Arvind's Newsletter

1.Airtel partners with Perplexity Pro, all customers get free 1-year access to ₹17,000 tool. Here's how to activate: Mint

Telecom giant Bharti Airtel has partnered with Perplexity, to provide all its 36 crore subscribers 12-months of with free access to the artificial intelligence (AI) start-up's ₹17,000 worth Perplexity Pro tool, according to an official release on July 17.

This includes Airtel customers across mobile, wifi and DTH services, subject to terms and conditions of use, the release added.

The statement further described Perplexity as “an AI-powered search and answer engine that offers real-time, accurate and deeply researched responses to users in a conversational language”. The tool “elevates a customer’s search from listing of web pages to an easy-to-read answer”, it added.

How to avail the offering? Simply log-on to the Airtel Thanks App.

2.India's outward FDI surges to $5.03 bn in June, equity jumps threefold: Business Standard

India’s outward foreign direct investment (FDI) commitments grew substantially on a year-on-year basis to $5.03 billion in June 2025, up from $2.9 billion in the same month last year. Sequentially, they rose from $2.7 billion in May 2025, according to data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Outbound FDI, expressed as a financial commitment, comprises three components: equity, loans and guarantees.

RBI data showed equity commitments rose more than threefold to $2.04 billion in June 2025, compared to $670.7 million in June 2024, and doubled from $987.1 million in May 2025.

Loan commitments increased marginally to $585.55 million in June 2025, up from $454.3 million in June 2024. However, they were lower than the $1.02 billion committed in May 2025.

Guarantees for overseas units moved up to $2.40 billion in June 2025, from $1.8 billion a year ago and from $692.2 million in May 2025, RBI data showed.

3.India’s craft chocolate revolution is taking a bite out of Lindt and Cadbury: Mint

Manam Chocolate is part of a growing wave of artisanal chocolate makers in India—alongside brands such as Paul and Mike, Bon Fiction, Naviluna, Cocoacraft, Soklet, The Whole Truth, Darkins, and Mason & Co, that are building a market for premium Indian chocolate. These homegrown brands are emerging as luxury indulgences, while challenging the long-held dominance of foreign brands, including Lindt, Ferrero, Hershey’s and Cadbury.

Backed by sharp branding and origin-led storytelling, these labels work with locally sourced Indian cacao, and small-batch, artisanal methods to highlight the bean’s natural flavour—steering clear of vanilla, artificial additives, or excessive refined sugar common in mainstream chocolate. Characterised by a high cocoa butter content (minimum 31%), these are chocolates with a distinctive sheen, a clean snap, a smooth texture, and a pronounced flavour.

According to Mordor Intelligence, India’s chocolate market is projected to grow from $2.48 billion in 2025 to $3.58 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 7.63%. With a significant shift toward premium and health-conscious consumption, 44% of Indians in 2022 were willing to pay more for healthier chocolate options—driven in part by rising diabetes rates, which reached 101 million in 2023. In response, manufacturers are launching sugar-free, cane sugar/date-sweetened, organic, and high-cocoa dark chocolate products.

4.Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF: MIT Tech Review and others

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders.

In the team’s approach, patients’ eggs are fertilized with sperm, and the DNA-containing nuclei of those cells are transferred into donated fertilized eggs that have had their own nuclei removed. The new embryos contain the DNA of the intended parents along with a tiny fraction of mitochondrial DNA from the donor, floating in the embryos’ cytoplasm.

The study, which makes use of a technology called mitochondrial donation, has been described as a “tour de force” and “a remarkable accomplishment” by others in the field. But not everyone sees the trial as a resounding success.Read the full story (Paywall)

5.China is building an underwater data center to reduce cooling costs: Scientific American

Demand for computing power is skyrocketing with the growth of artificial intelligence, but cooling the facilities requires huge amounts of water. In China and elsewhere, water supplies are already strained by demand from agriculture and human consumption, and changing rainfall patterns due to climate change.

China began constructing the underwater data centre about 6 miles off Shanghai in June, Scientific American reported, and it is set to begin operations in September after first being proposed two and a half years ago. Microsoft began a similar project a decade ago, but has reportedly shelved it. If the Shanghai project is successful, its makers plan to move rapidly to a larger-scale rollout.

6.Evolution isn’t a straight line: Modern humans come from 2 ancient lineages: Big Think

For decades, the prevailing theory of human evolution held that Homo sapiens descended from a single ancestral population in Africa. But new research suggests a more complex story. About 1.5 million years ago, our lineage split in two. These separate branches of humanity evolved apart for over a million years, then rejoined around 300,000 years ago. That reunion — not a straight line of progress — is what shaped the modern human genome.

7.The European Union is testing an age-verification app, a sign that online age gating is drawing closer: The Verge

 France recently approved a law requiring social media platforms to verify ages and obtain parental consent for under-15s, and several EU countries are pushing for bloc-wide measures to mandate age verification.

Even in US some senators want that children under 13 should be barred from using social media. Tech companies have pushed back, often on privacy grounds — laws in some US states have led to major porn sites withdrawing from those markets — but the tide may be starting to turn: Reddit will roll out age verification in the UK, with users required to upload a selfie or government ID to view certain content.

8.Anthropic Draws Investor Interest at More Than $100 Billion Valuation: Bloomberg

In the US, OpenAI rival Anthropic is in the early stages of planning another investment round that could value the company at more than $100 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The artificial intelligence startup is not formally fundraising, said people with knowledge of the situation. But pre-emptive funding offers from VCs for the top artificial intelligence companies have become the norm in Silicon Valley, and investors have approached Anthropic indicating that they’d invest at a valuation over $100 billion, the people said. The financing would mark a sharp jump from the $61.5 billion valuation Anthropic secured earlier this year, when it raised $3.5 billion in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

9.Does Marriage Have a Future? Debora L. Spar, Aryanna Garber in New Atlantis

How technology and the modern world are reshaping the idea of marriage, which once symbolised economic stability and social structure.

“Across the industrialized world, marriage rates are plummeting. In Japan, marriage rates fell from 9.3 per one thousand inhabitants in 1960 to just 4.1 in 2022. In the United States, they fell from 8.5 to 6.2 over the same period. And although birth rates are no longer linked as closely to marriage as they once were, they fell even more precipitously: again over the same period, the crude birth rate in the United States — the number of live births per one thousand people — dropped from 23.7 to 11.0. Even sex has become scarcer, with trends in sexlessness rising in recent years, and Millennials reporting fewer sexual partners than their parents and grandparents did at the same age.

As the data on these trends have become better known, researchers, pundits, and politicians have proffered a wide array of possible causes. Maybe marriage rates are falling as women’s rights and lives are improving, or as working-class jobs have disappeared for millions of single men. The decline could be attributable to fading morals, more promiscuous sex, or simply changing preferences. Maybe, having seen the escalating price of the traditional American union — the house, the kids, the college tuition — young people are deciding it’s simply not worth it. And so they’re striking out, and staying out, on their own.

All these explanations are no doubt true. But ultimately, the underlying force that is rearranging the contours of marriage is technology.” Read on.

10.Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK elections: Financial Times

The voting age will be lowered to 16 for all UK elections as part of an overhaul of the country’s voting system, the government has announced. 

The plan to give the vote to younger teenagers, which featured in last year’s Labour manifesto, will bring national elections in line with polls in Scotland and Wales. The voting age in England and Northern Ireland at present is 18.

The government said that young people already contributed to society “by working, paying taxes and serving in the military” and deserved the right to vote on issues that affected them.  

Internationally, the move aligns the UK with Austria, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Cuba, where the age is already 16. It is also 16 in the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The vast majority of countries set the limit at 18, though Greece and Indonesia have it at 17, while it is 20 in Oman, Kuwait and Tonga, and 25 in the United Arab Emirates.