Quick notes: What Musk wants | WTO is toast...

• What Musk Really Wants: India’s appeasement of Trump comes to nought.. All this touchy-feely diplomatic propaganda masked what Musk really wants from India — that his Starlink be allowed to enter the Indian market via an administrative allocation of spectrum (as opposed to the hefty sums paid by the existing Indian players through competitive bidding), a reduction in import duties on electric vehicles, especially Tesla, whose low-cost models he hopes to sell in India, and a possible collaboration between Space X and ISRO.



• Forever indebted to our colonial masters: UK and India relaunch trade talks in Delhi... "Oxford seat for my daughter and you get to loot India again, deal?"



• Darshan devo Shankar: Raag Yaman Kalyan bandish. Rahul Ranade, Navin and Chirag Solanki.




• ‘The WTO is toast.’: What happens to global trade now. The free trade promise of consumers buying from the lowest-cost producers could be imperiled.



• Trouble for China: Any deep understanding between the US and Russia will erode China’s influence at the high table.



• What If China, America Make Up?: Possibility of America and China reaching some level of tactical accommodation. . . Trump Says New China Trade Deal ‘Possible’. I have with President Xi is, I would say, a great one”.



• The world's deadliest dam failures have occurred in China:

My column: The world's deadliest dam failures have occurred in China. And if a powerful earthquake caused China's super-dam to collapse, millions downstream could die, largely in India's populous Brahmaputra Valley. Yet India has said little on the threat. https://t.co/5AKxJZPRsG

— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) January 29, 2025




• Raja Koduri on Intel's "cancel" culture: Intel’s ex-exec Raja Koduri says “You don’t learn without shipping”; gives a rundown into what’s wrong with Team Blue and how Intel is held back by bureaucratic snakes



• Hand in the cookie jar: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding



• China's bicycle revival: "Automobiles, as a transportation method, have their limits".

Quick notes: H-1B Visas | Distillation...

• The less Modi talks of the H1B visa the better: Everybody and his proverbial uncle in the leadership circles in the US and the West has about had it with the Indian PM’s pleadings to let in more Indian engineers and science grads as a way of pleasing his middle class voter base. The US’ intake of Indian STEMers will be whatever the American economy and system requires.
  
  Countries like Vietnam, that are following the Trumpian route to making the govt more receptive to the private sector, have already stolen a march over India, and will be beyond India’s ability to catch up with in the manufacturing sector. Time, therefore, for Modi to stop pushing the H1B stuff and regain a bit of self-respect for the nation. Or, there will be more humiliations in tow, like the C-17 returning the illegals in chains to Amritsar.
  
  
• The Problems with H-1B Visas and India’s Brain Drain:




• False prestige: India to go all out to win bid for 2036 Olympic Games



• Modi sarkar saving China from Trump: Reliance brings Shein to India five years after ban. . . No more a national security threat?



• ‘Distillation’ Is AI’s New Buzzword—and a Scary One for AI Companies. It is like asking any question you want of Einstein and becoming almost as knowledgeable as he is in physics. It's an easy way for smaller developers, in particular, to recreate some of the capabilities of much larger models in a much more cost-efficient manner, and doing it in a way that also produces AI models that themselves are a lot smaller and more cost-efficient.



• Mark’s unlawful activity: Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations



• English-medium champs: Why Can't India Build its Own DeepSeek or ChatGPT?



• Electric Scooter-Cum-Rickshaw: Hero MotoCorp Unveils Convertible Surge S32 Electric Scooter.



• Immigration Crackdown: UK Targets Indian Restaurants In Trump-Style Immigration Crackdown

DeepSeek - China’s new AI model

• Silicon Valley Is Raving About a Made-in-China AI Model: “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” said Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has been advising President Trump.
  
  DeepSeek said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Anthropic.
  
  DeepSeek said R1 and V3 both performed better than or close to leading Western models. As of Saturday, the two models were ranked in the top 10 on Chatbot Arena, a platform hosted by University of California, Berkeley, researchers that rates chatbot performance. A Google Gemini model was in the top spot, while DeepSeek bested Anthropic’s Claude and Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI.



• How China’s new AI model DeepSeek is threatening U.S. dominance: “To see the DeepSeek new model, it’s super impressive in terms of both how they have really effectively done an open-source model that does this inference-time compute, and is super-compute efficient,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”
  
  DeepSeek also had to navigate the strict semiconductor restrictions that the U.S. government has imposed on China, cutting the country off from access to the most powerful chips, like Nvidia’s H100s. The latest advancements suggest DeepSeek either found a way to work around the rules, or that the export controls were not the chokehold Washington intended.
  
  “They can take a really good, big model and use a process called distillation,” said Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta. “Basically you use a very large model to help your small model get smart at the thing you want it to get smart at. That’s actually very cost-efficient.”



• DeepSeek R1 Explained to your grandma:




• How small Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley: DeepSeek’s R1 release sparked a frenzied debate in Silicon Valley about whether better resourced US AI companies, including Meta and Anthropic, can defend their technical edge.
  
  Industry insiders say DeepSeek’s singular focus on research makes it a dangerous competitor because it is willing to share its breakthroughs rather than protect them for commercial gains. DeepSeek has not raised money from outside funds or made significant moves to monetise its models.
  
  DeepSeek claimed it used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and $5.6mn to train a model with 671bn parameters, a fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train comparably sized models.
  
  Ritwik Gupta, AI policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said DeepSeek’s recent model releases demonstrate that “there is no moat when it comes to AI capabilities”. “The first person to train models has to expend lots of resources to get there,” he said. “But the second mover can get there cheaper and more quickly.”
  
  Gupta added that China had a much larger talent pool of systems engineers than the US who understand how to get the best use of computing resources to train and run models more cheaply.



• The Empire Strikes Back: China Prepares One Trillion Yuan AI Plan to Rival $500 Billion US Stargate Project.

Quick notes: Lutyens properties | BYD in India...

• Inspired by Waqf board, KKKaangress to reclaim 'its' properties: “There are a large number of properties, including in Delhi, that belong to the pre-1969 Indian National Congress that were subject to legislation. There is now a Supreme Court judgment, which says that all the pre-1969 properties in which the Congress had operated from belong to the INC”.



• Chinese EVs in India?: BYD keen on India manufacturing despite Visa issues.... Xi wants EV dominance, NaMo wants shanti, sadbhavana. Match made in heaven! /s



• India's battery hope: Hindustan Zinc to revolutionise batteries, challenge Lithium dominance. "We are working with IITs on how to innovate with zinc for EVs".



• Semiconductors: First 'Made-in-India' chip to now roll out in 2025.



• Here come the AI lawsuits: LinkedIn accused of using private messages to train AI



• 15-Minute Meal Revolution: Quick Commerce Killing Restaurants?




• Tibet Dam Project: China could use it as "Water Bomb".



• War prep: Chinese university applies for undersea cable cutter patent — device developed by coastal university located across the sea from Taiwan



• Chinese illegal immigrants in US: “Sixty thousand Chinese males, mostly military age, do not leave China without the coordination and approval of the Chinese government. This is a coordinated national security vulnerability that the Chinese government is involved in.”



• Dalai Lama: “Despite all the suffering and destruction, we still hold fast to the hope for a peaceful resolution of our struggle for freedom and dignity. Drawing on the lessons learned from my decades of engagement with Beijing, the book also aims to offer some thoughts on what might be the way forward.”



• Freebie Raj: "All over the world, subsidy and welfare is given to those who can't afford. Here, we have women from two rich cities like Bengaluru and Mysuru, traveling free just because it is available".

  I took an early morning bus to Mysuru, from Bengaluru. ₹210 fare. Comfortable KSRTC bus and a world class highway for fast travel.
  
  But I got a few thoughts.
  
  1) Nearly 30 of the 50 passengers were women. Just show Aadhar and travel free. Is this fair? Is it equality?
  2) 20… pic.twitter.com/2TfkzF88IA

  — Kiran Kumar S (@KiranKS) January 8, 2025




• Building Namma Yatri: Open-Source Mobility Platform Redefining Urban Transport



• World's dumping ground: Between June and August 2019, 58 ships containing plastic waste appeared in Indonesian ports. Indonesia didn't accept this waste and the ships were supposedly sent back to their home country: the US. But instead, 38 of these ships came to India.
  
  “Tech dumping” is the practice of old, outdated or malfunctioning electronic devices and technologies being exported by developed countries to developing countries at low prices.



• Solar Sheep: China's Unexpected Solar Power Success Story！

Quick notes: Trade colony | Awaiting Tejas...

• Trade colony India: China just posted a trade surplus with the rest of the world of almost $1 trillion for 2024. China today accounts for around 27% of global industrial production.




• Why China needs India more than ever: China’s Export Boom Means Trump Tariffs Would Hit Beijing Where It Hurts



• Shakeout time: China makes more cars than it needs. Excess capacity among carmakers in China is driving the world’s largest auto market into a shakeout phase.



• India's loss: How China’s Synthetic Diamonds Crushed India’s $20 Billion Diamond Industry?



• 'Achievments abroad is not enough': Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu shares the #1 reason Indians have no respect globally.



• "First 40 Tejas still not...": Still awaiting Tejas from 2010 deal: IAF chief as China tests sixth-gen jet




• Bengaluru must shun car-centric planning: Instead of investing in projects that increase the vehicle footprint, the government should implement the vision outlined in the CMP— prioritising public transport, walking and cycling, and reducing dependence on private vehicles. It is time to shift focus towards building infrastructure that moves people, not just cars.



• Pakistan jackpot: Finds gold deposits worth Rs 609 billion.

Quick notes: Pak missile | Stock market cocaine...

• White House: Pakistan's ballistic missile programme emerging threat to US . . . Led by Russia & China, Pakistan eyes “Elite League” of group that can hit U.S with nuclear-armed missiles



• How Pakistan’s oil discovery could change global markets:




• Pakistan’s stealth move: To acquire 40 Chinese J-35A jets in 2 years amid IAF fleet woes



• Caliphate nextdoor: Pakistan may use Bangladesh as a corridor to send arms to India's northeast. Pakistani ships are now sailing into Bangladesh ports and the earlier orders to examine all cargo on these ships has been waived.



• Adani deal: Andhra Pradesh is likely to pay as much as 23 per cent over the price it agreed in the contract once the taxes and duties are included. Annual payments to Adani once the power supply is fully operational will be roughly equal to state spending on social security and nutrition programs for the previous fiscal year



• More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market: A new type of addict is showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country: investors hooked on the market’s riskiest trades. . . problem worse in India.



• AI reality check: The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive.




• Sino-Russian joint efforts in semiconductors? Russia plans EUV chipmaking tools that it says will be cheaper and easier to build than ASML's — country outlines new roadmap to smaller chips



• "No Silicon Valley": Startup Founder Reveals Why He Left Bengaluru In Just 16 Months... "Bengaluru is a place that encourages companies to grow fast and fail fast. That kind of pressure didn't align with the needs of a healthcare business, which has no room for error and demands significant trust from people... I felt excluded because I didn't speak Hindi and I wasn't an alumnus of the IIT".



• Narayana Murthy on Mass Migration To Bengaluru, Pune: These cities have become extremely challenging to live in, difficult to navigate, and have witnessed rising pollution levels. They are heading toward becoming unlivable