Arvind’s Nwsletter

1.Apple moves towards India-made iPhone batteries in push away from China, reported Financial Times

Apple wants batteries for its latest generation of iPhones to be made in India, as part of the US tech giant’s efforts to diversify its global supply chain and move manufacturing out of China.

The world’s most valuable company has informed component suppliers of its preference to source batteries for the forthcoming iPhone 16 from Indian factories, according to two people close to Apple.

Battery manufacturers, such as Desay of China, have been encouraged to establish new factories in India, while Simplo Technology, a Taiwanese battery supplier for Apple, has been asked to scale up production in India for future orders, said three people familiar with the situation.

Separately, an Indian government minister this week said TDK, a Japanese supplier for Apple, was setting up a 180-acre facility in Manesar in the state of Haryana to build battery cells that would be used in Indian-made iPhones. In a post on X, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT, congratulated Apple, TDK and local officials for enabling the government’s “goal of deepening [the] electronics manufacturing ecosystem in India”.

TDK said that “it has begun construction of a plant in India for part of the battery production” and has plans to begin in 2025.

Companies such as Desay and Simplo package the electric cells produced by TDK and their counterparts into modules and send them to assemblers such as Foxconn.

2.As global leaders and negotiators meet at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, at the heart of the world’s fossil fuel industry, a damning new report on climate change says the world is in danger of crossing five “tipping points” that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions won’t reverse anytime soon. 

It means humanity is at an inflection point between two potential futures. An international team of more than 200 researchers found that the mass death of warm-water coral reefs is now likely given current levels of warming (1.2C), while four other processes—the collapse of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, disruption of the North Atlantic sub-polar circulation and abrupt thawing of permafrost regions—are considered possible.

3.End of globalisation? : Tense talks between European and Chinese leaders underlined fears of a global shift away from promoting trade. 

China’s Xi Jinping insisted in talks with European Union officials that Beijing wanted to be a “trusted partner ” on trade, but Brussels has in recent months outlined a “de-risking” strategy, while Italy officially informed China that it was withdrawing from its belt and road infrastructure program. Other trade deals are also at risk: Proposed EU agreements with South America and Australia have suffered setbacks while the U.S. slowed plans to rollout an Asia-Pacific pact, which was already criticised as insufficiently ambitious.

4.Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year

Amy Edmondson has won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award for Right Kind of Wrong, about how to learn from failure and take better risks.

Her book won over the judges with its systematic, richly illustrated exploration of how to build on “intelligent failure” and its critique of the craze for failure that often hypnotises entrepreneurs and innovators.

Harvard Business School professor Edmondson is best known for her research into “psychological safety”. Right Kind of Wrong is the first mainstream management book to win the £30,000 award, now in its 19th year.

Roula Khalaf, the FT’s editor and chair of judges, said Right Kind of Wrong was “a highly readable and relevant book, with important lessons for leaders and managers everywhere”.

The book illustrates its point with important cases, from early heart transplants to the Boeing 737 Max crashes. Schroders’ chief executive, Peter Harrison, another judge, said it provided “clarity and practical prescription to address the issues businesses face every day”.

( I finished reading The Right Kind of Wrong a few weeks back and strongly recommend this book, it is in my top 5 books of the year )

5.Google DeepMind’s new Gemini model looks amazing—but could signal peak AI hype, reports MIT’s Technology Review.

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Now, the company has finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no.

Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet—its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race for AI supremacy. There is no doubt that the model is pitched as best-in-class across a wide range of capabilities—an “everything machine.”

But while it’s a big step for Google, but not necessarily a giant leap for the field as a whole. Judging from its demos, it does many things very well—but few things that we haven’t seen before. Read the full story.

Read MIT Technology Review’s in-depth interview with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google on occasion of the launch of Gemini.

Not everyone was impressed with Gemini: Google’s shares fell, and The Information said the company was lagging behind OpenAI.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/what-googles-gemini-says-about-the-state-of-alphabetone of the biggest things we all grapple.”