-year war, along with 60,000 to 100,000 Ukrainians, and many times that number severely wounded. 

Proportional to population, both sides have suffered worse than the US did “in the Vietnam and Korean war combined”.

4.Growing number of experts believe China’s carbon dioxide emissions have peaked, or will do so in 2025, in the latest sign of the country’s booming renewable energy production

Although China is responsible for 90% of the global growth in emissions since 2015, it has added green energy capacity at an unprecedented rate: The country is on track to add 180 and 159 gigawatts of solar and wind power respectively, roughly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, according to new data by the Global Energy Monitor.

However Western tariffs on Chinese clean tech could jeopardise the world’s efforts to reduce emissions, derailing decades of progress by forcing “consumers to bear the costs of the green transition,” an economist at Harvard University wrote.

5.Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated

More than half of all posts on LinkedIn may be artificial-intelligence-generated. Analysts examined 8,795 posts and found that a rapidly growing number of them showed AI hallmarks.

LinkedIn may be the front line of AI-generated content, WIRED reported: Chatbots’ corporate style is hard to distinguish from “genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging,” and no one goes on the site “expecting profundity, hilarity, or sincerity” anyway. LinkedIn users “strive to be the most anodyne versions of themselves… Artificiality (is) what everyone is expecting.”

6.What happens when autonomous weapons make life-or-death decisions

The notion of algorithms making decisions over who lives or dies is chilling.

How autonomous and semi-autonomous technology will operate in the future is up in the air, and the U.S. government will have to decide what limitations to place on its development and use. Those decisions may come sooner rather than later—as the technology advances, global conflicts continue to rage, and other countries are faced with similar choices—meaning that the incoming Trump administration may add to or change existing American policy.

But experts say autonomous innovations have the potential to fundamentally change how war is waged: In the future, humans may not be the only arbiters of who lives and dies, with decisions instead in the hands of algorithms.

For some experts, that’s a net-positive: It could reduce casualties and soldiers’ stress. But others claim that it could instead result in more indiscriminate death, with no direct accountability, as well as escalating conflicts between nuclear-armed nations.

7.Chinese Carmakers Are Trouncing Once-Unbeatable Japanese Rivals

Times are tough for Japanese carmakers.

As China’s assault on the world’s automotive industry gathers speed, Japan’s national champions are emerging as some of the biggest victims.

In China itself, the world’s largest car market, Japanese automakers are fighting for survival as local competitors flood showrooms with wave after wave of electric vehicles. The same Chinese companies are pushing into Southeast Asia, rapidly gaining ground in what has long been a stronghold for legacy brands like Toyota, Honda and Mitsubishi.

Japanese automakers suffered the biggest market share losses of any carmakers between 2019 and 2024 in China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, according to an exclusive Bloomberg analysis of vehicle sales and registration data.

Separately, BYD has asked Chinese suppliers to accept price cuts next year, according to an email from the company circulating on social media, suggesting the company is preparing for a price war to intensify.

8.Infosys chair bets companies will develop their own AI models

Indian technology grandee Nandan Nilekani expects companies around the world will increasingly build their own smaller-scale artificial intelligence models to streamline operations and boost productivity, dampening hope of a substantial enterprise payday for more powerful generative products.

The chair of IT services major Infosys told the Financial Times he was “not so sure” companies would want to shoulder the high costs and the potential “black box” of data and copyright liabilities associated with large language models behind popular applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“When you look at the large firms they’re all saying: ‘How do we take charge of our AI destiny?’” Nilekani said in an interview in Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India. “Small language models trained on very specific data are actually quite effective . . . everybody will build models, but I think they don’t have to build these gigantic ones.”

Nilekani said enterprise customers would call in LLMs for specific applications and the technology would fuel competition between the giants, such as Google and Apple, which offer online products to consumers.

But his prediction raises questions about the revenue model for start-ups that have invested in LLMs. Facing hesitation from businesses, the likes of Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft have all recently released AI models with fewer “parameters” — the number of variables used to train their systems and shape output.

Infosys, the nearly $19 bn annual revenue software and consulting business that Nilekani co-founded in 1981, is positioning itself to be an AI provider to the clients it serves across more than 50 countries, helping them to organise their data and train their own models.

Nilekani highlighted Infosys’ company launch last month of two small language models in partnership with AI chip group Nvidia. They were trained on Infosys data and integrated in products such as its digital banking software Finacle. “We are actually offering a service to our clients to build a model . . . there’s a lot of interest in that because we are demystifying this whole model-building stuff,” he said. “The whole technology has become so easy that you can build models in a matter of months.”

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