One Thing Today in Tech

The first trans-Atlantic flight using 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel was made between London and New York yesterday by Britain’s Virgin Atlantic, bringing the industry another small step closer to sustainable aviation.

Test flight VIR100, which did not carry paying passengers, took off from London’s Heathrow Airport at 11:49 am UK time (6:49 am ET and 5:19 pm in India) and landed at New York’s JFK airport at 2:05 pm ET, CNBC reported, citing Flightradar24.

The flight, which the airline named Flight100, demonstrated that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) was a safe drop-in replacement for the current fossil-fuel based jet fuel, compatible with today’s engines, airframes and fuel infrastructure, Virgin Atlantic said in a press release yesterday.

Shai Weiss, CEO of Virgin Atlantic said in the press release, “Flight100 proves that Sustainable Aviation Fuel can be used as a safe, drop-in replacement for fossil-derived jet fuel. 

SAF is made from non-fossil-derived fuels, including biofuels derived from plant or animal waste, municipal waste and agricultural residues. That it can be a drop-in alternative means that it can be used with the existing commercial aircraft without any costly modifications to their engines and so on.

Virgin’s Flight100 was made by a Boeing 787 widebody aircraft, flying on Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines, according to the press release.

Simon Burr, Group Director of Engineering, Technology & Safety, at Rolls-Royce said: “Rolls-Royce has recently completed compatibility testing of 100 percent SAF on all our in-production civil aero engine types and this is further proof that there are no engine technology barriers to the use of 100 percent SAF.”

SAF also produces emissions, but overall emissions from it are considered to be lower than emissions from fossil fuels.

In 2021, a group of 60 companies from the airline, transport and cargo industries promised to ensure that 10 percent of all the jet fuel they used was SAF. And last year, the aviation industry set itself the target of reaching net zero status by 2050.

SAF is made from waste products, and delivers CO2 lifecycle emissions savings of up to 70 percent, whilst performing like the traditional jet fuel it replaces, according to Virgin’s press release.

Today, SAF represents less than 0.1 percent of global jet fuel volumes and fuel standards allow for only 50 percent SAF blend in commercial jet engines.

CNBC notes that other airlines have used SAF on commercial flights, although generally on shorter journeys and in up-to-50 percent blends with regular fuel, which was previously the regulatory limit. Tuesday’s Virgin Atlantic flight was approved by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority earlier this month.

The SAF used on Flight100 is a dual blend comprising 88 percent hydro-processed esters and fatty acids (HEFA), supplied by AirBP and 12 percent synthetic aromatic kerosene, supplied by Virent, a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum Corporation.

The HEFA is made from waste fats while the SAK is made from plant sugars, with the remainder of plant proteins, oil and fibres continuing into the food chain. The kerosene is needed in 100 percent SAF blends to give the fuel the required aromatics for engine function 

In 2022 aviation accounted for 2 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions, having grown faster in recent decades than rail, road or shipping, the International Energy Agency notes in its assessment of the industry.

As international travel demand recovered following the Covid-19 pandemic, aviation emissions in 2022 reached almost 800 million tonnes of CO2, about 80 percent of the pre-pandemic level.

Earlier this year, the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, published a report assessing a variety of alternative fuels, including biofuels, and found that availability and accessibility are big problems, Mongobay, a US-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform, notes in a July report.

India’s EV landscape is changing, with startups emerging across the value chain – from all-electric cabs to e-bikes and innovative purchase options. But first, some headlines:

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms knowingly employed methods that lured children on to these platforms, The New York Times reported on Nov. 25, citing un-redacted court documents from a federal lawsuit in the US, filed last month by California, Colorado and 31 other states in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Apple contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology will invest more than $1.5 billion in an Indian construction project to fulfill “operational needs,” CNBC reports, citing company filings in Taiwan yesterday.

Tata Consultancy Services has launched its AWS generative AI practice, with an extensive catalog of use-cases for the technology, the company said in a press release yesterday.

One thing today

India’s consumer EV landscape is changing. Startups are emerging offering new products like e-bikes and slow-speed scooters that don’t require users to obtain a driving licence, and new purchase options are also being innovated to reduce the upfront cost of these vehicles to make them more competitive with their petrol burning counterparts.

Yulu Bikes, for example, has started directly selling a consumer version of its low-speed moped Miracle, which it calls Yulu Wynn and which is being manufactured by Bajaj Auto. With a top speed of only 25kmph, one doesn’t need a license to use this scooter on Indian roads. 

Yulu Wynn costs about Rs. 55,000 to buy, and then you will also have to sign up for one of Yulu’s subscription plans to use the scooter. The purchase price doesn’t include the battery or the software, which are included in the subscription plans, and you get access to the company’s Yuma battery swapping network. 

This is similar to how Ather Energy or Tata Nexon users pay to use premium features on those vehicles, Amit Gupta, Yulu’s co-founder and CEO told me recently. And you can find that detailed conversation on Forbes India’s website. 

Kunal Khattar, a prolific VC investor in the EV space, points out that if we find ways to take out the cost of the battery, then that’s practically half the cost of the electric vehicle. So models more like Yulu’s will surely emerge, where a bank might finance the battery and the consumer gets an affordable subscription plan.

Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that EMotorad Ventures, an electric bicycle maker in Pune, has raised $20 million in a Series B round. EMotorad’s electric bicycle models feature self-diagnostics, removable batteries, dual disc brakes, portable chargers, and retractable aluminum frames. 

TechCrunch reports that the company offers a 48-hour resolution of customer complaints. Founded in 2020 by Kunal Gupta, Rajib Gangopadhyay, Aditya Oza and Sumedh Battewar, EMotorad today exports its e-bikes to more than 18 countries through white labeling and selling its own brand in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, and some Middle Eastern markets.

Of its 14 e-bike models, seven or eight are available in India and the rest are sold overseas, priced between $600 to $1,200 in the US, according to TechCrunch.

Emotorad has raised more than $22.5 million in total funding, from investors including Singapore’s Panthera Growth Partners, Alteria Capital, xto10x Technologies, and Green Frontier Capital.

Economic Times reported yesterday that Gensol will make electric “reverse trikes,” which have two wheels in the front and one in the back, starting February, citing co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi, who is also the managing director of Gensol, a solar engineering procurement and construction company.

Jaggi expects to soon start production at a factory in Chakan, India’s biggest auto manufacturing hub, with capacity to turn out 30,000 vehicles. So cheaper Blusmart rides may be on offer next year.

US space agency NASA’s Administrator Bill Nelson is in India today to meet top government and ISRO officials, as both countries look to deepen their space exploration and scientific research partnership. 

The visit by Nelson, a former US senator, “fulfills a commitment through the US and India initiative on critical and emerging technology spearheaded by President Joe Biden,” Nasa said in a press release on Nov. 24.

Nelson was appointed as the 14th Nasa administrator in May 2021. During this visit to India, he is expected visit several locations, including the Bengaluru-based facilities where the NISAR spacecraft, a joint Earth-observing mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), is undergoing testing and integration for launch in 2024.

NISAR is short for NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar. It is the first satellite mission between NASA and ISRO. It is an Earth-observing instrument, the first in the Earth System Observatory, which was announced by NASA last year.

The observatory will be put in space via five satellite missions, including Nisar, which is set for launch next year. The observatory will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, key information to guide efforts related to climate change, hazard mitigation, agriculture, and so on.

Senator Nelson is also expected to meet students to discuss STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and how they can participate in the Artemis program, Nasa’s initiative to return humans to the Moon and make it a launchpad for missions to Mars.

The Nasa chief is also expected to travel to UAE during this trip to participate in the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Over the last few years, India has opened up its space efforts to private industry and startups and established the institutional infrastructure and policies to foster this ecosystem. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) is tasked with expanding the commercialization of India’s space tech capabilities.

In April, the government also released India’s space policy, to promote a comprehensive approach to the space economy opportunity ahead.

The government’s estimate projects India’s space market to be worth $40 billion in 2030. This could go as high as $100 billion, the consultancy Arthur D. Little says, if investments and efforts in certain focus areas are stepped up.

Meanwhile, OneWeb India, the local subsidiary of low-earth orbit operator Eutelsat OneWeb, said last week, it had become the first company to receive India’s go ahead to launch its commercial satellite broadband services. Bharti Airtel owns about 21 percent of UK-based OneWeb, which was recently merged with Europe’s Eutelsat.

Other multinational companies including billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite broadband business, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s project Kuiper, which are all putting large low earth orbit satellite constellations in space are also expected to offer to their services in India.

And JioSpaceFiber, part of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is also in the race to offer its own satellite based internet services in the country soon. 

On the startups front, Indian space tech startups have gone from raising only $35 million in funding between 2010 and 2019, to $28 million in 2020 to $96 million in 2021 and $112 million in 2022, according to Tracxn, a private markets intelligence provider.

This year the sector has attracted $62 million in funding as of August, according to Tracxn. Indian space startups are developing a range of technologies and products, including hyperspectral imaging, 3D-printed rocket engines, satellite propulsion systems and sustainable less toxic rocket fuels.

NVIDIA, which has a near monopoly on computer chips for AI applications, reported its fiscal third-quarter numbers yesterday that beat street expectations. 

The semiconductor company’s Q3 revenues of $18.12 billion is a 206 percent year-on-year jump, reflecting the extent to which big tech companies are ramping up AI investments. Sales to the data centre segment, which accounted for 80 percent of the company’s Q3 revenues, was even more impressive, rising 279 percent.

Sales rose 34 percent sequentially over Q2, and data centre sales, 41 percent. NVIDIA expects this scorching growth to continue. Q4 revenues are expected to touch $20 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, representing a 231 percent increase year on year.

“Our strong growth reflects the broad industry platform transition from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in the company’s Q3 earnings press release.

“Large language model startups, consumer internet companies and global cloud service providers were the first movers, and the next waves are starting to build,” Huang said.

Nations and regional communications services providers are investing in AI clouds to meet local demand, enterprise software companies are adding AI co-pilots and assistants to their platforms, and enterprises are creating custom AI to automate the world’s largest industries, he said.

“NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, networking, AI foundry services and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software are all growth engines in full throttle. The era of generative AI is taking off,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the very company that made generative AI mainstream with its ChatGPT bot, we await the final word on whether Sam Altman will return to the company he co-founded, or make his rift with the it permanent.

Altman was abruptly fired from the company on Nov. 17 and two days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman was joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research unit.

Microsoft, expecting to welcome any of the 770 OpenAI researchers who leave to join it, is said to be readying workspaces at its LinkedIn office, complete with Macbook laptops, Axios reported earlier today. About 95 percent of OpenAI staff have threatened to leave and follow Altman if the board of OpenAI doesn’t resign, making way for his return.

What’s happened “highlights the growing rift between the proponents of a more measured rollout of the technology, that emphasizes safety guardrails above commercialization and monetization of solutions. This could have deep-reaching implications for the market,” Beatriz Valle, Senior Technology Analyst at the UK based consultancy GlobalData, said in an email yesterday.

The events also shine a light on the legal structure of OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a non-profit company and adopted a new structure in 2019, following Microsoft’s involvement, Valle writes.

The company’s founding charter still allowed the four-person board to fire Altman.

OpenAI is controlled by its non-profit board, which has no fiduciary obligations towards stakeholders or investors, she points out.

“This was a very immature board with members who had never built companies, never moved from ideology to commercialization, nor had any pragmatic board experience,” Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research in San Francisco, writes in a blog post.

The board's big worries included ownership of training data, impact of untested models and detection of unwanted bias, Wang writes.

OpenAI's biggest challenge is making the economics work, and Altman’s move to accelerate commercialization was the right thing, he says.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella moved swiftly to recruit OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman after his shocking ouster as CEO last week from the company responsible for the ChatGPT bot which has made AI a household term. Microsoft also hired Greg Brockman, who resigned as president of OpenAI after Altman’s ouster.

Wall Street cheered, and Microsoft shares rose on the Nasdaq stock exchange, ending more than 2 percent higher yesterday.

“We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners,” Nadella wrote in a post on X.

“We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OpenAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”

Emmett Shear is co-founder of Twitch, the games streaming service that Amazon acquired, and interim CEO of OpenAI.

And then, a letter signed by more than 95 percent of the employees at OpenAI called for the resignation of the company's board and Altman’s return, Wired reports.

The employees threatened to quit and join Microsoft if their demands were not met. Among the signatories to the letter are company board member Ilya Sutskever as well as Mira Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO after the departure of Altman.

The letter, addressed to OpenAI’s board of directors, says: “Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI,” ABC News reports, citing a copy of the letter.

“We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman,” the letter reads.

Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company, OpenAI said in a statement on Friday, according to an Associated Press report carried by PBS.

Emmet Shear said yesterday in a post on X that he would hire an independent investigator to look into what led up to Altman’s ouster and write a report within 30 days, according to Associated Press.

He wrote that the reason behind the board removing Altman was not a “specific disagreement on safety.” This could be a reference to the debates around OpenAI’s mission to safely build AI that is “generally smarter than humans,” AP reports.

With billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft and other investors, OpenAI has moved to commercialise its AI technology, chiefly through ChatGPT, which can generate essays and poems and other human-like text.

OpenAI’s board includes Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, AP notes.

Casey Newton, whose tech newsletter Platformer is widely followed, pointed out in his latest letter today that Toner has the power under the company’s charter to halt OpenAI’s efforts to build an artificial general intelligence.

As to what is being seen as something of a coup for Nadella, he didn’t really have a choice, according to one analyst. “If Microsoft lost Altman he could have gone to Amazon, Google, Apple, or a host of other tech companies craving to get the face of AI globally in their doors,” Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said in a research note, according to AP.

For example, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com posted on X that “Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity” including unrealised open trade equity to immediately join his company’s AI team.

Diwali crackers are about to add to the already dangerously polluted air in the national capital region. So how would it be if you could fly over the smog for an important meeting, in a tenth of the time it would take to go from Gurugram to Connaught Place, say, and pay about the same as what an Uber ride would cost.

InterGlobe Enterprises, the company that operates India’s top airline Indigo, and Archer Aviation Inc., a Silicon Valley company that’s close to commercialising its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, said yesterday they have partnered to launch and operate an all-electric air taxi service in India.

Rahul Bhatia, Group Managing Director of InterGlobe, and Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer of Archer, signed an MOU to form a proposed partnership to do this, according to a press release yesterday. Based on Archer’s all-electric aircraft, called Midnight, they aim to bring a low-noise electric air taxi service that is cost-competitive with ground transportation, according to the press release.

The two companies aim to work with select in-country business partners to operate Archer’s aircraft, finance and build vertiport infrastructure, and train pilots and other personnel needed for these operations. The partnership also plans to finance the purchase of up to 200 of Archer’s Midnight aircraft for the India operations.

Midnight is a piloted, four-passenger electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft designed for quick back-to-back flights with as little as 10 minutes of charging in between flights, according to the company’s website. Archer is working to get certification for Midnight’s commercial readiness by late 2024 and start operations in 2025.

In India, which would the second international market for the company after the UAE, the goal is for a passenger on an InterGlobe-Archer flight to be able to fly the 27-km Delhi trip from Connaught Place to Gurugram, typically taking 60 to 90 minutes by car, in approximately 7 minutes.

InterGlobe Archer will also explore other use cases for the electric aircraft in India, including cargo, logistics, medical and emergency services, as well as private company and charter services.

“India is one of, if not the largest opportunity for eVTOL aircraft utilization in the world, as it is home to the world’s largest population, and its largest cities face some of the greatest congestion challenges in the world,” Adam Goldstein, Founder and CEO of Archer said in the press release.

Founded in 2018, Archer is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and has about $461 million in cash reserves currently. Its investors include automotive giant Stellantis, ARK Investment Management, United Airlines and Boeing.

InterGlobe and Archer expect to start with operations in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru first, Nikhil Goel, Archer’s chief commercial officer said in the press release.

Meanwhile, India’s hope for a made-in-India eVTOL is pinned to the success of the e200, being developed by ePlane Company in Chennai. The e200, in comparison with Midnight, is expected to be one of the world’s most compact two-seater planes – carrying one pilot and one passenger – and capable of vertical take-off and landing in an area not much bigger than what it takes to park a mid-sized sedan.

The plane is designed to be light enough, at around 600 kg, and have a range of 200 km per charge, and also be able to land on the average urban concrete rooftop.

ePlane’s founder and CEO, Professor Satya Chakravarthy, envisions hundreds of these air taxis flying over our cities. This involves achieving the safety levels of airplanes and cost economics of cars. And he thinks ePlane will get there. The company is also in talks with potential strategic investors, including some large automakers, to raise more money.

“Where we are today is we have shown flight tests of a subscale prototype, which we are now going to commercialise for cargo applications,” Satya said.

Razorpay, a leading fintech name in India, providing a payments platform and banking-as-a-service software to some 10 million businesses, in the country, yesterday elevated Rahul Kothari to the position of chief operating officer for India and Malaysia.

Kothari was previously chief business officer at the company. He will report to founder and CEO Harshil Mathur, the Bengaluru company said in a press release yesterday.

This appointment sharpens Razorpay’s focus on the Southeast Asia region, where it’s looking to expand. The company also aims to implement a deeper integrated strategy to step up growth by improving customer experience across its different lines of business and products.

In January, I wrote that Razorpay was at an inflexion point. About a month before that Shashank Kumar, the other founder, and Murali Brahmadesam had spoken about sustaining the culture of engineering at the company as it became bigger.

Brahmadesam came in from AWS, earlier last year, and he’d taken on the CTO’s role from Kumar, who was looking to free himself up from day-to-day engineering to focus on products strategy.

The company has about 1,000 engineers among its 3,500 staff, or “Razors” as they’re called internally, including several senior engineering leaders. Kumar had talked about how over the next five years, Razorpay would seek “tremendous scale.”

And imports such as Brahmadesam will be playing a critical role on the engineering front. 

Razorpay is stepping up its expansion into a broader financial services platform, from its flagship payments business—it accounts for most of its revenues and is making money on a standalone basis—to facilitating loans, and banking software.

The company is expected to go deeper into the emerging hot area of ‘banking as a service,’ which accounting giant Deloitte defines as provisioning of banking products and services through third-party distributors.

This opens up the possibility that a large number of new niche finance startups can partner large, established banks and financial services companies, and help each other tap a significantly larger market than they could individually. Razorpay could emerge as a facilitator of this growth, and benefit from it.

To throw the story forward, while Razorpay has made a name for itself in India, “We want to see how we can create a global engineering brand while we are working out of Bengaluru and India,” Kumar had told me a year ago.

Organizational changes such Kothari’s appointment are important incremental steps in that direction on the business front. Kothari has a degree in chemical engineering from IIT Kanpur, and an MBA from Indian School of Business. 

Over the last 20 years or so, he’s worked in the US, Europe and Australia. Currently based in Pune, he’s into his fifth year with Razorpay. Previously, Kothari played a critical role in making the payments business profitable at PayU, according to Razorpay’s press release.

He's also worked at security software company Symantec, BPO company WNS, and Boston Consulting Group.

Next year, Razorpay will be 10 years old. Technically, it was started in 2013 in Jaipur, but Mathur and Kumar, alumni of IIT Roorkee, moved base to Bengaluru quickly, and the company is widely considered to be founded in 2014. They were one of the first Indian startup founders to be part Y Combinator.

Investors including Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, and Salesforce Ventures have invested a total of $741.5 million in the company in six rounds of funding.

In December 2021, the company was privately valued at $7.5 billion, making it one of India’s most valued startups. The company reported close to Rs. 1,500 crore in FY22 revenues, a 75 percent growth over the previous fiscal, and it was profitable on a standalone basis, for the flagship payments business.

Bumble yesterday announced that Lidiane Jones, who currently serves as chief executive at Slack, will succeed founder and current CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, on Jan. 2. Wolfe Herd will become Executive Chair at that time, the company said in a press release yesterday. 

Nasdaq listed Bumble, which will report its fiscal third-quarter earnings later today, is expected to cross a billion dollars in revenue this year. 

“Early in my career, I was the target of online abuse and harassment. I lived in a perpetual state of anxiety; the internet felt like the Wild West, dangerous and toxic. I knew there had to be a better way: A kinder, more respectful internet,” Herd wrote in an exclusive blog for Forbes India in March this year. 

With that as the founding principle, Herd started Bumble in 2014, with a four-member team and a two-bedroom apartment, my colleague Naini Thaker wrote in her awesome piece on Bumble’s India plans in July.

Before Bumble, Wolfe Herd was a co-founder of Tinder, which she sued for sexual harassment, according to Forbes magazine.

Bumble went public in February 2021, raising $2.15 billion in a listing that saw the company’s stock soar to $76, versus the listing price of $43, before closing at $70.31. That made Wolfe Herd, who was 31 at the time, the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, worth $1.5 billion. She owns about a fifth of the company, according to Forbes.

Since then, the stock has plummeted well below the listing price and currently trades at around $13.

Under Wolfe Herd’s leadership, Bumble has built itself brand recognition as a dating app that is serious about women’s safety online, according to the company’s press release yesterday.

Jones, who will take on the CEO’s role, has a B.S. in computer science from University of Michigan. She’s had a stellar record, which started as an intern at Apple in 2002, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

She then spent close to 13 years at Microsoft, where she was Group Product Manager for Azure Machine Learning when she left for Sonos, the high-end speaker maker. She was there for close to four years, including through the company’s IPO, and was VP of software product management when she left for Slack.

Last year, she was named to replace Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, who left Salesforce in January this year. Salesforce acquired Slack in a $27.7 billion deal in 2021.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch that Jones’s move to Bumble makes a lot of sense, and would be a better fit for her skillset.

It’s not about moving from enterprise software to a dating app product, but rather that “Slack is no longer a growth play, but an integration play for Salesforce, and Lidiane’s talents are better at Bumble for turnaround and growth,” Wang told TechCrunch.

When she was named CEO of Slack, Fortune Magazine, after an interview with her, described Jones as a rare Brazil-born, Latin American tech CEO. She’s also a mother, according to Bumble’s press release yesterday.

“As a woman who has spent her career in technology, it’s a gift to lean on my experience to lead a company dedicated to women and encouraging equality, integrity and kindness, all deeply personal and inspiring to me,” Jones said in the press release.

Apple, last week, reported another quarter of revenue decline, on a year-on-year basis, but also one where the decrease was significantly narrower than nine months ago, amid heightened global uncertainties.

The three months to Sep. 30, which is Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter, was also the iPhone maker’s best quarter in India, ever.

“We achieved an all-time revenue record in India,” CEO Tim Cook told analysts and investors in a conference on Thursday last week. Apple shipped a record 2.5 million iPhones to India in the three months ended Sep. 30, according to an estimate from Hong Kong based market researcher, Counterpoint Technology Market Research, last week.

After more than a decade of hits and misses, that’s the best quarter Apple has seen in India, ever. Counterpoint and other well-known market researchers such as IDC estimate that Apple could end calendar year 2023 with sales of 8-9 million iPhones in India, which would represent a growth of between 19.4 percent and 34.3 percent versus the 6.7 million units sold here in 2022.

The company also saw September quarter records in several countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE and Vietnam, Cook added.

It was a significant quarter for Apple, for it switched to the type-C USB port from its proprietary lightning connection. The company also rolled out its latest generation of iPhones, new software across products, and reported significant progress on its journey towards making its products planet friendly.

Overall, in addition to the all-time record in India, “iPhone, revenue came in ahead of our expectations, setting a September quarter record,” Cook said. iPhone sales also set quarterly records in many markets, including China Mainland, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, he said.

That, and the sustained strong performance of services, were what helped revenues in a quarter that saw a significant drop in the sale of Mac computers and iPads as well, while Apple continues to lead the tablet market. “In services, we set an all-time revenue record with double-digit growth and ahead of our expectations,” Cook said.

iPhone revenue was $43.8 billion, up 3 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. Overall, Apple posted quarterly revenue of $89.5 billion, down 1 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.46, up 13 percent year over year. The sales decline has narrowed from the 5 percent fall in the company’s fiscal first quarter.

Apple senior VP and CFO Luca Maestri added that the company’s total installed base of active devices, reached an all-time high across all products and all geographic segments.

While Apple doesn’t call out region-specific numbers, Cook responded to a question by an analyst on the call by saying iPhone sales in India “grew very strong double digits,” in the three months ended Sep. 30. 

He provided some additional qualitative commentary: “It’s an incredibly exciting market for us and a major focus of ours. We have low share in a large market and so it would seem that there’s a lot of headroom there.”

The two physical retail stores in India have continued to better than expected. “It’s still early going but they are off to a good start,” he said.

In today’s episode we take a quick look at news of US President Joe Biden’s executive order to regulate AI, but first one other headline that’s caught everyone’s attention at home.

Headlines

Several politicians from various opposition parties in India have been sent notifications by Apple that they were being targeted by “state-sponsored attackers,” according to multiple media reports.

Among those who may have been targeted are members of parliament including TMC's Mahua Moitra, Shiv Sena (UBT's) Priyanka Chaturvedi, Congress's Pawan Khera and Shashi Tharoor, AAP's Raghav Chadha, and CPIM's Sitaram Yechury, Moneycontrol reports, citing the politicians as saying they have received notifications from Apple stating that their devices were being targeted by state-sponsored attackers.

One thing today

US President Joe Biden yesterday issued an executive order outlining new regulations and safety requirements for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as the pace at which such technologies are advancing has alarmed governments around the world about the potential for their misuse.

The order, which runs into some 20,000 words, introduces a safety measure by defining a threshold based on computing power for AI models. AI models trained with a computing power of 10^26 floating-point operations, or flops, will be subject to these new rules.

This threshold surpasses the current capabilities of AI models, including GPT-4, but is expected to apply to next-generation models from prominent AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, Casey Newton, a prominent technology writer who attended the Whitehouse conference at which President Biden announced the new rules yesterday, notes in his newsletter, Platformer.

Companies developing models that meet this criterion must conduct safety tests and share the results with the government before releasing their AI models to the public. This mandate builds on voluntary commitments by 15 major tech companies earlier this year, Newton writes in his letter.

The sweeping executive order addresses various potential harms related to AI technologies and their applications ranging from telecom and wireless networks to energy and cybersecurity. It assigns the US Commerce Department the task of establishing standards for digital watermarks and other authenticity verification methods to combat deepfake content.

It mandates AI developers to assess their models' potential for aiding in the development of bioweapons, and orders agencies to conduct risk assessments related to AI's role in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.

Newton references an analysis of the executive order by computer scientists Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor and Rishi Bommasani to point out that despite these significant steps, the executive order leaves some important issues unaddressed.

Notably, it lacks specific requirements for transparency in AI development, such as pre-training data, fine-tuning data, the labour involved in annotation, model evaluation, usage, and downstream impacts.

Experts like them argue that transparency is essential for ensuring accountability and preventing potential biases and unintended consequences in AI applications.

The order hasn’t also addressed the current debate surrounding open-source AI development versus proprietary tech. The choice between open-source models, as advocated by Meta and Stability AI, and closed models, like those pursued by OpenAI and Google, has become a contentious issue, Newton writes. 

Prominent scientists, such as Stanford University Professor Andrew Ng, who previously founded Google Brain, have criticised the large tech companies for seeking industry regulation as a way of stifling open-source competition. They argue that while regulation is necessary, open-source AI research fosters innovation and democratizes technology.