People worldwide have long been paying more for a premium cup of coffee. But what about a cost of over $100 for a cup? From Panama City, Panama, Oscar Sulbarán has the story, narrated by Cristina Caicedo Smit.
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Енергетики зараз активно відновлюють енергосистему і той запас міцності, який у ній був до обстрілів військ РФ
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Apple Inc. opened its first flagship store in India in a much-anticipated launch Tuesday that highlights the company’s growing aspirations to expand in the country it also hopes to turn into a potential manufacturing hub.

The company’s CEO Tim Cook posed for photos with a few of the 100 or so Apple fans who had lined up outside the sprawling 20,000-square-foot store in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, its design inspired by the iconic black-and-yellow cabs unique to the city. A second store will open Thursday in the national capital, New Delhi.

“India has such a beautiful culture and an incredible energy, and we’re excited to build on our long-standing history,” Cook said in a statement earlier.

The tech giant has been operating in India for more than 25 years, selling its products through authorized retailers and the website it launched a few years ago. But regulatory hurdles and the pandemic delayed its plans to open a flagship store.

The new stores are a clear signal of the company’s commitment to invest in India, the second-largest smartphone market in the world where iPhone sales have been ticking up steadily, said Jayanth Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy. The stores show “how much India matters to the present and the future of the company,” he added.

For the Cupertino, California-based company, India’s sheer size makes the market especially encouraging.

About 600 million of India’s 1.4 billion people have smartphones, “which means the market is still under-penetrated and the growth prospect is huge,” said Neil Shah, vice president of research at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Silicon Valley company has gained some ground in the smartphone market in the country, going from just about 2% to capturing 6%, according to Counterpoint data.

Still, the iPhone’s hefty price tag puts it out of reach for the majority of Indians.

Instead, iPhone sales in the country have thrived among the sliver of upper-middle-class and rich Indians with disposable incomes, a segment of buyers that Shah says is rising. According to Counterpoint data, Apple has captured 65% of the “premium” smartphone market, where prices range up from 30,000 rupees ($360).

In September, Apple announced it would start making its iPhone 14 in India. The news was hailed as a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has pushed for ramping up local manufacturing ever since he came to power in 2014.

Apple first began manufacturing from India in 2017 with its iPhone SE and has since continued to assemble a number of iPhone models from the country.

Most of Apple’s smartphones and tablets are assembled by contractors with factories in China, but the company started looking at potentially moving some production to Southeast Asia or other places after repeated shutdowns to fight COVID-19 disrupted its global flow of products.

“Big companies got a jolt, they realized they needed a backup strategy outside of China — they couldn’t risk another lockdown or any geopolitical rift affecting their business,” said Kolla.

Currently, India makes close to 13 million iPhones every year, up from less than 5 million three years ago, according to Counterpoint Research. This is about 6% of iPhones made globally — and only a small slice in comparison to China, which still produces around 90% of them.

Last week, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the government was in regular touch with Apple to support their business here and that the company had plans to have 25% of their global production come out of India in the next five years.

The challenge for Apple, according to Shah of Counterpoint, is that the raw materials are still coming from outside India so the tech company will need to either find a local supplier or bring their suppliers, based in countries like China, Japan and Taiwan, closer to drive up production.

Still, he’s optimistic this target could be met, especially with labor costs being lower in India and the government wooing companies with attractive subsidies to boost local manufacturing.

“For Apple, everything is about timing. They don’t enter a market with full flow until they feel confident about their prospects. They can see the opportunity here today — it’s a win-win situation,” Shah said.
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Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google.

He criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.”

He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.

“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday.

He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.”

“It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.

Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm listed Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.

‘Civilizational destruction’

The move came even after Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.

Musk also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production” according to the excerpts.

“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said.

He said, for example, that a super intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.

He tweeted over the weekend that he had met with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.

He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.

In the interview with Fox News, Musk said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.

In January, Microsoft Corp announced a further multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
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China’s gross domestic product grew 4.5% in the first quarter of the year, boosted by increased consumption and retail sales, after authorities abruptly abandoned the stringent “zero-COVID” strategy. 

The growth in the world’s No. 2 economy from January to March compared to the same period in 2022 was the fastest in the past year, and outpaced the 2.9% growth in the previous quarter, according to government data released Tuesday. 

The growth in GDP comes amid a rebound in consumption, as people flocked to shopping malls and restaurants after harsh COVID-19 restrictions were removed. 

In March, total retail sales of consumer goods went up by 10.6% year on year and grew 7.1 percentage points compared to the first two months of the year. 

Industrial production output, which measures activity in the manufacturing, mining and utilities sectors, grew by 3.9% in March compared to the same time last year. 

Fixed-asset investment — in which China invests in infrastructure and other projects to drive growth — rose by 5.1% in the first three months of 2023 compared to the same period last year. 

Investors are expected to scrutinize China’s first-quarter economic data for indicators of recovery following years of harsh lockdowns and a crackdown on the industries such as technology and real estate. 

Earlier this year, China’s government set this year’s economic growth target at “around 5%.” Last year’s growth in the economy fell to 3%, hampered by anti-virus controls that caused snap lockdowns and kept millions at home, sometimes for weeks on end. 

On Monday, China’s central bank kept rates on its one-year policy loans unchanged. Last week, it had vowed to step up support for the economy and maintain ample liquidity to support growth.  
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«Абсолютна частка безпосередньо цих країн у споживанні української агропродукції не є значною»
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Дипломати також засудили «безвідповідальну» ядерну риторику Росії, зокрема, щодо розміщення ядерної зброї в Білорусі
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U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledged Monday that the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives will vote to raise the country’s debt ceiling to avert a default on the government’s financial obligations in the coming months, but will also stipulate that future spending increases be capped at 1%.

The White House strongly criticized the announcement.

McCarthy, in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, called the country’s nearly $31.7 trillion debt a “ticking time bomb” and assailed Democratic President Joe Biden as “missing in action” in resolving the contentious issue before the government runs out of money to pay its bills, which could be as soon as June.

Any resulting default on the government’s financial obligations would be a U.S. first and could roil the world economy, plunge stock values and force widespread layoffs.

Biden and White House officials have called on Congress to approve a debt ceiling increase without conditions, as has often been done in the past, including during Republican administrations. But McCarthy said, “Since the president continues to hide, House Republicans will take action.”

McCarthy, who has had trouble in getting his 222-seat majority in the 435-member House to agree on a package of spending cuts to present to Biden, nonetheless told Wall Street leaders that the Republican caucus would pass legislation that would raise the debt ceiling for one year, pushing the issue next year into the midst of the 2024 presidential election campaign.

In addition, McCarthy said Republicans would roll back federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels and curb future spending boosts to no more than 1%. Republicans are also hoping to cut federal spending for social safety net programs for poorer Americans.

The White House, in a statement, said that McCarthy was breaking with the politically bipartisan norm in approving a debt ceiling increase without conditions, as happened twice during former President Donald Trump’s tenure. Biden has said he is willing to discuss future spending separately, aside from increasing the debt ceiling to authorize government borrowing to pay debts already incurred.

The White House said the Republican House leader “again failed to clearly outline what House Republicans are proposing and will vote on.” The White House contended Republicans would “increase costs for hard-working families, take food assistance and health care away from millions of Americans, and yet would enlarge the deficit when combined with House Republican proposals for tax giveaways skewed to the super-rich, special interests, and profitable companies.”

Biden and McCarthy met in early February about the debt ceiling but not since.
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