Arvind's newsletter

1.Torrent Pharmaceuticals leads race to acquire Cipla with 30% higher offer than Blackstone's reported Business Standard

Torrent Pharmaceuticals has emerged as a frontrunner to acquire its rival Cipla with a non-binding offer that’s more than 30 per cent higher than American private equity giant Blackstone’s bid.

According to a source close to the negotiations, while Blackstone offered approximately Rs 900 a share, the Ahmedabad-based pharmaceutical firmhas made an all-cash offer at around Rs 1,200 a share, which is close to the current market price of Cipla.

Shares of Cipla closed at Rs 1,239 apiece on the BSE on Monday, with a market valuation of Rs 1 trillion. The Hamied family, the promoters of Cipla, is expected to take a call on Torrent’s offer in two to three weeks, said the source.

2.Sony takes on Disney and Mukesh Ambani in India with Zee merger, reports Financial Times. Some excerpts from this article.

In the late 1980s, Sony stunned the world with the $3bn acquisition of Columbia Pictures and a grand ambition to crack Hollywood. Three decades on, the Japanese entertainment giant is pursuing the same strategy in India’s Bollywood.

Sony’s story in India started 40 years ago, when Japanese companies saw south Asia as just another growing market for electronics. But with the world’s biggest population, a rapidly growing middle class and an insatiable appetite for entertainment, India to Sony is now worth much more.

Last month’s approval of a deal between the Japanese giant and Zee, India’s largest listed media group, cleared the way for the creation of a $10bn entertainment conglomerate with more than 70 Indian TV channels, film studios and extensive movie catalogues. Sony faces a formidable challenge from Disney Star, India’s largest TV network, and other deep-pocketed rivals such as Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s JioCinema streaming service, which are jostling for dominance of the entertainment market in a country of 1.4bn people.

Nevertheless, Sony’s chief executive, Kenichiro Yoshida, is convinced of the opportunities for the combined group.

The country’s Hindi and regional language entertainment sector has grown into one of the world’s largest film industries,churning out more movies than any other nation every year since 2005, according to Sony.

The company hopes it can repeat its success in the US, its most lucrative market, in India. The media business Sony built there helped it leverage its intellectual property across games, TV shows, films and animation to evolve from an electronics brand into a $105bn global media giant.

Its most recent hit was turning the 2013 PlayStation game The Last of Us into a hugely successful TV show — a zombie saga streamed by HBO in the US. Analysts expect Sony’s pictures division to be boosted over the next two years by other TV adaptations of its blockbuster games titles.

This year, it plans to roll out the car racing GranTurismo movie, while action-adventure hits Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War are being produced by Netflix and Amazon Studios, respectively.

The entertainment company’s deal with Zee creates a 74-channel media powerhouse that gives the Japanese group a 24.8 per cent market share, overtaking Disney Star, which has a 24 per cent share. Once the merger is complete, Sony will take a 53 per cent stake in the combined entity with Zee and invest nearly $1.6bn.

Sony intends to replicate its US playbook by adopting an “arms dealer” strategy where it distributes titles across multiple rival streaming platforms to maximise profits, instead of launching its own streaming service.

3.The next generation of high-end electric vehicles is promising a major range upgrade. 

Mercedes revealed a concept of its upcoming sedan with a 466-mile single-charge range while BMW similarly says its latest prototype should manage 497 miles range. EV ranges are steadily improving: In 2021, the average EV range was 219 miles, and the first commercial EV to break the 400-mile barrier was the Tesla Model S, in 2020. Now they are pushing 500. Much of the improvement is from reduced weight and better aerodynamics, although battery-tech upgrades have helped. The Mini Cooper, the British design classic made famous by 1969’s The Italian Job, will have for the first time an electric version, too

4.ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it opines MIT Technology Review

Last winter and spring brought so many headlines about AI in the classroom, with some panicked schools going as far as to ban ChatGPT altogether. Now, with the summer months having offered a bit of time for reflection, some schools seem to be reconsidering their approach.

Tate Ryan-Mosley, our senior tech policy reporter, spoke to the associate provost at Yale University to find out why the prestigious school never considered banning ChatGPT—and instead wants to work with it. Read the full story.

5.AI could choke on its own exhaust as it fills the web, reports the Axios.

The internet is beginning to fill up with more and more content generated by artificial intelligence rather than human beings, posing weird new dangers both to human society and to the AI programs themselves.Experts estimate that AI-generated content could account for as much as 90% of the content on the internet in a few years' time, as ChatGPT, Dall-E and similar programs spill torrents of verbiage and images into online spaces.

That's happening in a world that hasn't yet figured out how to reliably label AI-generated output and differentiate it from human-created content.The danger to human society is the now-familiar problem of information overload and degradation.

There's also widespread fear that AI could undermine the jobs of people who create content today, from artists and performers to journalists, editors and publishers. The current strike by Hollywood actors and writers underlines this risk.

The danger to AI itself is newer and stranger. A raft of recent research papers have introduced a novel lexicon of potential AI disorders that are just coming into view as the technology is more widely deployed and used.

• "Model collapse" is researchers' name for what happens to generative AI models, like OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4, when they're trained using data produced by other AIs rather than human beings.

• Feed a model enough of this "synthetic" data, and the quality of the AI's answers can rapidly deteriorate, as the systems lock in on the most probable word choices and discard the "tail" choices that keep their output interesting.

• "Model Autophagy Disorder," or MAD, is how one set of researchers at Rice and Stanford universities dubbed the result of AI consuming its own products.

• "Habsburg AI" is what another researcher earlier this year labeled the phenomenon, likening it to inbreeding: "A system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features."

Read on