Arvind's Newsletter

1.Hyundai explores $3 billion IPO for India unit at $25-30 billion valuation

South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co is evaluating a plan to list its local unit to take advantage of India's IPO boom, said people with knowledge of the matter. The move, which comes nearly three decades after Hyundai Motor India (HMIL) was launched, could be the country's largest initial public offering if it comes to fruition. HMIL was India's second-largest passenger vehicle seller last year, after Maruti Suzuki India.

Marquee global investment banks including Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank of America, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and UBS, were in Seoul last week to make IPO pitches to the Hyundai leadership, said the people cited above. Bankers valued the company at $22-28 billion, they said. Hyundai is exploring a 15-20% dilution to raise $3.3-5.6 billion (₹27,390 crore to ₹46,480 crore), people said

The IPO record was set in 2022 by LIC of India with an issue size of ₹21,000 crore. India recently became the fourth-largest equity market in the world, overtaking Hong Kong. At the upper band of $28 billion (₹23.2 lakh crore), HMIL will be valued at more than Mahindra and Mahindra, Adani Power and Bajaj Auto.

2.Adani’s Kutch Copper, the world largest single location copper manufacturing plant to start operations in March 2024 at Mundra

Kutch Copper Ltd (KCL), a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Ltd (AEL), the world's largest single-location copper manufacturing plant will start operations of the first phase by March-end and full-scale 1 million tonnes capacity by FY29 (March 2029), news agency PTI reported citi.

The $1.2-billion facility will help cut India's dependence on imports of the third most used industrial metal after steel and aluminium whose demand is rising on the back of fast-growing renewable energy, telecom and electric vehicle industries. 

3.Taylor Swift won her fourth Album of the Year Grammy, the most of any artist, for 2023’s Midnight. But it was a great night for Indian musicians as well

The win was Swift's fourth in the category, pushing her past Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Stevie Wonder for the most in Grammy history. She was also named Billboard’s most powerful person in music last week, and accounts for 2% of all U.S. record sales. Her success stands in contrast to that of the wider industry, which has seen slowing growth, the Financial Times reported.

Indian musicians Shankar Mahadevan and Zakir Hussain won the Grammys award for "Best Global Music Album" on Monday with their fusion band "Shakti". The award was given to the album "This Moment"

In addition Zakir Hussain secured an additional grammy for the Best Global Music Performance for his contribution to “Pashto" alongside Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer, featuring Rakesh Chaurasia. Zakir won a third grammy on the night and Rakesh his second grammy for best contemporary instrumental album for “As We Speak”, jointly also with Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer.

4.This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be trained on massive data sets that contain millions upon millions of words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways.

A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights and sounds experienced by a single child learning to talk?

A lot, it turns out. This work, published in Science, not only provides insights into how babies learn but could also lead to better AI models.

5.Could a giant beach umbrella in space save the Earth from climate change? A growing number of astronomers and physicists think it could.This is a rare climate-related win win. If it works, the scientists behind the project will have saved the world.

The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2 percent of the sun’s radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries.

The idea has been at the outer fringes of conversations about climate solutions for years. But as the climate crisis worsens, interest in sun shields has been gaining momentum, with more researchers offering up variations. There’s even a foundation dedicated to promoting solar shields.

A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of “space bubbles.” Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid.

Now scientists led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, say they are ready to build a prototype shade to show that the idea will work. Lets hope they succeed.

6.Microsoft’s AI chatbot will start developing news stories for media start-up Semafor

But Semafor’s human journalists will still do the actual writing. 

Microsoft is working with media start-up Semafor to use its artificial intelligence chatbot to help develop news stories — part of a journalistic outreach that comes as the tech giant faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from the New York Times.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft is paying an undisclosed sum of money to Semafor to sponsor a breaking news feed called “Signals”. The companies would not share financial details, but the amount of money is “substantial” to Semafor’s business, said a person familiar with the matter.

Signals will offer a feed of breaking news and analysis on big stories, with about a dozen posts a day. The goal is to offer different points of view from across the globe — a key focus for Semafor since its launch in 2022.

Semafor co-founder Ben Smith emphasised that Signals will be written entirely by journalists, with artificial intelligence providing a research tool to inform posts. Microsoft on Monday was also set to announce collaborations with journalist organisations including the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, the Online News Association and the GroundTruth Project.

7.At 43, why the Rohan Bopanna show has only begun

“I say I’m at level 43, not age 43 now!” said Rohan Bopanna during his speech at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on the night of January 27, after winning his maiden men’s doubles grand slam, the Australian Open.

Yes, Bopanna, a veteran of the tour, won his first men’s doubles major at the age of 43, and let it also be known that he did so with no cartilage in his knees. In doing so, Bopanna became the oldest man to win a slam; claimed the No. 1 ranking, again the oldest one to do so; and also became only the third Indian man—after Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes—to win a major.

Bopanna’s story is that of resilience, one that has seen him play on court for over two decades, awaiting the euphoric highs. It came way back in 2017 when Bopanna won the French Open mixed doubles title with Canadian Gabriela Dabrowski.

Bopanna’s first men’s doubles major has come in what was his 61st grand slam appearance, and with his 19th partner.