US Calling: Grok Vs Chat GPT, Presidential debate, Ellen DeGeneres Show, curry in iPhone, Earthshot Prize and Tanishq’s new store

The third Republican Presidential debate in Miami, on November 8, 2023, required candidates to have reached 4 per cent in multiple polls and have 70,000 unique donors to earn a spot.

Republicans began the week with good poll numbers but suffered big election losses on Tuesday. Trump skipped the debate. Heated exchanges between Indian Americans Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy made headlines.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s ‘take no prisoners style’ is provocative. Responding to Niki Haley’s call for a ban on Tik-tok, he defended it, saying it helped reach out to a younger generation of American users and pointed out her daughter’s use of the platform. To this, Haley responded with “Leave my daughter out of your voice” and called him “scum”.

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Ramaswamy compared Haley to Dick Cheney in three inch heels, to highlight her hawkish foreign policy stance on Israel, China and funding Ukraine. Haley, not one to be cowed down, said her heels were five inches high and to be used as ammunition.

Ramaswamy was unapologetic and accepted he is “unrestrained in speaking what needs to be spoken” and “…not somebody who does well with pole tested platitudes”. He claimed he is at his best “… being unvarnished, being unshackled and speaking the truth”.

Ramaswamy was critical of politicians saying “corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, ..to die in wars that did not advance anyone’s interest”.

Vivek was also forthright about the choice of NBC News anchors Lester Holt and Kristen Welker, along with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, as the debate’s moderators.

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He said, “Think about who is moderating this debate. This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk”, insisting that the event would have “ten times the viewership” with those three.

Anaik Sachdeva’s ‘The Loving Library’ on the Ellen DeGeneres Show

The Ellen DeGeneres show featured a heartwarming story of community service from Phoenix resident Anaik Sachdev, a nine-year-old Sikh boy.

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Sachdev’s initiative, ‘The Loving Library’, is a beautiful example of how a personal experience can inspire action to help others. The project’s goal to offer books to patients to alleviate the isolation they might feel while in medical facilities, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, shows a remarkable level of empathy and generosity from someone so young.

Sachdev is a rapper and is helping homeless people by posting rapping videos on YouTube to draw attention to their cause. Ellen helped him with a $15,000 cheque and a bag of gifts from “five Below” (a website/store where everything is priced at $5 or below) to help him reach his target of collecting 1,000 books.

Elon Musk’s launch of Rebellious Grok

Elon Musk unveiled Grok that joins a growing family of AI-powered large language chatbots that includes ChatGPT by OpenAI, Google Bard, Facebook’s Llama and MetaAI and Microsoft’s BingAI and others.

Grok’s USP is that it tackles provocative queries, whereas OpenAI is steadily adopting a conservative approach to address safety risks. Grok as per the company’s website “is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”.

“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” The xAI announcement says that Grok is built on top of a language model that has 33 billion parameters. The company claims that its fundamental advantage is its “real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform”.

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Critics have been quick to comment on the absence of guardrails and the bot’s misuse as most commercial AI models will refuse to generate explicit, violent, or illegal content.

Curry in the iPhone

Apple first started assembling iPhones in India back in 2017. Since 2020, Apple has been producing its flagship iPhones in India. The iPhone 15 Pro models, released on September 22, 2023, were produced at Foxconn’s plant in Chennai.

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When reports started coming in from users saying that the iPhone 15 Pro was overheating, it was humorously attributed to the curry in India. Apple, with its legendary customer service, has said in a statement that they “found a bug in iOS 17 that is impacting some users and will be addressed in a software update”.

Since third-party apps can also overload the CPU, Apple is working to identify those and collaborate with software developers on fixes. A forthcoming iOS 17 update should address the issue.

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Indian American-led firm ‘Boomitra’ bags the EarthshotPrize in the ‘Fix Our Climate’ Category

Britain’s Prince William attended the annual Earthshot Prize ceremony on Tuesday, November 7, 2023, at Singapore. The Earthshot Prize has distinguished itself as a global environmental Nobel Prize.

It rewards efforts to safeguard the planet by empowering its winners with financial support to help scale their innovations, for greater impact. One million pounds are allocated to each winner (approximately $1.23 million across five critical categories: Protect and Restore Nature, Clean our Air, Revive our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate.)

Indian American led Boomitra (formerly known as ConserWater) won the award in the ‘Fix Our Climate’ category. Aadith Moorthy is the Founder and CEO of ConserWater Technologies, that helps farmers grow healthy crops with less water, electricity, fertilizer and money.

ConserWater predicts soil moisture and nutrient levels to a 10m resolution at any location in the world, using satellite data and AI. This is used to provide irrigation and fertigation recommendations to the farmers. Aadith is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford with a bachelors in Artificial Intelligence.

The Earthshot Prize to ‘Build a Waste-Free World’ category was won by S4S Technologies, an Indian start-up which has developed a solar powered dehydrator that helps cut food waste using solar-powered dehydration equipment.

Tanishq opens third US store ahead of Dussehra, Diwali and wedding season

There was a time when Indians travelled to India to shop for wedding jewellery and clothes. But now, Tanishq, the Indian jewellery brand owned by the Tata Group, are bringing their wares to the USA.

Over 3 million strong, the Indian diaspora is a prosperous and growing community and gold has always been a preferred investment choice. Tanishq opened its first US store in New Jersey in January 2023 with a two-storey showroom in Iselin, New Jersey spread over 3,750-square-foot. The choice of New Jersey was prompted by its sizeable Indian-American community, 387,000 Indian-Americans, reportedly four percent of the state’s population.

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Its next store opened in Dallas Texas and now its third store has opened in Houston Texas. Tanishq has been targeting the US market through its “trunk-shows” in the Bay area, Houston and others.

The high demand and interest shown by the Indian-American community encouraged Tanishq to have an “on-ground presence” in the USA. Tanishq will offer their latest collections enabling Indian Americans to access Indian jewellery in the USA.

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(The writer is a former IRS officer presently in the US. She is on https://twitter.com/punamsidhu)

  

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