Arvind’s Newsletter

1.Apple has been diversifying away from China ( remember the article few days back in this newsletter on its struggles in ramping production in India). But it is not just moving manufacturing to India, Foxconn it’s manufacturing partner is expanding into Vietnam. The world’s biggest electronics manufacturer has signed a $62.5 million lease with Saigon-Bac Giang Industrial Park as it diversifies production outside of China.

2.A small group of folks in Israel, known as Team Jorgé, have been able to play a covert role in more than 30 elections across the world. Journalists from several outlets ran a longterm covert operation of their own to uncover the truth about a group determined to destroy it. Read the story in The Guardian: Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections. "In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets ... Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair."

3.Users have been reporting all sorts of ‘unhinged' behavior from Microsoft's AI chatbot. In one conversation with The Verge, Bing even claimed it spied on Microsoft's employees through webcams on their laptops and manipulated them." Microsoft's Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar, and people love it. Another columnist at the New York Times, was deeply disturbed after his two hour conversation with the chat bot. Over the course of the discussion, the chatbot announced that its name was Sydney, that it was in love with Kevin and that it might want to engineer a deadly virus. Afterward, Kevin — a Times technology columnist who’s hardly a technophobe — pronounced himself frightened by A.I.

4.The EU approved a ban on selling new fossil fuel cars by 2035. The bloc aims to speed up the adoption of EVs and contribute to its goal of becoming a net-zero economy by 2050.

Meanwhile, China – the world's biggest automobile market – wants at least half of all new cars to be electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen-powered by 2035.

5.India has been ranked fourth out of 51 countries in having a quality entrepreneurship ecosystem, a new global report said, reflecting the steady rise in the nation's business environment over the years.

India's ranking in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) National Entrepreneurship Context Index (NECI) report is a drastic turnaround following a much lower score in 2021, which was 16th overall. India's latest score of 6.1 reflects a steady increase in the country's overall entrepreneurial environment over the years.