Arvind's Newsletter

1.Move over New Delhi, Jakarta is the world’s most polluted city.

The Indonesian capital was the world’s most polluted city for several days this month, and authorities set out a series of measures to reduce the smog, driven by a combination of coal-fired power plants on its outskirts and a long-running drought. Among other things, motorists will be subject to random emissions tests, risking fines or loss of their driving licenses if their vehicles are too polluting. Tens of thousands of Indonesian civil servants were ordered to work from home for two months to help alleviate Jakarta’s worsening air pollution. Among those suffering is Indonesia’s president: “He has been coughing for almost four weeks,” one minister told reporters, “and said he has never felt this way.”

2.India’s wealth managers search out small-town millionaires reports Financial Times. Some excerpts from the article:

“India’s biggest conurbations, including around Mumbai, New Delhi and Hyderabad, have always been associated with banking scions and merchant dynasties, but more millionaires are emerging in so-called second- and third-tier cities considered less developed though still populous.

Between 2020 and 2021, India’s (dollar) millionaires club grew from 689,000 people to 796,000, according to Credit Suisse.

The increasing wealth comes as Indian businesspeople have made their companies more formal, sometimes cashing in by selling out to private equity firms or taking them public. Meanwhile, the stock market has been on a tear. Indian equities have gained handsomely in the past few years, also boosting wealth.

Mumbai, India’s banking centre and home of Bollywood, still boasts the greatest portion of India’s super-rich (billionaires), according to the 2022 Hurun India Rich List. But the Hurun ranking shows smaller cities are also spawning their own millionaire’s rows: Agra, better known for the Taj Mahal than its business scene, now hosts six of India’s richest people; Rajkot, the fourth-largest city in the western state of Gujarat, has seven.

To keep up, wealth managers are branching out to smaller cities after years being based in top 4-5 cities and flying out to smaller cities. The chance for wealth managers to score new clients in India’s further-flung cities is also because multigenerational family-business owners are shifting from physical (real estate and gold) to financial assets.

3.How the U.S. government came to rely Elon Musk—and is now struggling to rein him in. the

In the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has written large piece on the power Musk has amassed and wields in government quarters. "In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatisation, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice.

Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. OnePentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission.'We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,' he told me. He replied immediately, 'In some ways.' Reid Hoffman told me that attitude is 'like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.'" (I am the state).S

The above article is under paywall and if you are not able access you may like to read an article based on the New Yorker piece in Futurism.

4.How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips as reported in New York Times.Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models.

Over more than 10 years, Nvidia has built a nearly impregnable lead in producing chips that can perform complex A.I. tasks like image, facial and speech recognition, as well as generating text for chatbots like ChatGPT. The onetime industry upstart achieved that dominance by recognising the A.I. trend early, tailoring its chips to those tasks and then developing key pieces of software that aid in A.I. development.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, has since kept raising the bar. To maintain its leading position, his company has also offered customers access to specialised computers, computing services and other tools of their emerging trade. That has turned Nvidia, for all intents and purposes, into a one-stop shop for A.I. development.

While Google, Amazon, Meta, IBM and others have also produced A.I. chips, Nvidia today accounts for more than 70 percent of A.I. chip sales and holds an even bigger position in training generative A.I. models, according to the research firm Omdia.

In May, the company’s status as the most visible winner of the A.I. revolution became clear when it projected a 64 percent leap in quarterly revenue, far more than Wall Street had expected. Nvidia has surged past $1 trillion in market capitalization to become the world’s most valuable chip maker.

5.IBM says 40% of the global workforce will have to learn new skills over next three years due to AI implementation."AI won't replace people---but people who use AI will replace people who don't"

“Generative AI is going to have such a big impact on the global jobs market that 40% of workers will have to re-skill in the next three years, according to a study by IBM. The good news is that 87% of executives who were surveyed said they expect the likes of ChatGPT to augment existing roles rather than replace them.”

However, behind the hype of generative AI, large companies are struggling to deploy the new technology— hitting cost and data management hurdles that are leaving many of their generative AI projects stuck in pilot phase, reports Axios.

Companies remain optimistic overall about the boost in productivity promised by generative AI — but achieving the technology's potential is taking longer and costing more than many initially expected.