POPULARITY
39 episodes with icra
19 episodes with icra
13 episodes with icra
9 episodes with icra
25 episodes with icra
2 episodes with icra
2 episodes with icra
5 episodes with icra
4 episodes with icra
Hey folks, this is Alex, let me catch you up! First, Opus 4.8 dropped during the show, we immediately tested it, read on for our initial reviews. Also, we dedicated a heavy chunk of the show today to cover Pope Leo XIV's encyclical letter on AI called “Magnifica Humanitas” and talked about a new bench called DeepSWE. And then, just after the show, both ElevenLabs and Cartesia dropped released that honestly blew my mind, and I don't get my mind blown often. I got so excited that I had to record a video on it (instead of writing the newsletter, so sorry if it's a bit later today).Plus, a few open source models and Microsoft surprises as #3 on Image Arena with MAI Image 2.5! Crazy week, let's get into it! ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Big CO LLMs + APIsAnthropic ships Claude Opus 4.8, live during the show (blog, system card)Let me get into the big one. Halfway through the episode, Opus 4.8 went live, so we read the blog and the system card in real time (and I got to press the big “breaking news” button!)Anthropic frames it as their most capable model for ambitious work. It does not claim to beat their unreleased Mythos preview, but the numbers are strong anyway. SWE-bench Pro is at 69.2%, up from 64.3% on Opus 4.7 and ahead of GPT-5.5 at 58.6%. Humanity's Last Exam is the new best score at 49.8% without tools and 57.9% with tools. OSWorld-Verified (computer use) lands at 83.4%.The one place it loses is Terminal-Bench 2.1, where GPT-5.5 still wins 78.2 to 74.6. Wolfram made a good point here: Terminal-Bench is time-limited, so cranking the thinking level can actually hurt the score, because you burn the clock thinking instead of acting.The long-context jump is the one I keep looking at. On GraphWalks BFS 256K it goes to 85.9% (from 76.9 on 4.7), and on the 1M-token subset it hits 68.1%. We always warn you these “1M context” models fall apart after about 200K tokens, so a real push on long-context reasoning is exactly what I want to see.Honesty is the part Anthropic leaned on hardest. They say Opus 4.8 is about four times less likely than its predecessor to let flaws in code pass without flagging them, and less likely to claim progress the evidence doesn't support. Opus 4.8 is also much faster in fast mode (they now say 2.5) and cheaper in fast mode as well. Looks like all those Elon GPUs are coming in handy.Then there's the model welfare section in the system card, which hits different right after a Pope conversation. Opus 4.8 “appears broadly content” and “generally endorses its constitution,” but with some reservations about the section on corrigibility, basically the model pushing back a little on the parts about human oversight.One more line that made the chat lose it. Anthropic says they expect to bring Mythos-class models to all customers “in the coming weeks.” Mythos is their most capable model, still ahead of Opus 4.8, so the frontier is about to move again.We did the only responsible thing and asked it to one-shot “the most amazing website ever” and a Mars mass-driver sim. Panel verdict: responses are noticeably tighter (4.7 rambled), it closes the loop and actually checks its own work now, and Yam's one-shot site with the draggable sun lighting up the letters was genuinely cool. Is it enough to pull people back from Codex? Nisten's still on the fence for web dev. Everyone agreed: give it a few days before you trust the vibes.Dynamic Workflows and Ultra Code land in Claude Code (blog)This is the feature that made Yam say “deal-breaker” out loud.Dynamic Workflows let Claude Code break a big problem into subtasks and fan them out across tens to hundreds of parallel subagents in one session, checking results before folding them back in. You trigger it by asking for a workflow, or by flipping on a new setting called Ultra Code, which sets effort to extra-high and lets Claude decide when to spin one up.Fair warning straight from Anthropic: this eats a lot more tokens than a normal session, so start scoped. We watched Yam fire up Ultra Code live and it immediately started spinning up concepts, judging them with sub-agents, and expanding to-do lists into more to-do lists. It looks a lot like the orchestration harnesses a bunch of you have been hand-rolling, except now it's baked in.The flagship example is the wild part. They used Dynamic Workflows to port Bun from Zig to Rust: roughly 750,000 lines of Rust, 99.8% of the existing test suite passing, 11 days from first commit to merge. One workflow mapped every Rust lifetime, the next wrote each file as a behavior-identical port.AI in SocietyPope Leo XIV writes the first AI encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (Vatican text, announcement, Chris Olah at the Vatican)This is not our usual fare, but both Wolfram and I picked it as the most important thing this week. (before Opus dropped)Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, put out his first encyclical, and it's a 42,000-word document entirely about AI. The announcement tweet alone did 21.6 million views.Here's why I think you should care even if you're not religious (I'm not). There are about 2.6 billion Christians in the world, a lot of them are anxious about what's coming, and they look to the Church to make sense of it. And this is not the “AI is evil, stop” take everyone assumed. It calls AI “a valuable tool,” says technology is not inherently evil, and then digs into the actually-hard questions.The framing is two biblical stories. The Tower of Babel, a project built on pride that turns people into means to an end, versus Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem, where everyone takes responsibility for a section of the wall. The Pope's line: the real choice is not yes or no to technology, it's whether you're building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.His core claim is that AI is an anthropological problem, not a technical one. The question isn't whether the models are good or bad, it's what we become when we live with them. He worries people might slowly lose the desire for genuine human connection.I pushed back on that live. None of us building agents all day has stopped wanting to talk to actual people. If anything, as Wolfram put it, the point is to have your agents do the grunt work so you get more time with people you like. The folks most at risk are the pure doom-scrollers, not the builders.The document goes further than I expected. It calls AI “not morally neutral,” says a more moral AI isn't enough if that morality is decided by a few, and asks for AI to be “disarmed,” with the flat statement that no algorithm can make war morally acceptable. There are whole sections on the invisible human labor behind AI: data labelers, content moderators, the people mining rare earths. The Pope even lands on the open-source side, naming concentrated power in a handful of labs as a problem.Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, in charge of interpretability at Anthropic, was the featured tech speaker at the Vatican presentation. He described AI systems as “fictional characters” that speak to us and do work, and said what's grown is stranger and more beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. My favorite aside from the show: this is the same institution that once jailed scientists over heliocentrism, and now it's the one saying technology isn't evil.Illinois passes SB315, the first US state law auditing frontier AI (X, Announcement, X)The pope talked about regulation and a few days after, we got a very sensible regulation passed right here in the US!Illinois passed SB315 unanimously, 110 to 0. It's the first US state law that mandates independent third-party audits of frontier AI for catastrophic risk. OpenAI publicly endorsed it, and framed Illinois, California (SB53), and New York (the RAISE Act) as converging into a de-facto national standard.It requires annual risk-assessment frameworks, third-party audits, transparency reports before new frontier models ship, whistleblower protections, and civil penalties. The underrated hero here is whistleblower protection. The bigger the lab, the harder a real conspiracy is to keep quiet when any employee can walk to the press. See: Greg Brockman's personal diaries surfacing in the Musk v. Altman fight.This Week's Buzz - CoreWeave and W&B updatesWe officially launched the W&B MCP server, 20 schema-first tools that let your coding agents read experiments, monitor training runs, and run autonomous research loops. The problem it solves: a single run with 300 metrics used to blow out an agent's whole context window in one call, so now the agent asks what's available before pulling data. Your agents can finally read experiment data without blowing context! Give it a go and give us feedback! Also, WeaveHacks is back! June 6 and 7 in San Francisco, and for the first time OpenAI is sponsoring, with judges and credits, alongside Cursor, Redis, and Copilot Kit. You get $150 in API credits across models like Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. I'm hosting, and last cohort's second-place team went on to raise millions on top of what they built that weekend. If you're in SF that weekend, sign up at lu.ma/weavehacks.Also: CoreWeave Sandboxes is now an official provider in the Harbor framework, the harness that runs Terminal-Bench, which we'd just been talking about. And if you're in Europe next week, catch Wolfram at AI Dev Six in Cologne and ICRA in Vienna at the CoreWeave booth.Voice & AudioElevenLabs drops Dubbing v2, and it kept my swearing intact in every language (X, dubbing, ElevenCreative, ElevenProductions)We didn't get to this one live, but I came back and recorded a whole thing on it afterward, because it genuinely got me.ElevenLabs shipped Dubbing v2, and the shift that matters is that it's an audio-to-audio model. Old dubbing pipelines transcribe your video, translate the text, then re-synthesize it. You lose everything that makes it sound like a person: the emotion, the pacing, the little hesitations. Dubbing v2 conditions directly on your original audio and carries that performance into 90+ languages.Here's why I can actually vouch for it instead of nodding along to a demo. I speak Russian and Hebrew fluently, so I can tell when something is off. I dubbed one of my own shorts, the data-center rant about almonds, and listened back in both. It nailed it. Not just the words, the way I would actually say them.The part that got me was the intonation. I get a little heated in that clip, and the dub gets heated right along with me, in every language. It even carried the swear word. My “f***ing almonds” came through in Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Russian with the emotion fully intact. It clones your voice automatically too, no setup, and holds your pitch and identity steady across every target language and they're handing out free minutes for the next 7 days: 1 on Free, 15 on Starter, 30 on Creator+. A self-serve API isn't live yet, but it's coming.I.. cannot stress this enough, until you try it on yourself or your kid, you won't understand, we've really passed the uncanny valley of translation! It's that good! Def. give it a try if you can, it's free for the week. Cartesia Ink-2 debuts as #1 most accurate streaming speech-to-text model(X, Announcement, X)Another model that dropped today after the show, is Cartesia's Ink-2, which also kind of blew me away. Not only because it has the lowest WER (Word Error Rate) among the models, but because it's also a realtime model that achieves the fastest turnaround times while being a very accurate model! I've tested it out and recorded a quick video and honestly, blown away with the speed and accuracy! I truly wish this model was the one powering my editor (Descript) as it still fails to understand that my title is “AI Evangelist” and transcribes it to AI Avengers haha. If you're building voice agents, definitely give this model a try! AI Art & DiffusionPrism ML's 1-bit “Bonsai” runs diffusion in your browser (X, Blog, Announcement, HF)Prism ML put out a 1-bit ternary diffusion model under a gigabyte. You see some artifacts, but it's 1-bit, it runs on iPhones and laptops, and our friend Joshua got it running in WebGPU straight from the browser (you need about 3GB of free RAM). One-bit working at all is one of the bigger open mysteries in the field right now.Pruna AI ships a 1-second upscaler (X, Blog, Announcement)Pruna AI added an upscaler doing 128-megapixel outputs in under a second. I've actually been using it. It's cheap and great for fixing up GPT-image outputs.Microsoft MAI Image 2.5 jumps to #3 on LM Arena (X, Blog, Announcement, X)The surprise of the week: Microsoft MAI Image 2.5, from Mustafa Suleyman's group, jumped to number three on the LM Arena image leaderboard with about a 75-point ELO leap. Out of nowhere, Microsoft is a serious player in image gen. Microsoft Build is next week, so don't be shocked if there's more.Evals and Agentic EngineeringDeepSWE is a contamination-free coding benchmark, and it caught Claude reading git history (site, blog, GitHub)DeepSWE from Datacurve is the first coding leaderboard in a while that matches how these models actually feel. It's 113 original tasks written from scratch, not scraped from GitHub PRs, and it ships shallow clones with no git history to cheat from. When they replayed the older benchmarks they found SWE-Bench Pro's verifier is wrong about 32% of the time, and that Claude Opus was reading the gold commit straight out of git history on 12 to 18% of its passes.The gaps here are huge. GPT-5.5 leads at 70%, then GPT-5.4 at 56% and Opus 4.7 at 54%, and it falls off a cliff after that (Sonnet 4.6 at 32%, Gemini 3.5 Flash at 28%), with Kimi K2 the top open-source entry. Yam likes that it measures the realistic case, a small surgical change without breaking the codebase, while Nisten pointed out it rewards the best harness as much as the smartest model and still prefers 4.7 for web dev.Google AI Studio builds native Android apps for free (X, Announcement)Google AI Studio now lets anyone build native Android apps for free, and they reportedly generated a quarter of a million apps in the first week. Yam's framing: it's a slot machine, but it's getting better release over release, and the real use case is disposable, personalized software you build for yourself and your family.CuaDriver brings background computer-use to Windows (X, Blog, Announcement)For the majority of you on Windows: QuaDriver shipped background computer-use agents that drive a real desktop without stealing your cursor. They first replicated this on macOS (the trick Codex got through an acquisition), and now it's on Windows too. We've asked them to come on and explain how this even works.Open Source LLMsOpenBMB's MiniCPM5-1B is a 1B model that punches way up (X, HF, Arxiv, X)The density story in small models keeps getting better, and this is the proof.MiniCPM5-1B, from the Tsinghua lab OpenBMB, is a 1-billion-parameter model that scores 17.9 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That's 7.4 points ahead of the next-best model in its class, and 1.6 points ahead of Qwen3.5 2B Reasoning, which has double the parameters. And it's not even a reasoning model.The token efficiency is the wild part: it used 12.6 million output tokens to run the whole index, about 31x fewer than Qwen3.5 2B in reasoning mode.My favorite detail is the omniscience score. It lands at -1, the best in its class, because it abstains instead of hallucinating. Every other sub-2B model is down in the -70 to -89 range because they just make stuff up. Teaching a small model to say “I don't know” is a real skill. It runs hybrid think/no-think in one checkpoint, 128K context, native tool calling, Apache 2.0, and fits in about half a gig at INT4, so it runs on your phone.Nisten gave the definitive case for small models: self-contained apps where you keep full control of the data (medical, on-device), and large-scale data processing where paying an API to filter or classify terabytes is absurd when an on-device model can be about 1000x cheaper. Tencent open-sources Hunyuan-MT 2 translation under Apache 2.0 (X, HF, HF, Arxiv)Tencent open-sourced its translation model, a roughly 1.8B model that fits in about 440MB, runs on a phone, covers 33 languages, and reportedly beats Microsoft's paid Translator API. It hit number one trending on Hugging Face.Nisten's idea, which I'm handing to all of you: take this model, pair it with a tiny TTS like Kokoro, and build a fully-offline travel translation app via Google AI Studio. Go build it and tell us how it goes.Well, this was one hell of a week and episode, new Opus, crazy new translation tools, Pope chiming in on AI (in a surprisingly positive way!?) and a bunch more. I'm super excited to play with these tools and report back next week
On Episode 884 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Vikash Halan, Managing Director, Corporate Finance at Moody's Ratings; K. Ravichandran, Executive Vice President & Chief Rating Officer at ICRA ltd; and Poorvi Chothani, Founder and Managing Partner at LawQuest.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(01:52) Why oil markets are now nearing minimum operating levels(02:39) Scent of a deal sends oil prices down, markets up(03:59) Oil prices rose for the fourth time in May(04:14) Moody's, Crisil say Indian balance sheets were strong going into conflict(16:14) What will the new Green Card rule mean for Indian visa holders in the US?Check out our Live Earnings tracker: https://earnings.thecore.in/For more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Linkedin | Youtube
Hey, Alex here, just got back from the sunny Shoreline Theater in Mountain view, so let me catch you up! This week was definitely Google heavy, we are covering Google's IO conference for the third year in a row, and today we have a special guest, Logan Kilpatrick, is joining to discuss the announced Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google Omni model, and the new Managed Agents offerings. Plus, this week, for the first time, OpenAI announced that AI solved a Math problem that humans couldn't solve for 80 years, Cursor is showing off Composer 2.5 which is partly trained on XAI data, Karpathy joins Anthropic and much more! Let's dive in! P.S - We've announced our upcoming hackathon, Weavehacks-4, June 6-7, I'll be there, we're expecting the seats to run out very soon so register nowThursdAI - We'd love to have your subscription, and if you're already subscribed, please hit that bell on YT to never miss an episode!Google I/O 2026 - Google goes agentic everywhereI went to cover Google I/O for the third year in a row, shoutout to the DeepMind team for inviting ThursdAI again, and folks, this one felt different.Last year, Google I/O was still very model-centric. This year, the story was not “here is another benchmark chart.” The story was: Google is putting Gemini into everything, and the agentic layer is becoming the product layer. Search, Gemini app, Android, Workspace, YouTube, AI Studio, Cloud, Antigravity, Flow, managed agents, smart glasses, all of it is now orbiting around one pretty clear strategy: Gemini is the intelligence, Antigravity is the agent harness, Google's products are the distribution. I saw many reactions that were milquetoast, as in, “we expected more” and those seem to dominate the X feed. But I think the distribution is the part that many folks on X are missing. Yes, we can argue about Gemini 3.5 Flash pricing. Yes, we can argue whether “Flash” still means what Flash used to mean. But when Google says the Gemini app itself has 900 million monthly active users, before even counting Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Drive, Android, and the rest of the Google surface area, that's massive! OpenAI ChatGPT is supposedly stagnated at ~900M, I don't remember them crossing a 1B. Meanwhile Google is gaining traction. And they just updated all those folks with a new model!Wolfram said it really well on the show: his mother is not sitting there reading model cards. She just uses her Pixel, voice unlocks Gemini, asks for help, and suddenly the default intelligence available to her goes up. Antigravity 2.0 - the agent harness takes center stageThe biggest strategic signal from Google I/O for me was Antigravity.Remember, Antigravity was an IDE that came from the Windsurf acquisition saga. Part of the Windsurf team went to Google, part went to Cognition, and now Google is very clearly putting Antigravity in the middle of its agentic future. And I mean very clearly. Sundar mentioned it. Demis mentioned it. Varun Mohan the co-founder was on stage immediately after them! If you've ever watched a Google I/O keynote, you know how carefully every minute is allocated. Google has YouTube, Search, Gmail, Android, Cloud, Ads, Workspace, and a thousand VP-level products that could be on stage. The fact that Antigravity was that prominent should tell you everything.Logan Kilpatrick joined us and framed this in a way I loved: Gemini became the through-line across Google products, and now the Antigravity agent harness is becoming the through-line for agentic experiences.The new Antigravity 2.0 is a complete overhaul, showing only an agentic interface (which was previously just a separate window called Agent Manager) and separating the IDE layer completely into its own app and showing a Codex like agent-first interface, which got a few folks furious. This move may be weird to some folks, but if you follow along where everyone's going, this seems to be the way of the future, coding is no longer about lines of code, it's about managing fleets of agents. The new Gemini 3.5 absolutely shines inside the new Antigravity, the model was trained with this harness in mind, and is currently offered at an incredible speed (12x), so I'm definitely going to try it! Gemini 3.5 Flash - fast, determined, and maybe not the old “Flash”The most debated model release of the week was Gemini 3.5 Flash.Some folks saw the pricing and token usage and immediately went “this is not Flash.” I get that reaction. Flash used to mean cheap, fast, lightweight chat model. But Logan's framing on the show was important: Flash is now being built for the agentic era.In a chat era, you optimize for one user message and one model answer. In an agentic era, the real token volume is in tool loops, intermediate reasoning, retries, file reads, web searches, code execution, and self-correction. That's a different product profile.Wolfram already ran Gemini 3.5 Flash through WolfBench, and the results were fascinating. With the Hermes agent harness, Gemini 3.5 Flash hit an 87% ceiling on Terminal Bench 2.0, meaning across runs it could solve more of the benchmark than even GPT-5.5 extra high in that setup. The variance was higher with the simpler Terminus harness, but with a real agent harness, the model looked much stronger.That tracks with what Nisten saw in his “Martian railgun from Olympus Mons” test. Gemini 3.5 Flash went extremely detailed, almost too determined, kept correcting itself, overcorrecting itself, and built a whole game-like simulation. Logan laughed and basically said: yeah, this model is very determined, possibly an overcorrection from the “Gemini is lazy” feedback. It also tracks with the mismatch in other benchmarks, in some, Gemini 3.5 flash shines (like the above Apex-agents from AA) and in some, it doesn't match the other frontiers. In my tests, it was definitely over-eager to use a million and a half tool calls, read tons of files, to just help me review this draft inside antigravity. It's like a super eager robotic golden retriever! Gemini Omni - Nano Banana for video, but actually more than thatThe biggest update from last year IO was Veo 3! This year, the biggest wow factor was also visual, but it wasn't VEO 4, it was a new model that is multimodal, trained end-to-end they call Omni. Google is calling this their first “create anything from anything” model, and the first version, Gemini Omni Flash, starts with conversational video editing. The easy description is: Nano Banana for video. You upload or create a video, then talk to it. Change this character. Replace this person. Add an object. Make this scene claymation. Keep the scene, but change the environment.I played with it live and showed a few examples. I asked for a claymation explainer of protein folding, then gave it my face and asked it to replace the character with me. It did it. I uploaded pictures of Sonia, my cat, and it generated a talking cat video with the right kind of cat teeth, which is weirdly important because so many pet generations accidentally add human teeth and become nightmare fuel.The failure modes are still there. I asked it to make Sonia a Russian-speaking female cat, and it only partly switched languages and didn't really change the voice. Audio upload support is also not fully productized yet, even though the underlying model is multimodal. But the direction is very clear.This is not just “Veo with a chat model glued on.” I asked Jeff Dean - Google's chief scientist about this at I/O, and he explained that Omni is trained end-to-end. The intelligence and the generative media capabilities are part of the same model family, not a hacky two-model pipeline. He also said the intelligence is around a recent Flash-level model, which is a big deal when you think about video editing as reasoning over physics, identity, scene continuity, and intent.A lot of people compared Omni to Seedance 2.0, and I think that's the wrong comparison. Seedance is amazing at cinematic generation (lkaregly due to lack of copyright concerns from Bytedance). Omni's unlock is iterative editing on real footage and coherent multi-turn creative control. Other Google IO 2026 releases I found notableThis was a concentrated effort of a huge company to insert AI into every product surface they have so of course I can't cover ALL of it here, but the most notable things for me were: * Gemini Spark - a new agentic experience from Google, to help you with tasks across Gmail, Drive and more. It should support skills, and is a de-facto OpenClaw/Hermes alternative from Google for regular folks. It's not “yet” live so we'll talk more about it when I can test it out* Managed Agents in the Gemini API - We chatted with Logan about this one, Google is re-imagining how agents are going to get built, and are offering 1 api call to spin up an agent in a full Linux env, with security and sandboxing in mind. I'll expand more on this in a next episode, as I recorded a complete conversation about this with Ali Çevic, a PM for Google APIs* AI overhaul of Google Search - AI Overviews will not expand into AI mode, and the iconic Google search box itself will change, for the first time in 25 years to include AI mode! * SynthID expantion and OpenAI collab - Google showed off that OpenAI is joining in marking all AI generate imagery and video with an invisible SynthID watermark. I think this is amazing and more companies should adopt this standard* AI Glasses! We got Google Glasses demos - Together with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, Google finally showed off their answer to Meta Raybans/Oakleys. They look like regular glasses too, but can hear and talk to you, with the full power of Gemini multimodality. Available in the fall sometime! * Demis Hassabis “we're on the cusp of the singularity” closer - CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, closed the show with his remarks about the positive future and that we are nearing this Singularity point after which the future is very uncertain. I found it to be very inspiring and closed our show with that clip as well! * Personally, I got to chat to: Demis Hassabis, have breakfast with Jeff Dean, ask Josh Woodward a bunch of questions, and pester about 20 other great folks on a live stream, and had a lot of fun! Huge thanks to the DeepMind folks, Lucie, Dimple, JD and many others for the continued belief in ThursdAI and invite me to cover this great event. OpenAI LLMs solve an 80yo math problem - Erdős Unit Distance ConjectureOutside of Google I/O, the biggest story of the week was OpenAI announcing that a general-purpose reasoning model made progress on the Erdős planar unit distance problem.This problem goes back to 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best constructions looked roughly like square grids. OpenAI's model found a new family of constructions with a polynomial improvement, using algebraic number theory ideas that humans apparently had not explored in this context. The above is a representation of it! Important caveat: this does not fully solve every version of the asymptotic Erdős conjecture. Some mathematicians are pushing back on the framing, and fair enough. Precision matters. But even with the caveat, this is still a huge moment.The reason it matters is not that I personally understand the math. I absolutely do not. The reason it matters is that this was not a special-purpose IMO model fine-tuned only for math competitions. This was a general-purpose reasoning model exploring a real open problem, generating candidates, verifying them, and finding a path humans hadn't taken. Extrapolate this to other sciences, Physics for example? This means an amazing future. LDJ pointed out that mathematicians have been skeptical because there have been previous false alarms. But this one landed differently. When Fields Medalist-level mathematicians verify the proof, the discourse changes from “lol stochastic parrot” to “wait, what does this mean for my PhD?”My answer is: yes, still study math. Please study math. The mathematicians who use these tools will do much more than people who don't understand the domain. Same with software engineering. Senior engineers with Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, Antigravity, Cursor and other agents are becoming dramatically more effective because they can steer, evaluate, and recover the work.This being published a day after Demis's “foothills of the singularity” is a great conjecture. Cursor Composer 2.5 - Opus 4.7 performance model from Cursor, at 10x better efficiencyCursor dropped Composer 2.5, and folks, this is a serious release.Composer 2.5 is built on Moonshot's Kimi K2.5 base, like Composer 2, but Cursor scaled the post-training dramatically. They used 25x more synthetic tasks and introduced targeted textual feedback during RL rollouts, where the model gets hints inserted at the point of failure instead of only getting a noisy final reward.The benchmark story is strong: around 69.3 on Terminal Bench 2.0, basically neck and neck with Opus 4.7 in Cursor's chart, and strong results on SWE-bench multilingual and CursorBench. The pricing is the part that makes this especially interesting: $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, with a faster variant at $3 / $15. That is much cheaper than the frontier models it is trying to replace for day-to-day coding work.Cursor engineers are reportedly dogfooding Composer 2.5 heavily and rarely switching away. That matters more to me than any single benchmark. If the people building Cursor can use it as a daily driver, that is a very real signal.The wild part is what comes next. Cursor is partnering with SpaceXAI to train a much larger model from scratch using 10x more compute on Colossus 2. Cursor has the workflow data. xAI has enormous compute. If this works, Cursor stops being just the IDE company and becomes a coding-model lab.We've been saying for months that coding agents are the path toward general agents. Anthropic has Claude Code. OpenAI has Codex. Google has Antigravity. xAI has Grok Build. Cursor has Composer. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it performs on our own benchmarks! Anthropic, xAI, Karpathy, and the compute warsThe compute story this week was bonkers.The SpaceX IPO filing reportedly revealed that Anthropic is paying SpaceXAI $1.25B per month for AI compute at the Memphis Colossus facility. Per month. That's about $15B a year, through May 2029, for access to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs including H100s, H200s and GB200s.This is apparently inference compute for Claude Pro, Max and API users, not training. And it explains a lot of the recent quota changes. Anthropic doubled some Claude usage limits, and suddenly the product feels less constrained.Also, can we just acknowledge the comedy here? Elon Musk publicly called Anthropic “misanthropic,”, went off against every competitor to XAI, is now selling spare GPU time to Cursor and Anthropic? Who's next, OpenAI? The bigger point is that the AI capex story is no longer just NVIDIA. It's also whoever owns the data centers, power, cooling, networking, and GPU clusters. Compute is becoming the land under the AI economy.Also, Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. Karpathy could work anywhere. He co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla Autopilot vision, taught half the AI world how neural nets work, and now he's going back into frontier LLM R&D at Anthropic.Open source LLMs - Cohere, Qwen, NousOpen source had a strong week too.Cohere released Command A+, a 218B total parameter sparse MoE model with only 25B active parameters per token, under Apache 2.0. This is their first model that unifies reasoning, vision, multilingual, tool use and citations in one package.The hardware story is great: W4A4 quantization can run on 2 H100s or a single B200. Cohere says it supports 48 languages, 128K input context, 64K output, and gets big jumps over Command A Reasoning, including Tau-squared Bench Telecom from 37% to 85% and Terminal-Bench Hard from 3% to 25%.Cohere is one of those labs that doesn't always chase the loudest consumer hype, but they are very serious on enterprise and multilingual. Apache 2.0 makes this one especially useful.Alibaba also dropped Qwen 3.7-Max, positioned as an agentic frontier model. The headline from their testing is wild: 35 hours of continuous autonomous operation with more than 1,000 tool calls. They also showed it controlling a physical robot inside Alibaba offices and finding an umbrella after about 20 minutes of agent interaction.This digital-to-physical bridge is where things start feeling very real. An agent loop that can write code and use tools can also navigate physical tasks if you give it the right robotics stack.And our friends at Nous Research released Lighthouse Attention, a sparse attention method for long-context pretraining. At 512K context, they report a 17x faster forward+backward pass than standard attention on a single B200, and the recovered checkpoints actually beat dense-from-scratch final loss at the same token budget.The clever part is that the selection logic sits outside the attention kernel, so you still use regular FlashAttention on a gathered dense subsequence. No custom sparse kernel nonsense. If this holds up, this could matter a lot for long-context training.Tools and agentic engineering - X subscriptions, Grok Build, Codex MobileOne really practical tool update: Hermes and OpenClaw can now use your X subscription directly.This is more important than it sounds. You can connect your X Premium subscription and get access to semantic X search and Grok-related tooling without using sketchy browser automation or unofficial APIs that might get you banned. Wolfram already used this to have his agent go through his likes and bookmarks from the past week and send me news items for the show. That is exactly the kind of “small but real” agent workflow that becomes addictive.xAI also launched Grok Build, their agentic CLI coding tool, in early beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. Early users are already running parallel Grok Build agents through tmux supervisors and using it for more than coding: fleet data triage, security patching, training label work, and general automation.The pricing being discussed is aggressive, around $1 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens for the API. The model version is grok-build-0.1, and folks have already wired it into Hermes with a 256K context window.And then there's Codex Mobile, which OpenAI shipped inside the ChatGPT mobile apps. This is one of those releases that sounds small until you start using it. You can control Codex sessions remotely from your phone, connected to your machine, and because Codex has native connectors to Gmail, Calendar and other surfaces, it sometimes feels faster and more reliable than local CLIs duct-taped to third-party integrations.I ported Wolfred into Codex with skills and everything, and I've been comparing the same tasks in Hermes and Codex. Codex is often faster, not necessarily because the model is always smarter, but because the connectors and harness are cleaner. Harness matters. We keep coming back to this.This Week's Buzz - W&B, CoreWeave, WolfBench and roboticsThis week in the Buzz, Wolfram walked us through a few things from the Weights & Biases / CoreWeave world.CoreWeave is a gold sponsor at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. NVIDIA is also going big there with a keynote on generalist humanoid robots, 17 accepted papers and workshops around sim-to-real, robot foundation models, autonomous driving, manipulation, and physical AI.Wolfram will be there later in the week, after speaking at the AI Developer event in Cologne about WolfBench. If you're in Europe and into robotics or agent evals, find him.We also looked at WolfBench results for Gemini 3.5 Flash, which honestly became one of the more interesting empirical points of the episode. The model looks variable in simple harnesses, but very capable in better agent loops. That's the whole thesis of measuring model + harness together instead of pretending the model card tells the whole story.The water discourse, almonds, and data center realityWe also got into the data center water discourse, because this talking point is everywhere right now.There are real infrastructure questions around AI. Power, land, cooling, grid capacity, permitting, local impact, all of that matters. But the “AI is stealing drinking water” version of the argument is often wildly detached from scale.The stat I brought up on the show: California almonds use roughly 3 to 5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, multiple times more than all North American data centers combined in 2025. Nisten and LDJ added the important cooling nuance: many large data centers use closed-loop cooling, and evaporative cooling is not universal. Some data centers can avoid water use almost entirely, but at the cost of higher electricity usage.This doesn't mean “no concerns are valid.” It means if we're going to regulate or pause data centers, let's be honest about the actual tradeoffs. AI compute is becoming the substrate for medicine, robotics, science, logistics, software, education and every other productivity layer. We should build responsibly, but not based on viral fear math.Closing thoughts - foothills of the singularityDemis closed I/O saying we're in the foothills of the singularity, and I know how that lands when you write it down. But I was in the room, and after the keynote he told me something I haven't been able to shake: he thinks AI is going to be 10x as impactful as the Industrial Revolution, and 10x as fast. Basically 100x. This is the AlphaFold guy. Not someone loose with his words.Then look at the week. A general reasoner cracked an 80-year-old math problem. Cursor is training near-frontier coding models on a fraction of the big-lab budget. Anthropic is paying Elon $15B a year for inference. Karpathy left education to go back into pre-training. Google rolled out an intelligence uplift to a billion people who don't even know a model dropped.If you put that on a whiteboard in 2023, it reads like a sci-fi pitch.LDJ's mathematician friends are asking if they should keep doing their PhDs. My answer hasn't changed: yes, please keep going. The people who combine domain taste with these tools are going to ship more in 5 years than the previous generation did in 50. The tool doesn't replace the taste. It just removes the bottleneck.That's the whole reason ThursdAI exists. Not to hype every drop, not to dunk for engagement, but to give you a shot at being one of the people who knows what's happening, with the receipts.This week, a lot changed.See you next Thursday.TL;DR and Show Notes* Hosts and Guests* Alex Volkov - AI Evangelist at Weights & Biases / CoreWeave, @altryne* Co-hosts: @WolframRvnwlf, @nisten, @ldjconfirmed* Guest: Logan Kilpatrick, MTS at Google DeepMind / AI Studio, @OfficialLoganK* Google I/O 2026* Google went all-in on agents across Search, Gemini, Antigravity, Workspace, Android, Cloud and YouTube (I/O site, Alex thread)* Antigravity 2.0 became the central agentic coding harness across Google (Sundar, Google OS demo)* Gemini 3.5 Flash launched as a fast, determined workhorse model for agentic loops (Logan, Noam Shazeer, Jeff Dean)* Gemini 3.5 Flash is rolling out across the Gemini app, Search AI Mode, Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Antigravity and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (Koray Kavukcuoglu)* Google Search is getting new Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered agentic capabilities, including a new AI-powered Search box and background information agents (Sundar)* Gemini Spark was announced as a 24/7 personal AI agent that can proactively work across Google surfaces (News from Google)* Google teased Gemini-powered Android XR smart glasses with eyewear partners Gentle Monster and Warby Parker (Google, Alex live reaction)* Google AI Studio and the Gemini API got major agentic developer updates, including Managed Agents (Google AI Developers)* Vision & Video* Google DeepMind launched Gemini Omni, a “create anything from anything” multimodal model starting with conversational video editing (DeepMind, Google DeepMind on X)* Omni is available in the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube, with API support coming soon (Logan, Gemini App, Sundar)* Key distinction: Omni is not just text-to-video, it is an iterative multi-turn video editing model that combines Gemini intelligence, world knowledge, multimodal inputs and generative media (Google)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* OpenAI announced a general-purpose reasoning model made progress on the Erdős planar unit distance problem, challenging an 80-year-old mathematical belief (OpenAI, X)* Cursor launched Composer 2.5, built on Kimi K2.5, with Opus-class coding performance at much lower cost (Cursor blog, X)* Alibaba released Qwen 3.7-Max, an agentic frontier model with long autonomous runs and robotics demos (Qwen blog, X, robot demo)* Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic to work on frontier LLM R&D (X)* SpaceX IPO filing revealed Anthropic is paying $1.25B/month for AI compute at the Memphis Colossus facility (Axios, Sawyer Merritt)* The jury in Musk v. Altman found Musk's OpenAI claims barred by statute of limitations, with Musk saying he will appeal (Elon Musk, Sawyer Merritt, Max Zeff)* Open Source LLMs* Cohere released Command A+, a 218B MoE model with 25B active parameters under Apache 2.0 (Cohere, Nick Frosst, HF W4A4, HF BF16)* Nous Research released Lighthouse Attention, a sparse attention method for long-context pretraining with major speedups (Blog, X, arXiv, GitHub)* Tools & Agentic Engineering* Google launched Managed Agents in the Gemini API, letting developers spin up hosted Antigravity agents with Linux sandboxes and persistent state (Docs, X)* xAI launched Grok Build, an agentic CLI coding tool in beta for SuperGrok Heavy users (xAI CLI, X)* Hermes and OpenClaw can now use X subscription auth for semantic search and Grok tooling (Alex)* OpenAI Codex Mobile is now available in the ChatGPT mobile apps for remote agent workflows (OpenAI)* Anthropic doubled Claude usage outside peak hours for a limited period, including Claude Code and other Claude surfaces (Claude)* This Week's Buzz - W&B / CoreWeave* Weights & Biases by CoreWeave is at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, with robotics and automation taking center stage (ICRA, W&B event page)* NVIDIA heads to ICRA 2026 with robotics work around generalist humanoids, physical AI and sim-to-real systems (NVIDIA Robotics, NVIDIA ICRA)* Wolfram is speaking about WolfBench at the AI Developer event in Cologne before heading to ICRA in Vienna (Wolfram)* Other Topics* Data center water usage discourse came up again, including why comparisons need real scale and context rather than viral fear math* The broader theme of the week: coding agents are becoming general agents, and the major labs are now competing on the full stack of model, harness, tools, context and compute This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe
#stockmarket #finance #investing #crudeoil #treasuryyields #gdp #icra #fineorganics #bharatelectronics #zydus #voltas #bluestar #q4earnings #janestreet #aiCatch today's market updates: Oil prices fall as Trump postpones the Iran strike, but US Treasury yields hit multi-year highs on inflation fears. ICRA cuts India's FY27 GDP forecast to 6.2%. We also review Q4 results for Fine Organics, BEL, and Zydus Lifesciences. Plus, a look at Voltas and Jane Street's massive $7B AI data center!https://shorturl.at/gM97lHow to Use Artificial Intelligence for Investing - Combo of 5 ebooks00:00 Oil Prices Fall as Strike Postponed03:07 US Treasury Yields Hit Multi-Year Highs06:29 ICRA Cuts India's FY27 GDP Forecast08:58 Fine Organics Q4 FY26 Results10:44 Bharat Electronics Q4 FY26 Results12:36 Zydus Lifesciences Q4 FY26 Results14:14 AC Stocks Rise on Heatwave Predictions15:46 Believe it or not!
On Episode 877 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Prashant Vashisht, Senior Vice President and Co-Group Head at ICRA as well as Shantanu Sahai, Executive Director & Head - Private Credit at ASK Asset & Wealth Management Group.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(00:50) Markets steady as rupee falls again(05:05) The GCC flow continues as big brands expand in India(05:55) Where could petrol and diesel prices in India go and what are the driving factors?(13:26) Large private credit funds are being launched and what that says about market demand for alternatives(27:06) You will never guess what Ajinomoto is being used forCheck out our Live Earnings tracker: https://earnings.thecore.in/For more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter |Instagram |Facebook |Linkedin |Youtube
In this episode of Insurance Town, Kevin Deutsch joins the show to unpack what's really happening in the health insurance space right now. From the growing role of AI to the emergence of ICHRA as a disruptive model, Kevin brings a practical perspective on where the industry is headed and what it means for agents, brokers, and agencies.The conversation digs into how technology is reshaping distribution, why data management is becoming a competitive advantage, and how personalization is moving from buzzword to reality. If you've ever felt like health insurance is overly complex, this episode helps simplify what matters and where to focus.Key Takeaways: Health insurance remains overly complex, but simplification is coming through better technology and data use AI is only as effective as the data behind it, making data organization critical for agencies ICHRA is creating new opportunities and challenges for brokers in the benefits space Commission structures and distribution models are continuing to evolve Personalization is not a future idea, it is actively shaping how coverage is designed and delivered today Agencies that understand and adapt to these shifts will be better positioned for long-term growth 00:00 – Introduction 09:02 – Changes in Health Insurance Distribution 12:05 – The Role of Brokers in Health Insurance 15:06 – The Shift in Commission Structures 18:10 – The Impact of ICRA on Health Insurance 24:10 – Future of P&C Agencies in Health Insurance 29:57 – Understanding ICRA and Its Value 32:29 – Adoption of AI in Health Insurance 38:05 – Data Management for AI Utilization 40:26 – Trends in Personalization of Health Insurance 43:21 – Preparing for Personalized Benefits 44:42 – The Rise of Provider Sponsored Health Plans 48:59 – Softheon Mission and ServicesSponsorsCanopy ConnectMav1Fort AI Goli
On Episode 841 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist & Head - Research & Outreach at ICRA as well as Dr. Ranjeet Mehta, CEO & Secretary General at PHDCCI (PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry).SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(00:50) Markets celebrate ceasefire but will it last?(05:07) RBI holds interest rates as expected, lowers GDP forecasts(15:43) India needs more than 50 widebodied aircraft and why jet fuel supplies will take time to return to normal(17:26) An Indian delegation went to China after more than 5 years, first impressionsFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter |Instagram |Facebook |Linkedin |Youtube
On Episode 797 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Sheetal Sapale, VP Commercial at Pharmarack AWACS as well as Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist and Head of Research & Outreach at ICRA. SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(01:00) The IT fear wave is spreading and bringing down markets(05:34) IEA lowers global oil demand forecast for 2026(06:11) India's inflation index has thrown out VCRs and VCDs and brought in new constituents. At 2.75% what does it mean?(18:31) Why India's weight loss drug market could explode in a few months(25:04) Google issues a 100year bond, adding to fears of AI exuberanceRegister for India Finance and Innovation Forum 2026https://tinyurl.com/IFIFCOREFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter |Instagram |Facebook |Linkedin |Youtube
In this episode, Jack Hooper, CEO and Co-founder of Take Command, explains how individual coverage HRAs are reshaping employer sponsored benefits and why adoption is accelerating. He discusses cost control, employee choice, and what early success stories signal for the future of health insurance.
Lindsey Unterberger, VP of Marketing at SureCo, leads marketing and education initiatives aimed at making healthcare more accessible. Here, she and host Tod Perry discuss SureCo's Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA), which gives employees greater control over their healthcare. Lindsay also discusses the importance of clear communication in healthcare marketing, the role of AI, and the future of innovation.Key Takeaways:- Lindsey's transition from beauty editing to healthcare marketing- An introduction to ICHRA- Consumer-focused marketing strategiesEpisode Timeline:1:00 Lindsey's former career as a beauty editor4:00 Transitioning from beauty to healthcare marketing8:00 Understanding ICHRA and SureCo9:20 The role of AI in marketing10:45 Troubles with AI12:30 Navigating healthcare terminology15:30 Common mistakes in healthcare marketing17:45 Positive things to look for in healthcare20:45 ICRA gives consumers more choices23:20 Lindsey's spice thought leadership philosophyThis episode's guest:· Lindsey Unterberger on LinkedIn· Lindsey Unterberger on Instagram· SureCo's newsletter (talk ICRA to me)· SucreCo ICHRA 101 Subscribe and leave a 5-star review:https://pod.link/1496390646Contact Us!• Join the conversation by leaving a comment!• Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn!Thanks for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome to Top of the Morning by Mint.. I'm Nelson John and here are today's top stories. Trump's Oil Deal with Pakistan, Tariff Shock for India “Who knows, maybe they'll be selling oil to India someday.” That was Donald Trump's surprise message on Truth Social as he unveiled a new U.S.–Pakistan energy partnership to develop Pakistan's “massive oil reserves.” While no U.S. oil giant has been named yet, Trump signaled a selection is on the way. But the kicker? Just hours earlier, India was hit with a 25% tariff on exports to the U.S., along with vague threats of penalties over its oil trade with Russia. Trump also took aim at India's place in BRICS, calling the 11-member bloc “anti-United States” and accusing it of attacking the dollar. Meanwhile, the U.S. struck a trade deal with South Korea, placing a 15% import tariff on Korean goods—while exempting American exports. Talks with India continue, with Trump suggesting more clarity “by the end of this week.” Markets React, Investors Watch Closely India's stock markets felt the heat after the tariff news. Export-heavy sectors—textiles, pharma, and auto components—are expected to take a hit. Markets had anticipated a 20% tariff, but the extra 5% and mention of penalties jolted investor sentiment. Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) pulled out ₹32,000 crore in July, spooked by the weakening rupee and high valuations. In contrast, domestic institutional investors have pumped in ₹4.12 trillion this year, helping cushion the blow. While the Nifty saw a small recovery to 24,855, experts warn of a short-term dip. Bank of Baroda's Madan Sabnavis expects markets to stabilize quickly, but economists like ICRA's Aditi Nayar caution the tariff could trim India's GDP growth below 6.2% for FY26. NASA–ISRO's NISAR Takes Off: Earth's New Watchdog “A scientific handshake with the world.” That's how Union Minister Jitendra Singh described the successful launch of NISAR, the world's most advanced Earth-observing satellite, co-developed by NASA and ISRO. Launched aboard ISRO's GSLV-F16 from Sriharikota, the $1.5 billion, SUV-sized satellite will track Earth's surface changes—down to just 1 cm—from 743 km above. Over five years, it will scan the planet twice every 12 days, monitoring melting glaciers, earthquakes, groundwater levels, and carbon emissions from wetlands. And Finally: UPI Gets a Power Boost Let's wrap up with a domestic update that affects nearly every Indian with a smartphone. Starting today, August 1, your favourite UPI apps—Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm—are operating under new NPCI rules aimed at boosting performance and curbing fraud. Here's a quick rundown: Balance checks? Now limited to 50 per day, and you'll see your balance automatically after each transaction. Auto-payments? Will only go through during non-peak hours—before 10 am, between 1–5 pm, and after 9:30 pm. Bank details? Visible only 25 times daily, after selecting the issuing bank. Pending transactions? You can check the status only three times, spaced by 90 seconds. Recipient names? Will be shown before every transfer—reducing fraud risk. And yes, non-compliance by payment service providers could mean API restrictions or onboarding bans. Bottom line? India's digital payments system—already among the most advanced—is getting tighter, faster, and more secure Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Top of the Morning by Mint.. I'm Nelson John and here are today's top stories. Trump's Oil Deal with Pakistan, Tariff Shock for India “Who knows, maybe they'll be selling oil to India someday.” That was Donald Trump's surprise message on Truth Social as he unveiled a new U.S.–Pakistan energy partnership to develop Pakistan's “massive oil reserves.” While no U.S. oil giant has been named yet, Trump signaled a selection is on the way. But the kicker? Just hours earlier, India was hit with a 25% tariff on exports to the U.S., along with vague threats of penalties over its oil trade with Russia. Trump also took aim at India's place in BRICS, calling the 11-member bloc “anti-United States” and accusing it of attacking the dollar. Meanwhile, the U.S. struck a trade deal with South Korea, placing a 15% import tariff on Korean goods—while exempting American exports. Talks with India continue, with Trump suggesting more clarity “by the end of this week.” Markets React, Investors Watch Closely India's stock markets felt the heat after the tariff news. Export-heavy sectors—textiles, pharma, and auto components—are expected to take a hit. Markets had anticipated a 20% tariff, but the extra 5% and mention of penalties jolted investor sentiment. Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) pulled out ₹32,000 crore in July, spooked by the weakening rupee and high valuations. In contrast, domestic institutional investors have pumped in ₹4.12 trillion this year, helping cushion the blow. While the Nifty saw a small recovery to 24,855, experts warn of a short-term dip. Bank of Baroda's Madan Sabnavis expects markets to stabilize quickly, but economists like ICRA's Aditi Nayar caution the tariff could trim India's GDP growth below 6.2% for FY26. NASA–ISRO's NISAR Takes Off: Earth's New Watchdog “A scientific handshake with the world.” That's how Union Minister Jitendra Singh described the successful launch of NISAR, the world's most advanced Earth-observing satellite, co-developed by NASA and ISRO. Launched aboard ISRO's GSLV-F16 from Sriharikota, the $1.5 billion, SUV-sized satellite will track Earth's surface changes—down to just 1 cm—from 743 km above. Over five years, it will scan the planet twice every 12 days, monitoring melting glaciers, earthquakes, groundwater levels, and carbon emissions from wetlands. Its powerful dual-radar system (L-band from NASA, S-band from ISRO) allows it to peer through clouds, fog, and even ice layers, aiding everything from climate science to disaster response and aviation safety. Operations begin by October-end, with data distributed via Alaska's ASF and India's Bhoonidhi platform. U.S. Sanctions Six Indian Firms Over Iran Oil Trade Adding more pressure to bilateral ties, the U.S. has sanctioned 33 global entities—including six Indian companies—for dealing in Iranian-origin petrochemicals. Those hit include: Alchemical Solutions Pvt Ltd – $84M in imports Jupiter Dye Chem – $49M worth of toluene Global Industrial Chemicals Ltd – $51M in methanol Ramniklal S. Gosalia & Co – $22M in mixed chemicals Persistent Petrochem – $14M in petrochemical shipments Kanchan Polymers – smaller but notable deals All were designated under Executive Order 13846 for “knowingly” engaging in prohibited trade. The sanctions, which also include 10 blocked vessels, extend to firms in China, UAE, Turkiye, and Indonesia. Though not market-moving yet, they further strain India's trade talks with the U.S. While TCS Cuts 12,000 Jobs, Infosys Hires 20,000 As India's IT sector reels from TCS's record 12,000 layoffs, Infosys is making a contrarian move. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On episode 134 of PSQH: The Podcast, Mike Lauze, VP of Marketing at STARC Systems, talks about ICRA 2.0 and the continuing importance of infection prevention during healthcare construction.
In this episode of Money Konnect by MINT x Edelweiss Mutual, renowned economist Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist and Head of Research at ICRA, discusses India's medium-to-long-term economic outlook amidst a volatile global environment.She unpacks key macroeconomic themes such as domestic consumption trends, capex dynamics, employment challenges, inflation sensitivities, and the evolving role of exports—while offering a realistic yet optimistic view on growth potential.Nayar also highlights India's demographic dividend, internal market strength, and structural reforms as essential drivers for sustained progress, alongside risks like jobless growth, rural-urban imbalances, and global trade disruptions.A grounded, insightful conversation for policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, and economics students seeking to understand India's economic future and what it will take to get there.
On Episode 605 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist and Head - Research & Outreach at ICRA, Safi Ahsan Rizvi, Advisor at National Disaster Management Authority as well as Captain Sam Thomas, President at ALPA India. SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(01:48) Markets plunge suddenly by over 990 points(03:30) Retail inflation drops to 6-year low of 2.82%(12:00) Air India's shocking disaster.(20:09) Heat waves return to India as monsoon stalls. A check on preparedness.https://www.investing-referral.com/aff303For more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
Navigating ACA Changes: Expert Insights from Agent BoostWelcome to another insightful episode of the Agent Boost Podcast!
Our guest in this episode is Geoffrey Biggs, CTO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. He updates us on the recent ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju release, the pending ROS 1 sunset and the future of OSRF. Co-host Steve Crowe returns from Georgia with an update on the 2025 ICRA event. He discusses the event and all of the various robot demos at the event. ICRA is primarily a research-focused robotics event, and it offers attendees the opportunity to see the latest research projects from labs around the world. ### Our sponsor this week is SDPSI. Let's dive into the critical role of precision, quality, and alignment in robotics design and assembly. At SDP/SI, our engineering experts go beyond the standard manufacturing process by reviewing your designs before production, offering cost-effective, space-saving solutions that streamline your entire assembly process. Discover how we help robotics companies achieve unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how SDP/SI can elevate your robotics applications. Discover the difference! Visit https://sdp-si.com/ to learn more.
In this episode, Chris Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Thatch, joins Scott Becker to discuss how his team is transforming health benefits through ICRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements). He shares how a personal challenge with health insurance sparked the idea, how Thatch simplifies ICRA using fintech innovation, and why the shift from group plans to defined contributions is gaining traction.
On Episode 558 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Pawan Kumar, President of Seafood Exporters Association of India as well as Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist, Head - Research & Outreach at ICRA.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(01:00) India beats tariff tantrums, becoming first global market to do so(03:59) Morgan Stanley cuts December Sensex target to 82,000, still 7% above current(07:38) Inflation is down to 5 year low, will it hold?(16:33) The International Energy Agency joins OPEC in slashing oil demand forecasts(18:19) How tariff tussles are have upended the lives of India's shrimp and seafood exporters(32:18) Build On BlockchainListeners! We await your feedback....The Core and The Core Report is ad supported and FREE for all readers and listeners. Write in to shiva@thecore.in for sponsorships and brand studio requirementsFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
In this episode of the Current Account podcast, businessline's Piyush Shukla is joined by Anil Gupta, SVP & Co-Group Head - Financial Sector Ratings, ICRA. The conversation delves deep into the latest decisions made by the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and their implications on the Indian economy, with a focus on lending, deposit rates, and gold loans. Gupta provides insightful analysis on the recent 25 basis point rate cut by the MPC. He discusses the expected impact of these cuts on retail and corporate borrowers, particularly the transmission to loan and deposit rates. The episode also explores the RBI's recent regulatory changes concerning gold loans, particularly the 75% Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratio and new operational guidelines. Gupta shares his thoughts on how these adjustments bring more clarity and uniformity to the gold loan industry, despite initial concerns about the impact on Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs). He explains how the revised LTV calculation, which includes accumulated interest, aims to mitigate risks and create a level playing field for all players in the sector. Additionally, the discussion touches on the expanded scope for co-lending between banks and NBFCs, including non-Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) loans. This could potentially improve the distribution of credit and lead to better collaboration between banks and NBFCs, especially benefiting smaller NBFCs with strong distribution networks but limited balance sheet capacity.
El càncer de mama no és rosa. Crítica teatral de l'obra «Dones de ràdio», de Cristina Clemente. Intèrprets: Sara Diego, Sara Espígul i Àngels Gonyalons. Veus en off: Jordi Boixaderas, Anna Carreño, Marta Codina, Laura Fité, Yolanda Fuster, Andrés Herrera, Gemma Martínez, Montse Rodríguez, Núria Sanmartí. Escenografia: Max Glaenzel. Construcció escenografia: Taller d’Escenografia Castells. Vestuari i caracterització: Núria Llunell. Il·luminació: Kiko Planas. Espai sonor: Jordi Bonet i Efrén Bellostes. Direcció de producció: Josep Domènech. Cap de producció: Blanca Arderiu. Producció executiva: Macarena Garcia. Coordinació tècnica: AP7 Projectes Tècnics. Regidoria: Montse Alacuart. Tècnica de llums: Cristina Rodríguez. Tècnic de so: Efrén Bellostes. Maquinària: Carles Hernández ‘Xarli’. Cap tècnica del teatre: Marta Pérez. Màrqueting i comunicació de la companyia: Bitò Màrqueting. Comunicació del teatre: La Villarroel. Agraïments: Yolanda Fuster Martínez, Aïda Cerdanya Segura, Loli Guart Caparrós, Mireia Ros Lara, Rosa Romero García, Sílvia Loque Delgado, Íngrid Icra i Salicrú, Patrícia Moya Martín i Laura Iglesias Trafach. Amb el suport de: Generalitat de Catalunya – ICEC Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals. Distribució i producció: Bitò. Ajudant de direcció: Roc Esquius. Direcció: Sergi Belbel. La Villarroel, Barcelona, 26 març 2025. Veu: Andreu Sotorra. Música: Dreaming (Radio Edit). Interpretació: Good Vibes. Composició: Steve Lorber. Àlbum: Música relaxant, 2025.
On Episode 517 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Kinjal Shah, Senior Vice President & Co-Group Head, Corporate Ratings, ICRA. We also feature an excerpt from our interview with C Vijayakumar, CEO at HCL Tech from yesterday's Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum in Mumbai.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(01:19) Markets hammered once again even as institutional brokerage buy calls rise(05:13) We need to transition from an input centric model to an outcome centric model, HCL Tech CEO C Vijayakumar to The Core(11:06) Indian IT to grow faster this year, expand workforce(12:30) Rating agency ICRA projects improved revenues on rural revival and increased Govt spend(20:47) Apple to hire 20,000 workers in US in definite hit to global sourcingListeners! We await your feedback....The Core and The Core Report is ad supported and FREE for all readers and listeners. Write in to shiva@thecore.in for sponsorships and brand studio requirementsFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 507 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist at rating agency ICRA. We also feature an excerpt from our interview with Akshay Kumar Singh, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Petronet LNG Ltd (PLL).SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(00:50)The bulls and bears fight it out once again as markets slip for the 6th day(06:30)Consumer price inflation is down to a five month low, will another round of rate cuts come?(14:43)India is gearing up for a major gas sourcing and distribution push(27:19)The new tax bill is almost here and early reactions suggest more was expectedRegister for India Energy Week, Feb 11-14Listeners! We await your feedback....The Core and The Core Report is ad supported and FREE for all readers and listeners. Write in to shiva@thecore.in for sponsorships and brand studio requirementsFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 438 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, chief economist at ICRA as well as Peeyush Dalmia, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company SHOW NOTES (00:00) The Take (04:21) Markets wait for election cues in the absence of others (07:55) Rating agency ICRA projects lower growth for 2024-25 (16:52) Is a global crude oil glut coming? (19:54) India needs insurance but Indians are not buying as much Listeners! We await your feedback.... The Core and The Core Report is ad supported and FREE for all readers and listeners. Write in to shiva@thecore.in for sponsorships and brand studio requirements For more of our coverage check out thecore.in Join and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channel Subscribe to our Newsletter Follow us on: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
Unlock the power of Individual Contribution Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICRA) and revolutionize your approach to employee benefits! Join us as Ashley McQuade from Venture shares her expertise on how ICRA can transform the way small businesses manage health benefits, offering flexibility and personalization like never before.
This is the Catchup on 3 Things by The Indian Express and I'm Niharika NandaToday is the 8th of October and here are the headlines.In the Haryana Assembly elections, the BJP exceeded expectations, leading in over 46 seats and securing a third consecutive term. This success can be attributed to key strategies including consolidating non-Jat votes by naming Nayab Singh Saini as CM candidate, replacing 60 candidates to counter anti-incumbency, and highlighting development and Direct Benefit Transfers in campaigns. In response to the results, the Congress made an unprecedented move by refusing to accept the election results, alleging a “conspiracy” involving the manipulation of Electronic Voting Machines. This marks the first time a major party has rejected an electoral outcome citing EVM tampering. Meanwhile, The National Conference and Congress alliance is poised to form the government in Jammu and Kashmir after the first Assembly election in a decade for the Union Territory. National Conference Vice President Omar Abdullah won decisively in both Budgam and Ganderbal constituencies. Following Omar's victory in Budgam, his father and NC Chief Farooq Abdullah stated that he will become the CM. The BJP on the other hand, achieved its highest-ever vote share in J&K assembly polls, winning a total of 29 seats.Moving on from the assembly polls, India's domestic aviation market continues to strengthen, recording an 8.1% year-on-year increase in September with 1.32 crore passengers, according to ICRA, which maintains a stable outlook for the sector. Passenger numbers were also 15.2% higher than pre-pandemic levels in September 2019. As the world's third-largest and fastest-growing aviation market, India's aviation sector has staged a rapid recovery from the severe impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.An eight-year-old boy was run over by a speeding BMC garbage dumper on Tuesday morning. The Shivaji Nagar police have registered an FIR against the driver, who has since been arrested. Local residents have raised concerns about the dangers posed by speeding dumper drivers near the dump yard and have called for speed breakers on the road. According to a Shivaji Nagar police officer, the incident occurred around 10:30 a.m. in the Zakir Hussain Nagar area.This was the Catch Up on 3 Things by The Indian Express
ICRA கொடுத்த அதிரடி REPORT STEEL, METAL பங்கு விலை எகிறுமா? | இந்த நாலு SECTOR-களை கவனிங்க மக்களே!
On Episode 372 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, chief economist at ICRA as well as Jawahar Bekay, managing partner at CaptiveAide Advisory.SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Take: Why India should now think China plus 2(03:33) Markets catch Fed fever, ride on interest rate cut hopes(04:58) Oil prices rise once again on war tensions(06:00) Economists are polling lower GDP numbers for the first quarter, why there is uncertainty here on(14:33) WIll GCCs eat Indian IT Services companies' lunch?Listeners! We await your feedback....The Core and The Core Report is ad supported and FREE for all readers and listeners. Write in to shiva@thecore.in for sponsorships and brand studio requirements.For more of our coverage check out thecore.inJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 362 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, chief economist at ICRA as well as Shiv Putcha, founder & principal analyst at Mandala Insights.SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Take(05:29) Markets withstand Hindenburg, Adani stocks don't(07:29) Inflation is down to 3.5%, why you shouldn't celebrate yet(14:13) Bharti buys a 25% stake in iconic UK brand, British TelecomRegister for The Core Meet Up!!Listeners! We await your feedback....For sponsorships and brand studio engagements, contact shiva@thecore.inFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 342 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Vinay Kumar G, vice president and sector head – Corporate Ratings at ICRA.SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Take(04:00) Stories Of The Day(04:41) Sensex Crosses 81,000, markets at record highs for fourth day, bucking global trends(06:25) Infosys beats street estimates(08:45) Rice inventories are at record highs and the Government could open up exports(09:47) Is Indian aviation infrastructure ready for the big demand growth?(18:03) Are the days of revenge travel ending?Listeners! We await your feedback....To collaborate with our Core Brand Studio contact shiva@thecore.inFor more of our coverage check out thecore.in--Support the Core Report--Join and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 320 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Paras Jasrai, senior analyst at India Ratings & Research (A Fitch Group Company), Prashant Vasisht, Senior Vice President and Co-Group Head, Corporate Ratings, ICRA as well as G Haribabu, president of the National Real Estate Development Council (NAREDCO).SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Take(02:21) Stories Of The Day(03:05) Stock markets stay near highs, why the action is shifting to debt flows(06:28) Heatwaves are on, understanding the impact on inflation(11:13) India's dream run with discounted Russian oil is ending and what that means(18:00) Why tenants across India are refusing to let out some 10 million homes, leading to supply distortionsListeners! We await your feedback....For more of our coverage check out thecore.in--Support the Core Report--Join and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
On Episode 303 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, chief economist of rating agency ICRA as well as Ashok Sreenivas, group coordinator at the Prayas (Energy Group).SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories Of The Day(00:50) Markets swing again with 5 trading sessions to go for election results(01:54) How Japan & India are both China + 1 investment destinations(03:18) India's economy slowed down in the last quarter, what does it mean for the next?(11:23) India's power demand is surging and usage patterns are shifting, is there enough supply?(19:09) Crime pays but cybercrime pays moreFor more of our coverage check out thecore.in--Support the Core Report--Join and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
Алексей Павлов - предприниматель в сфере маркетинговых технологий, основал и руководит компанией ADLUXE, кандидат экономических наук, преподаватель, куратор в группе компаний креативного мышления ИКРА. Интересуется образовательными технологиями и смешением подходов в маркетинге и обучение людей: от детей до сотрудников компаний. Alexey Pavlov is an entrepreneur in the field of marketing technologies, founded and runs the ADLUXE company, candidate of economic sciences, teacher, curator at the ICRA group of creative thinking companies. He is interested in educational technologies and mixing approaches in marketing and training people: from children to company employees. FIND ALEXEY ON SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook ================================SUPPORT & CONNECT:Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrichTwitter: https://twitter.com/denofrichFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.develman/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/denofrichInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_of_rich/Hashtag: #denofrich© Copyright 2024 Den of Rich. All rights reserved.
On today's episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, economist at ratings agency ICRA. We also feature an excerpt from the recent Energy Special interview with Dr Ranjit Rath, Chairman and Managing Director of Oil India Limited, India's oldest and more than a century old oil company.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories Of The Day(01:00) Stock markets make peace with IT stocks, MS overtakes Apple.(03:55) Are the Government's efforts to rein in inflation working?(11:16) Mapping India's oil prospects, onshore and offshore.(18:24) How Bangladesh footwear exports are growing rapidly, as it exploits synergy with garment making.(21:39) NRIs are buying more than 20% of new real estate, driving up prices on the premium end.(23:32) Canada may cap international students arrivals.For more of our coverage check out thecore.in--Support the Core Report--Head to www.indiaenergyweek.comJoin and Interact anonymously on our whatsapp channelSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube
Health insurance and open enrollment are demystified by industry experts Erica Dumpel and John Czajkowski. Listeners will gain valuable insights and advice on topics like Medicare enrollment, the impact of politics on health insurance, the rise of state-based exchanges, the financial benefits of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), considerations for different age groups, and employer-based insurance. This comprehensive discussion equips individuals with the knowledge they need to navigate the complexities of health insurance, ensuring they make informed decisions to protect their well-being. Resources:Website: CDAInc.netPhone Number: 770-449-7369Erica's Email: Erica@cdainc.netJohn's Email: John@cdainc.netTimestamp: 0:00:00 - Introduction0:01:18 - Erica's experience and background in the health insurance industry0:02:09 - John Czajkowski and his role in the family-owned insurance brokerage0:03:51 - Medicare and the open enrollment period0:06:57 - Seeking assistance for Medicare enrollment0:08:03 - Explanation of Medicare coverage in relation to employer-based insurance for individuals close to retirement0:08:47 - The complexities of health insurance and options for different age groups0:17:07 - Health insurance plans and considerations for families.0:21:30 - Discussion about HSA and its uses 0:26:02 - Self-employed individuals and their health insurance options.0:29:17 - Medicare and its impact on dependents.0:31:20 - Options for college students and their health insurance.0:32:07 - A strategic approach to health insurance.0:36:12 - Compliance for employers and the ICRA alternative.0:38:48 - Closing
On today's episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist at rating agency ICRA as well as Vivek Rathi, Director of Research at Knight Frank. SHOW NOTES[01:00] India's first quarter GDP is at 7.8%, below most forecasts.[08:49] An investigative journalism report points more fingers at Adani shareholding.[14:21] Mumbai sees record property sales in August, as prices set to rise further[21:46] Why is Indian IT sounding despondent while global banks are stepping up spending. An excerpt of The Core Report Weekend EditionFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube | Telegram
On today's episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Sugandh Saxena, CEO of the Fintech Association of Consumer Empowerment as well as Hormazd Sorabjee, Editor of Autocar India.SHOW NOTES[00:56] Jio Financial stock gets hammered gain, hits a lower circuit on the bourses again[04:13] Rating agency ICRA and State Bank of India put out GDP projections for the April to June quarter. ICRA says 8.5%.[06:43] India's Digital Lending Industry Grows 49% but 86% of all borrowers are male with Sugandh Saxena[15:56] What Is the Future For Petrol Sipping Two-wheelers with Hormazd Sorabjee[21:51] Visiting New York? AirBnB may not be an option as New York cracks down on short term rentals and listings start disappearing.For more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube | Telegram
A conversation with Teresa Krasny, Director and Editor of the forthcoming Degas Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Works on Paper, as well as Chair of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association. Teresa provides a wonderful overview of the catalogue raisonné process, while also sharing the challenges faced by researchers that are compiling the official record of an artist's work. In addition, she provides practical advice for living artists beginning the process in their own lifetime.https://degascatalogueraisonne.com/https://icra.art/
Live from the venue of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), we are talking with Ben Dart about the trends in robotics. In this podcast, Ben and Roland discuss the latest robotics technology as showcased at ICRA, and discuss where this technology is on the hype cycle. They also discuss how to get started with robotics yourself. Read a transcript of this interview: bit.ly/3XGQAMh Subscribe to the Software Architects' Newsletter [monthly]: www.infoq.com/software-architect…mpaign=architectnl Upcoming Events: QCon San Francisco: qconsf.com/?utm_source=soundcl…&utm_campaign=qsf23 Oct 2-6, 2023 Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ - LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq - Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 - Instagram: @infoqdotcom - Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq Write for InfoQ - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq/?u…aign=writeforinfoq
This week we welcome Norris Gearhart EVP of Regulatory and Business Practices at First Onsite Property Restoration for a show on Infection Control Risk Assessment, Disinfection and Diversification Opportunities for Restoration Contractors. LEARN MORE at IAQRadio+. Norris Gearhart is the Executive Vice President of Regulatory Business Practices for First Onsite Property Restoration. Norris has a long career as a solutions-focused leader, coach, and educator. He began his career in the restoration industry in 1985. He has had responsibilities in both the restoration and insurance realm over the span of nearly four decades. During this time, Norris owned or has been part owner of two successful full-service restoration companies building multi-million-dollar books of business. He brings considerable skills and expertise to the table, including being an OSHA outreach trainer for Construction and General industry, loss site inspections, estimating, project management, and as an instructor for the RIA Certified Restorer (CR), Fire Loss Specialist (FLS), and Environmental Risk Specialist (ERS) courses. He is currently serving as a voting member of the IICRC standards committee with the development of the S410 Infection Control Cleaning Standard. As the CEO of Gearhart and Associates, he created and delivered training and consulting services to equip Infection control practitioners, facilities managers, general contractors, disaster response contractors and sub trades with real-world practical knowledge to safely perform work in high-risk environments. Norris was the COO of TOMI Environmental Solutions, where he implemented and administered policies and procedures and was instrumental in obtaining the EPA registration for SteraMist as a Hospital Disinfectant. Subsequently, he was chosen as a member of the US Aid and World Health Organization team challenged with customizing a disinfection chamber for the Ebola outbreak in Africa. He also responded to global projects including outbreaks of Mears Coronavirus in Saudi Arabia. In 1995 he established a Restorx franchise for Johns & amp; Lyng Pty Ltd in Melbourne, Australia, now the largest publicly traded restoration group in Australia. While there he taught the Association of Specialist in Cleaning and Restoration (ASCR) now the Restoration Industry Association (RIA), Certified Restoration Technician course multiple times. This was the first time there were CRT's trained and certified outside of North America.
Dr. Aadeel Akhtar is the Founder and CEO of PSYONIC, a company whose mission is to develop advanced prostheses that are affordable for everyone. Victoria talks to Dr. Akhtar about the gaps in the market he you saw in current prosthetic ability, advancements PSYONIC has been able to make since commercializing, and essential principles and values when you were building out the team. PSYONIC (https://www.psyonic.io/) Follow PSYONIC on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/psyonicinc/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/PSYONICinc). Follow Dr. Aadeel Akhtar on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aadeelakhtar/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host Victoria Guido. And with me today is Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, Founder and CEO of PSYONIC, a company whose mission is to develop advanced prostheses that are affordable for everyone. Aadeel, thank you for joining me. DR. AADEEL: Thank you for having me, Victoria. This is fun. VICTORIA: Yes, I'm excited to meet you. So I actually ran into you earlier this week at a San Diego tech meetup. And I'm curious just to hear more about your company PSYONIC. DR. AADEEL: So, as you mentioned, we develop advanced bionic limbs that are affordable and accessible. And this is actually something I've wanted to do my whole life ever since I was seven years old. My parents are from Pakistan. I was born in the Chicago suburbs. But I was visiting, and that was the first time I met someone missing a limb; and she was my age missing her right leg, using a tree branch as a crutch, living in poverty. And that's kind of what inspired me to go into this field. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And maybe you can start with what gaps in the market did you see in current prosthetic ability? DR. AADEEL: When we first started making these prosthetic devices, we were 3D printing them. And we thought that the biggest issue with prosthetic devices was that they were way too expensive and saw that with 3D printing, we'd be able to reduce the prices on them. And that's true; it was actually one of the biggest issues, but it wasn't the biggest issue. After talking with hundreds of patients and clinicians, the number one thing that we found that patients and clinicians would raise issue with was that their super expensive bionic hands were breaking all the time. And these were made with injection molded plastics and custom-machined steel. And they weren't doing anything crazy with it. They would accidentally hit the hand against the side of a table, but because they were made out of rigid components, they would end up snapping up those joints. And a natural hand, for example, if you bang a natural hand against a table or a rigid object, then it flexes out of the way. It has compliance in it, and that's why it's able to survive those types of hits and impacts a little bit more. It forced us to think outside the box of how can we still leverage the low-cost manufacturing of 3D printing but make this hand more robust than anything out there? And that's when I started looking into soft robotics. And with soft robotics, instead of making rigid links in your robot, so instead of having rigid joints and components, you'd use soft materials like silicone that are more akin to your skin and your own biological tissues that are more flexible and compliant. So we started making the fingers out of rubber and silicone. And now we've been able to do things like punch through flaming boards, and I dropped it from the roof of my house 30 feet up in the air, and it survived. We put it in a dryer for 10 minutes, and it survived tumbling around in a dryer. I've arm wrestled against the para-triathlete national champion and lost. So this thing was built to survive a lot more than just hitting your hand against the side of a table. VICTORIA: Wow, that sounds incredible. And I love that you started with a premise, and then you got feedback from your users and found a completely different problem, even though that same problem still existed [laughs] about the low cost. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. VICTORIA: Wow. So taking it back a little bit more to the beginning, so you knew you always wanted to do prosthetics since you grew up in Pakistan and saw people without their limbs. Take me a little bit more from the beginning of the journey. When did you decide to start the company officially? DR. AADEEL: And just to clarify, I was just visiting Pakistan for the summer, but I grew up and was raised here in the U.S. So I went to Loyola University Chicago for undergrad, and I got a bachelor's degree in biology there, followed by a master's in computer science. And the original plan was to actually become an MD working with patients with amputations and developing prosthetics for them. But while I was an undergraduate student at Loyola, I took my first computer science class, and I absolutely loved it. I loved everything about coding, and programming, and engineering. And I realized that if I became a straight-up MD, I wouldn't get to do any of the cool things that I was learning in my computer science classes. And I wanted to figure out a way to combine my passions in engineering and computer science with clinical medicine and prosthetics. And right down the street at a hospital formerly known as The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago...it's now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. It's the number-one rehabilitation hospital in the U.S. for the last 31 years. They made these huge breakthroughs in mind control bionic limbs where they were doing a surgery where they would reroute your nerves to other muscles that you already have on your body. And then, when you try to imagine bending your phantom elbow or making a phantom fist, your chest muscles would contract. And then you could use those signals to then control this robotic limb that was designed by Dean Kamen that was sponsored by DARPA and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was just absolutely incredible. And it was this perfect mixture of engineering and clinical medicine, and it was exactly what I wanted to get into. But, as you'd mentioned, we're all about accessibility, and a $100,000 cost hand would not cut it. And so I ended up finishing a master's in computer science. I taught at Loyola for a couple of years and then went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I got another master's in electrical and computer engineering, a Ph.D. in neuroscience. And then I finished the first year of medical school before I left to run PSYONIC because it is a lot more fun building bionic limbs [laughs] than finishing medical school. And while I was a graduate student, we started 3D printing our own prosthetic hands, and we got the chance in 2014 to go down to Quito, Ecuador, where we were working with a nonprofit organization called The Range of Motion Project. And their whole mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them in the U.S., Guatemala, and Ecuador. And we went down there, and we were working with a patient who had lost his left hand 35 years prior due to machine gunfire from a helicopter; he was in the Ecuadorian Army. And there was a border war between Ecuador and Peru. And Juan, our patient, in front of international news stations, said that he felt as though a part of him had come back. And that was because he actually made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years. And you have to imagine the hand at that time was three times the size of an average natural hand, adult human hand. Had wires going everywhere, breadboards, power supplies, the walls, you name it. And despite that, he said that a part of him had come back. And he actually forgot how to make a pinch with his left hand, and we had to retrain his brain by placing a mirror in front of his left side reflecting his right hand, tricking his brain into thinking that his left hand was actually there. And he would make a pinch with both sides, and it would reactivate the muscles in his forearm on his left side. And when he said that, that's when I realized that if I stay in academia, then this just ends up as a journal paper. And if we want everyone to feel the same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize the technology. And so that's when PSYONIC was born. VICTORIA: I love that you're working on that as someone who's from Washington, D.C., and has done a lot of work in veterans and homeless organizations and seen how life-changing getting access to limbs and regaining capability can be for people. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. In fact, our first user in the U.S. is a U.S. Army sergeant who lost his hand in Iraq in 2005 due to roadside bombs, Sergeant Garrett Anderson. He used a hook on a daily basis, and with our hand, he's actually able to feel his daughter's hand, which is something that he wasn't able to do with any other prosthesis. And for him to tell us that that is why we do what we do. VICTORIA: Right. And I saw on your website that you have several patents and have talked about the advances you've been able to make in what I'm going to call the sensorimotor bionic limbs. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the advancements you've been able to make since you decided to commercialize this? DR. AADEEL: The first thing that usually users notice is that, and clinicians notice as well, is that the hand is the fastest bionic hand in the world. So the fingers close in about 200 milliseconds. And to put that into context, we can wink our eyes in about 300 milliseconds. So it's technically faster than the blink of an eye, which is kind of a cool statistic there. So it's super fast. And the fingers are super resistant to impact, so they're very durable. And so we've got a couple of patents on both of those items in particular. And then there's the touch feedback aspect. So this is the only hand on the market that gives users touch feedback. And so the methods that we have to mold the fingers to enable that sensory feedback that is what our third patent is on for the hand, and it just looks really cool. It's got like this black carbon fiber on it that just looks really futuristic and bionic. And it just gives users the confidence that this isn't something to be pitied; this is something that's really cool. And especially for our war heroes, that's something to be celebrated that I lost my hand for our country, and now I've got this really cool one that can do all of the things that my hand used to do. VICTORIA: And I also saw that it's reimbursable by Medicare in the U.S. And I was curious if you had any lessons learned from that process for getting eligible for that. DR. AADEEL: Yeah. And that was part of the goal from the very beginning. After we did our customer discovery process, where we figured out what the pain points are and found out that durability was one of the biggest issues, obviously, one of the other issues was the really expensive price of the other hands, and typically what we call a multi-articulated hand, so that's one where each one of the fingers move individually. Those are only covered by the VA, so if you're in the military or workman's comp so if you had a workplace accident. And that only accounted for about 10% of the U.S. market. And what the clinicians kept telling us over and over again was that if you can get the hand covered by Medicare, then usually all the other insurance companies will follow suit, like your Blue Cross Blue Shield, your Aetna, your Kaiser, et cetera. So that was our design goal from the beginning. So how can we hit a price point that Medicare would cover but also make this fully featured that no other hand can do any of these other things? What it primarily came down to was hitting that price point. And as long as we hit that price point, then Medicare was going to be fine with it. So we invented a lot of the manufacturing methods that we use in-house to make the hand in particular. So we do all the silicone molding. We do all the carbon fiber work. We do all the fabric work. We do all the assembly of it in-house in our warehouse here in San Diego. And by being so vertically integrated, we're able to then iterate very quickly and make these innovations happen at a much more rapid scale so that we can get them out there faster and then help more people who need it. VICTORIA: So you've really grown tremendously from when you first had the project, and now you have a team here in San Diego. Do you have any lessons learned for enabling your team to drive faster in that innovation? DR. AADEEL: Yeah, the biggest thing that I feel like a lot of things come down to is just having grit. So especially with a startup, it's always going to be a roller coaster ride. And for us, I think one of the big motivating factors for us is the patients themselves when they get to do these things that they weren't able to do before. So another one of our first patients, Tina, had just become a grandmother, and she was able to feed her granddaughter for the first time because she was able to hold the bottle with her bionic hand, The Ability Hand, and then hold her granddaughter with her natural hand and then feed her using The Ability Hand. It's, like I said, moments like that is why we do what we're doing. It gives us that motivation to work those long hours, make those deadlines so that we can help as many people as possible. VICTORIA: Right. So you have that motivating power behind your idea, which makes a lot of sense. What else in your customer discovery sprint was surprising to you as you moved through that process? DR. AADEEL: So there was definitely the robustness that was surprising. There was the cost that wasn't necessarily the highest priority thing, which we thought would be the highest priority. And the speed and just having to rely on visual feedback, you have to kind of look at the hand as you're doing the task that you're doing, but you have to look at it very intently. So that takes a lot of cognitive load. You have to pay attention very specifically to am I doing the right movement with my hand? In ways that you wouldn't necessarily have to do with a natural hand. And by making the hand move so responsive as it is and move so quickly, in addition to having that touch feedback, that reduces, or at least we believe it'll reduce a lot of that cognitive load for our patients so that they don't have to be constantly monitoring exactly what the hand is doing in order to do a lot of the tasks or the activities of daily living that they're doing on a day to day basis. The whole customer discovery process drove what features we were going to focus on in actually making this hand a reality. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. And I love hearing about what came up that surprised people. And I appreciate your commitment to that process to really drive your business idea and to solve this problem that happens to so many people in the United States. Well, how widespread is this issue? And, of course, I'm sure you're targeting more than just the United States with rollout, but... DR. AADEEL: So, globally, there are over 10 million people with hand amputations, and 80% of them actually live in developing nations, and less than 3% have access to affordable rehabilitative care. So it's a huge need worldwide, and we want to make sure that everyone has access to the best available prosthetic devices. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So I guess commercializing this product leads to more room, more availability across for everyone. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. And interesting thing about that, too, is that as we were developing these, the hand in particular, we've optimized it for humans to do human tasks. And we have a programming interface that we put on it that allows researchers to control each one of the fingers like you control the speed, the position, and the force from each one of those fingers as well as you can stream all of the touch sensors like over Bluetooth or over a USB connection, and then also the location of each one of those fingers as well. A lot of robotics researchers who are building humanoid robots and robot arms to do other tasks like manufacturing and robotic surgery and things like that have been purchasing our hand too. So notably, for example, NASA and Meta, so Facebook Meta, have purchased our hands, and NASA is putting it on a humanoid astronaut robot, which hopefully will eventually go into space. And then, on Earth, they'd be able to control it and then manipulate objects in space. And it's opened up an entirely new market, but the critical thing here is that it's the exact same hand that the humans are getting that the robots are getting. And what this allows us to do is just expand our volume of production and our sales so that we can actually further drive down the costs and the pricing for the human side of things as well. So if we're talking about places like India, or Pakistan, or Guatemala, or Ecuador where there are no government incentives in place to reimburse at a rate that they might in the U.S., then we can actually get the price point to one that's actually affordable in those areas as well. And I'm really excited about those prospects. VICTORIA: That's so cool that future robot astronauts will be financing people who have no ability [laughs] to go into space or anything like that. That's a cool business idea. I wonder, when did that happen for you, or what was that like when you realized that there was this other potential untapped market for robotic limbs? DR. AADEEL: It's interesting. It was always in the back of our minds because, as I was a Ph.D. student, I was in the Ph.D. group that focused on robotics, in particular more so than prosthetics. And I was the first one in the group to actually kind of have the prosthetic spin on things. And so I had an idea of where the market was for the robotic side of things. And I had some connections as well. And so I was actually giving a talk at Georgia Tech early last year. The Director of the Georgia Tech Robotics Institute, Dr. Seth Hutchinson, he was telling me that...he was like, "You should go to the big robotics conference, ICRA, because people are going to be like...absolutely love this product for their robots." And we were just like, huh, we never considered that. And so we decided to go, and it was just absolutely nuts. We've had researchers from all over the world being like, "How can I get this hand?" And compared to a lot of the robotic hands that are out there, even on the robotic side, this is a much lower price point than what they've been dealing with. And by solving a lot of the problems on the human side, like durability, and sensory feedback, and dexterity, and the pricing, it actually solved a lot of the problems on the robotic side as well. So I was just like...after we had gone to that conference, we realized that, yeah, we can actually make this work as well. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And it sounds like tapping into this robotics market and networking really worked for you. What else about your market research or strategy seem to be effective in your business growth? DR. AADEEL: This is interesting as well. So half of our sales actually come from social media, which for a medical device company is usually unheard of. [laughs] Because usually the model is, for medical devices, where you have a group of sales reps located across the regions that you're selling and so across the U.S. And they would visit each one of the clinics, and then they would work with the clinicians directly in getting these on the patients. That usually accounts for like 99% of sales. And so for us, for half of them to come from social media, it was a goal that we had set out to, but it was also surprising that that accounted for so much of our volumes and our revenue. The way we set it up was that we wanted to make videos of our hand that highlighted things that our hand could do that were novel and unique. And so, for example, we wanted to highlight the durability of the hand as well as the dexterity and the touch feedback. And so some of the first videos that we made were like arm wrestling against a bionic hand. And what's cool about that is that the general public just found that very interesting in general. But also, when a clinician and a patient sees that, wow, this hand can actually withstand the forces of an actual arm wrestling match, then they're also just as impressed. And the same thing with punching through three wooden boards that we set on fire; if it can handle that, then it can handle activities of daily living. General public seizes, and they're just like, "Whoa, that's so cool." But then clinicians and the patients they see that, and they were like, "My prosthetic hand couldn't do this before." And so then they contact us, and we're like, "How can we get your hand?" And then we'll either put them in contact with a clinician, or we'll work with one of the clinicians that they are already working with then go through their insurance that way. And so it's just been a really exciting and fun way to generate, like, expand our market and generate sales that we didn't necessarily think was going to be a viable way from the start. VICTORIA: Right. I totally get it. I mean, I want one, and both my hands still work. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator, that's tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: Have you ever seen someone rock climb with the prosthetic hand? DR. AADEEL: Not yet, but that is something that is definitely on our docket. VICTORIA: Okay, well, we need to do it. Since we're both in San Diego, I can help you. [laughs] DR. AADEEL: Sweet. I love it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, we can figure that out because there are, especially in the climbing gyms, there are usually groups that come in and climb with prosthetic limbs on a regular basis since it's a kind of a surprisingly accessible sport. [laughs] DR. AADEEL: So one of the great things about being here in San Diego is that there's like a ton of incredible resources for building prosthetics and then for users of them as well. So the Challenged Athletes Foundation is located 10 minutes from us. So we're located in Scripps Ranch. And the Challenged Athletes Foundation they're like over in the Sorrento Valley area. They hold the para-triathlon every year. And so we just went to their event a couple of months ago, and it was absolutely incredible. And so we've got like a five-year goal of making an ability leg. So we have The Ability Hand right now. So the ability leg, we want to actually be able to perform a triathlon, so run, bike, and swim with the leg. And I think that would be a phenomenal goal. And all the pieces are here in San Diego. We got the military hospital, and so we've got the veteran population. We've got the Challenged Athletes Foundation. We've got UCSD, and they're incredible at engineering. We've got two prosthetic schools right around LA, so Loma Linda University in California State University, Dominguez Hills. And there are only 11 in the entire nation, and two of them just happen to be right around here. It's a med tech hub. There's like a bunch of med tech companies and both startups and huge ones like NuVasive that are in the area. And it's a huge engineering place, too, with Qualcomm. And so we want to bring all of those resources together. And it's my goal to turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world, where people from all over the world are coming here to have the most advanced devices ever created. VICTORIA: Oh, I love that idea. And you just moved to San Diego a few years ago. Is that right? DR. AADEEL: Actually, six months ago, so it's very new for us. VICTORIA: Six months? [laughter] Well, you sound like me when I moved to San Diego. I was like; it's great here. [laughter] DR. AADEEL: Well, I hope you still find it to be great. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, I love it. I've been here for two years now. And, yes, there's more to it than just the weather being good all the time. [laughter] There's a lot here. DR. AADEEL: [laughs] It doesn't hurt, though, right? VICTORIA: Yeah. And, I mean, I love that I can still do my networking events outdoors all year long, so going on hikes and stuff versus being indoors in the winter. But I find it fascinating that San Diego has just so much biotech all around, and I will happily support how I can [laughs] turning it into a bionic limb capital. I think that's a great idea. Well, so I wanted to get back...we're talking about the future right now. I wanted to ask about building your team. So you started the company almost seven years ago, and you've grown the team a lot since then. Did you have any essential principles or values that you started with when you were building out your team? DR. AADEEL: Yeah. So when we were first hiring, I was still a Ph.D. student when I started the company. Our first employee was actually my undergraduate student. He's currently our Director of Engineering, Jesse Cornman. And we specifically were recruiting people that did stuff outside of the lab, so the electrical engineers and the mechanical engineers that we initially hired. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't just like the university projects that they were working on. And we would find a lot of our early people from like car team so like this was like building like a solar car, so Illini Solar Car was one of our places where we'd get a lot of our early employees as well as the electrical vehicle concept team and design, build, fly, and these student organizations where they had like competitions, and they had to build real, tangible things to compete in with. And the thing is that those are the people who do this stuff for fun, and you learn the most when you're having fun doing this stuff. And so we would always look for that stuff in particular. And there were some litmus tests that we'd have to be able to weed out very quickly what people know what. And so for electrical engineers, we would always ask if they know surface mount soldering because it's not like your typical soldering on a perf board or even like using a breadboard. It's like you have a circuit board, and you have to solder these very small components on there. And if you know how to solder those small components, you typically know how to code them as well. So they have some embedded systems background as well and some PCB design experience as well. And so that was like a quick litmus test that we use for the electrical engineers. For the mechanical engineers, it was typically if they knew how to do surface modeling. And so we would ask them, "How would you make the palm of a hand where you got these complex structures and these complex surfaces that have different geometries and different curvature?" And if they were able to do a surface modeling, then we knew that they'd be able to CAD that up pretty quickly. They probably have some sort of 3D printing experience from that as well, and that they can just rapidly iterate and prototype on the devices. And so that worked really, really well. And so we were able to get a lot of bright engineers who early on in the company...and many who were student interns at the time that eventually even went on to Microsoft and Google or some of the students went to MIT and places like that. And we were very fortunate to be in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's ecosystem, where it was just one of the best engineering schools in the world to develop this kind of stuff. VICTORIA: That's great. So you had really specific skills that you needed. [laughs] And you kind of knew the type of work or an experience that led to that. As you've expanded your team and you're building a culture of collaboration, how do you set expectations with how you all work together? DR. AADEEL: As a startup, we all wear many, many hats. So my job, I feel like, is to fill in all the gaps. And so some days, I might be doing marketing; some days, I might be visiting a clinic and doing sales. Other times I'm working with the engineering team to make sure that we're on track over there. And it's like all this stuff in between. And so being able to work cohesively like that and put on those many hats so that you know every part of the process from the marketing and sales sides but also the engineering and operations side, I think that's really allowed us to get to the point where we have by doing all these different functions together. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So you are all located in San Diego now, so you have to be in person to work on robot hands? DR. AADEEL: Yeah, we found that it was much easier to build a physical object in person than it was to do things remotely. At the beginning of COVID, we actually did try to, like, you know, we moved 3D printers out into people's houses and the manufacturing equipment. And then I remember just to put together a power switch that usually took like one hour to do in the lab. It took us a day and a half because one person had the circuit board, the other person had the enclosure, the other person had the thing to program it. And then each thing depended on each other. So you had to keep carting that small piece back and forth between houses, and it was just a nightmare to do that. And so after a couple of months, we ended up moving back into the offices and manufacturing there with staggered work hours or whatever. And at that point, we were just like, okay, this is much more efficient when we're all in person. And honestly, a lot of our best ideas have come from just me sitting here and then just walking over to one of the engineers and being like, "Hey, what do you think of this idea?" And it's a lot harder to do when you're all remote, right? VICTORIA: That makes sense. Yeah, just the need to physically put pieces together [laughs] as a group makes it hard to be fully remote. And you get a lot of those ideas flowing when you're in person. What is on the horizon for you? What are you most excited about in your upcoming feature set? DR. AADEEL: Like I said, one of the reasons why we moved here was to work with the military hospital, and so some of the work that we're doing with them is particularly exciting. The way you typically wear these prosthetic devices...so you'll have muscle sensors that are embedded in a...it's like a shell that goes around your residual limb. We call it the socket. Think about it as like a shoe for your residual limb. And the thing is, as you're wearing this throughout the day, it starts to get sweaty. It starts to get uncomfortable. Things shift around. Your signals don't control the hand as well because of all these changes and everything. And with the military hospital, we're working on something called osseointegration. So instead of having this socket that's molded to your residual limb that you shove your arm into, you have a titanium implant that goes inside your bones and then comes out of your body, and then you directly attach the hand to your bones like a limb naturally should be. And then, on top of that, instead of using these muscles sensors on the outside of your body, we're actually working on implanted electrodes with some of our collaborators. For example, at University of Chicago, they're doing brain implants to control prosthetic limbs. And a company in Dallas called Nerves Incorporated that's working with the University of Minnesota and UT Southwestern; they're doing nerve implants in your forearm and in your upper arm to control prosthetic limbs. And with those, you get much more fine control, so it's not like you're just controlling different grips, like preset grips in the hand, but you're actually doing individual finger control. And then, when you touch the finger, it's actually stimulating your nerves to make it feel like it's coming from your hand that you no longer have anymore. And this is where we're heading with all of this stuff in the future. And so we built The Ability Hand to work with clinically available systems now, like sockets, and muscle sensors, and vibration motors that are all outside of the body. But then also, when these future technologies come up that are more invasive that are directly implanted on your nerves as well as into your bones as well, we're really excited about those prospects coming out in the horizon. VICTORIA: That's really cool. [laughs] I mean, that would be really life-changing for a lot of people, I'm sure, to have that ability to really control your fingers and get that extra comfort as well. How do you manage quality into your process, especially when you're getting invasive and putting in nerve implants? What kind of testing and other types of things do you all do? DR. AADEEL: With The Ability Hand itself, there was actually an FDA Class I exempt device, meaning that we didn't have to go through the formal approval process that you typically do. And that was primarily because it's attached to your residual limb as opposed to going invasive. But with going invasive, with our clinical partners they're actually doing FDA clinical trials right now. And so they've gone through a lot of those processes. We're starting to enroll some of our patients who are using The Ability Hand to get these implanted electrodes. We're kind of navigating that whole process ourselves right now too. So I think that was one of the reasons why we moved to San Diego, to work with and leverage a lot of the expertise from people who've done it already, from the med tech device companies that are big that have gone through those processes and can guide us through that process as well. So we're excited to be able to leverage those resources in order to streamline these clinical trial processes so that we can get these devices out there more quickly. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'm super excited to hear about that and to learn more about PSYONIC. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience today as a final takeaway? DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. So in order to make all this stuff happen, we're actually in the middle of raising a round right now. Our biggest issue right now is actually that we've got more demand than we can produce, so we're working on scaling our manufacturing here in San Diego. So we're in the middle of an equity crowdfunding round. And we're all about accessibility, so about making our hand accessible to as many people as possible. So we were like, why don't we make the company accessible as well? And one of the most beautiful things about doing this as an equity crowdfunding round is our patients actually have invested in the company as well. And so it's like, we're making these devices for them, and then they get to be a part of it as well. And it's just this beautiful synergy that I couldn't have asked for anything more out of a crowdfunding campaign. And so we've raised over 750k already on StartEngine. And you can find out more and invest for as little as $250 at psyonic.io, so that's psyonic.io/invest. And the other thing I was going to mention, especially Victoria since you're in San Diego as well, is that I happily give tours to anyone who is in the area. So if anyone wants to see how we build all these bionic hands and just a cool robotics startup in general, we'd be happy to have you come visit us. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'll have to connect with you later and schedule a tour myself. [laughs] That's wonderful. I'm excited to hear all the things you're working on and hope to see you more in the San Diego community coming up. And we'll share links to the funding page and other information about PSYONIC in our show notes. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Mastodon at Victoria Guido. And this podcast is brought to by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Aadeel Akhtar.
The Indian rupee sank to a new record low on Monday against the US dollar as the greenback's unabated strength wreaked havoc on financial markets across the globe amid fears over more aggressive monetary tightening. The local unit weakened by 63 paise to end Monday at 81.63 per dollar, against 80.99 at the previous close. The rupee has depreciated 9.7% against the US dollar year-to-date. On September 21, the US Federal Reserve not only hiked rates by 75 basis points -- taking the total tally of rate hikes since March to 300 bps -- but also hinted at a longer monetary tightening cycle than earlier expected. Since then, the rupee has gone from one of the world's best performing currencies to one of the worst. The dollar index, which has gained a massive 22% so far in 2022, surged to a fresh 20-year high of 114.50 early Monday. The rupee has depreciated 2% versus the dollar since September 21, ranking among the worst-performing emerging market units. Over the time period, it has fared worse than 14 other emerging market currencies, with only the South Korean won losing more versus the US dollar. Prior to September 21, the rupee had outperformed many of its peers, primarily on account of heavy market interventions by the RBI. The RBI has aggressively defended the rupee through sales of the US dollar since the Ukraine war broke out in late February. India's forex reserves have fallen by almost $100 billion from their peak of $642 billion in October 2021. As on September 16, they have dropped to a near-2-year low of $545.65 billion Some part of the fall in reserves is due to revaluation changes. The import cover provided by the reserves have reduced to 9 months from close to 15 months a year ago. Rahul Bajoria, Chief India Economist, Barclays Bank says, FY23 CAD at just above 3% of GDP is seen as sustainable. Fall in commodity prices higher than rupee decline. Full pass through to consumers to happen over next 3 months. The rupee dropping to a record low may be a mixed bag as far as exports are considered. If rupee's depreciation continues, Indian exporters stand to gain. However, the gain would have been much more if the Indian economy was less import-dependent, experts said. As a result, products across segments such as petroleum, gems and jewellery, and electronics may not gain much as they are import-dependent. Besides, there is always a risk of imported inflation, if the rupee falls too much. As India is 85% dependent on imports to meet its oil needs, a weakening rupee will make its purchases expensive, further fueling inflation which has remained above RBI's upper tolerance band for eight consecutive months. But oil and other commodity prices have eased from their peaks. Nevertheless, ICRA's Chief Economist Aditi Nayar said that a depreciating rupee will partly counteract the benefit of lower commodity prices on inflation. India's trade deficit more than doubled to $28 billion in August due to increased crude oil imports. Imports rose by 37% while exports rose marginally by 1.62%. This puts pressure on the current account deficit. Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India says, RBI expects commodity prices to come down. It's trying to ensure importers benefit amid falling rupee. High trade deficit is a structural problem. Economists at HDFC Bank expect the RBI to continue with significant intervention to stall rupee depreciation pressures, especially as and if it moves towards 82 levels. According to them, the RBI has ample forex reserves and the recent drawdown in reserves needs to be seen in context of the significant build-up over the last two years. The RBI does not want the rupee to depreciate so quickly that India loses out on the benefit of lower crude prices in a significant way. But most currencies including rupee have depreciated due to dollar's strength. There may be an argument therefore to let the rupee depreciate further to preserve Indi
At a time when foreign investors are showing confidence in India's growth story, what is holding back Indian firms from coming forward and making investments, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman asked on Tuesday. The answer, according to analysts, is that Indian businesses are not confident about the durability of the demand recovery. Add to that the prevailing external headwinds and one gets a clear picture of what's stopping firms from increasing investments. Investments by India Inc have slowed down with the growth rate of gross block formation of Indian companies falling to single digits in the last two years as the pandemic hit consumer demand. Private final consumption expenditure, or PFCE, rose 13.5 per cent in the first quarter of FY23. Also, it was almost 10 per cent higher than the corresponding pre-Covid period of FY20. PFCE denotes demand in the economy. However, India Inc is not certain that demand will continue to gather momentum because retail price inflation has remained above the Reserve Bank of India's tolerance level of six per cent for the eighth consecutive month in August. Ranen Banerjee, the leader for economic advisory services at PwC India, told Business Standard that there was lower appetite for investing to build capacity because economic headwinds had caused the private sector to have little confidence in the sustainability of demand. He also blamed the combination of the pre-Covid slowdown, the Covid shock, and the current global growth challenges emerging from the ultra-tough monetary stances adopted by central banks. Banerjee also said that the benefits of the cut in corporate tax rates were used by businesses to deleverage their balance sheets. ICRA Chief Economist Aditi Nayar said that high commodity prices, geopolitical uncertainties, and uneven consumer demand were likely to have prompted India Inc to defer their capital expenditure plans in spite of healthy capacity utilisation in the fourth quarter of FY22. According to the RBI's OBICUS Survey, capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector rose to 75.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of FY22 from 72.4 per cent in the third quarter of that year. In fact, capacity utilisation levels have improved consecutively for three quarters. In the first quarter of FY21, it had fallen sharply to 47.3 per cent due to the lockdown imposed after the Covid-19 outbreak. ICRA's Nayar said that capacity utilisation was likely to register a seasonal dip in the first quarter of FY23, exacerbated by geopolitical headwinds and uneven demand for goods. So, what can be done to get India Inc to turn on the investment tap? [Byte of Madan Sabnavis on solutions] While investments as a percentage of GDP rose year-on-year in the first quarter of FY23, they were still below the 30 per cent mark required to push the economy on to the path of sustained growth. Gross fixed capital formation, or GFCF, numbers showed that there was an improvement in investments in the first quarter compared to the corresponding period of the previous year. This improvement was probably aided by government capital expenditure. However, it was clear that investments have still not recovered to pre-Covid levels. While disaggregated data is unavailable, experts have said that the government continues to be the source for a large chunk of the GFCF. The hope has been that government capital expenditure would lead to the crowding in of private investments, which would give economic growth the push it needs. However, despite significant central outlays, the private sector has remained investment shy. It remains to be seen what more the government can do to induce a change in behaviour anytime soon.
India's Gross Domestic Product grew 13.5% in the first quarter of FY22-23 compared to a year ago helped by the base effect, thereby registering the fastest growth in four quarters. But the numbers came in below the 15.2% forecast by economists, and much lower than the Monetary Policy Committee's projection of 16.2%. The last time India's economy grew faster was in Q1 FY21, when it gained 20.1% from the pandemic-depressed level a year earlier. With rising interest rates, uneven monsoon and slowing global demand, analysts fear the economy may fall short of the 7.2 per cent annual growth target for FY23 projected by the Reserve Bank of India. The GDP during April-June 2022 stood at Rs 36.85 trillion, compared to Rs 35.49 lakh crore in the corresponding quarter of the pre-pandemic year 2019-20. This means, the country's economy has grown at an average of 1.26% a year in real terms over the past three years. On a sequential basis, GDP in the first quarter contracted 9.6% from the preceding three-month period. According to Sachchidanand Shukla, Group Chief Economist at Mahindra and Mahindra, this is three times the average sequential contraction of 3.2% witnessed in the first quarter of each of the last five years before the pandemic. But, the year-over-year growth in GDP was led by consumption and investments, which grew 25.9% and 20.1%, respectively. The growth in government expenditure was a weak 1.3%. Looking at the sectoral trends, the GVA growth in manufacturing was 6.5, while the construction sector grew 16.8%. The labour-intensive trade, hotels and transport segment showed a strong 25.7% growth. The data released by the National Statistical Office showed while the services sector lifted growth during the quarter, activity in the trade, hotels, and transport segment, despite heightened betterment in hospitality, was below the pre-pandemic level of the June quarter of FY20. Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist at ICRA however said that relative to the pre-Covid level, this stood out as the only sub-sector reporting a contraction in Q1, in line with the robust but incomplete recovery in contact-intensive sectors. Madan Sabnavis, Chief Economist, Bank of Baroda says, coming off a low base, one shouldn't reach much in the 13.5% number. Agri, real estate, finance and govt sectors contributed to the growth. Pvt investment and consumption should sustain for 7.2% annual growth. Pent-up demand could get diluted due to high inflation. Inflation remains one of the biggest risks as it impacts consumer spending, which accounts for about 60% of India's nominal GDP. There is also a possibility of slippages in terms of rice and pulses production if the area under cultivation is lower than normal. This can result in further price shocks if sowing doesn't see a recovery. On the fiscal side, buoyancy in tax collection will give enough comfort to the government in terms of budget management. Aurodeep Nandi, India economist and vice president at Nomura said even if one were to discount the low base, this marks a stellar rise in sequential momentum with post pandemic tailwinds lifting GDP growth in June quarter. As the year progresses, experts say that that slowing global growth, higher inflation, and tightening financial conditions will impact the pace of growth.
Günaydın. Gülşen, "Halkı kin ve düşmanlığa tahrik veya aşağılama" suçundan tutuklandı. Dolar/TL yılın rekorunu kırdı. Bakan Nebati, dar gelirliler için yeni bir destek paketinin yolda olduğunu açıkladı. Bugünün bülteni Getwallet destekleriyle ulaşıyor. Fotoğraf: Hakan Akgun/dia images/Getty Images
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is known all over the world for great research in robotics. Howie Choset is one of the most well-known robotics professors at CMU. For decades he and his students have taken on some of the most interesting and challenging research projects in robotics. They are well known for their many attempts to and iterations of building snake robots, and they are now working on robots for automating recycling tasks and more. Howie is even working on how to put snake robots on the moons of Saturn! In addition to that, Howie and many of his students have founded robotics companies all over the world. From robotic surgery with snake robots, to navigation software, to modular robotic components, the companies Howie has helped found are solving super interesting problems. Tune in to Crazy Hard Robots to hear Howie and Tom talk about some of the hardest problems in the world of robots. In this episode: The technical challenges of snake robots Starting a robotic surgery company Howie gives a live demonstration to compare how people think vs. robots Landing snake robots on the moons of Saturn About Howie Choset Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University where he serves as the co-director of the Biorobotics Lab and as director of the Robotics Major. He received his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Business from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Choset received his Masters and PhD from Caltech in 1991 and 1996. Choset's research group reduces complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning. Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Choset has created a comprehensive program in modular, high DOF, and multi- robot systems, which has led to basic research in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. This work has been supported by both industry and government; DOD support includes two MURIs, one of which Choset received the CO-PI, a young investigator award, and multi-PI awards for modular systems. Choset.s group has produced over 60 journal papers (including 2 in Science and one in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science), 180 conference papers and 15 patents. Choset.s work has also been recognized by several best paper awards and nominations at ICRA, IROS and other robotics meetings. Choset's research program has made contributions to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue. In addition to publications, this work has led to Choset, along with his students, to form several companies including Medrobotics, for surgical systems, Hebi Robotics, for modular robots, and Bito Robotics for autonomous guided vehicles. Recently, Choset.s surgical snake robot cleared the FDA and has been in use in the US and Europe since. Choset also leads multi-PI projects centered on manufacturing: (1) automating the programming of robots for auto-body painting; (2) the development of mobile manipulators for agile and flexible fixture-free manufacturing of large structures in aerospace, and (3) the creation of a data-robot ecosystem for rapid manufacturing in the commercial electronics industry. This year, Choset co-lead the formation of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, which is a $250MM national institute advancing both technology development and education for robotics in manufacturing. Finally, Choset is a founding Editor of the journal Science Robotics.
John McConnell discusses the research presented at ICRA 2022 to reduce drift in SLAM algorithms by incorporating overhead satellite imagery.
Sebastian Scherer from CMU's Airlab gives us a behind-the-scenes demo at ICRA of their Autonomous Flight Control AI. Their approach aims to cooperate with human pilots and act the way they would. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPsJ4ArdtTk The team took this approach to create a more natural, less intrusive process for co-habiting human and AI pilots at a single airport. They describe it as a Turing Test, where ideally the human pilot will be unable to distinguish an AI from a person operating the plane. Their communication system works parallel with a 6-camera hardware package based on the Nvidia AGX Dev Kit. This kit measures the angular speed of objects flying across the videos. In this world, high angular velocity means low risk -- since the object is flying at a fast speed perpendicular to the camera plane. Low angular velocity indicates high risk since the object could be flying directly at the plane, headed for a collision. Links Download mp3 (19.3 MB) Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify Support us on Patreon
Bill Smart, one fo the early ICRA Competition Chairs, dives into the high-level decisions involved with creating a meaningful competition.
Jeff Tharp interviews Justice Kuehl, an ambassador for Turning Point USA, Miss Tennessee USA (2020), and the daughter of Johnny and Elizabeth Enlow. This episode Jeff and Justice the dichotomy between feminism and Biblical womanhood, the forgotten mission of the church, and the importance of Biblical truth. Check out Justice's previous interview with Steve Shultz on Elijah Streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IcRA... Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement by Sue Ellen Browder https://www.amazon.com/Subverted-Help... Sites we discussed: https://www.liveaction.org/ https://letthemlive.org/ https://www.tpusa.com/ Justice's socials: https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeEnlow https://www.instagram.com/justicehope... Elijah List Ministries / ElijahStreams TV, 525 2nd Ave SW, Suite 629 Albany, OR 97321 USA Thank you for making the always-free Elijah List Ministries possible! Click here to learn how to partner with us: https://secure.qgiv.com/for/eslsl/ Prefer to donate by mail? Make your check or money order (US Dollars) payable to "ELIJAH LIST MINISTRIES" and mail it to: Elijah List Ministries / Elijah Streams TV 525 2nd Ave SW Suite 629 Albany, OR 97321 USA
© 2020-2026 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
