South Asia Investor Review

In a television speech to the nation, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged his people to make sacrifices by spending less on fuel, fertilizer, and travel. He also asked them not to buy gold for a year. “To save foreign exchange, we must accept the challenge of patriotism,” he said. It appears that India's problems do not just stem from the effects of the US-Iran war; India's problems started well before that. Flight of foreign capital has put the Indian currency under tremendous pressure, with the Indian rupee falling nearly 10% in recent months. Many analysts believe that the Indian IT services exports could fall significantly as the artificial intelligence (AI) models begin to replace the IT workers. It could create a balance of payments crisis that could force India to seek the IMF bailout in the not too distant future.  Already, the Indian economy has slipped to the sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP , dropping from previous projections that had it at fourth. Indian ...

Responding candidly to a question in the Indian capital New Delhi,  OpenAI  CEO Sam Altman said: "The way this works is we're going to tell you, it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models you shouldn't try, and it's your job to like try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless." This occurred at an event organized by The Economic Times where Altman answered a question by Rajan Anandan, a former Vice President of Google in India and South East Asia and current venture capitalist.   OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in India Altman in Delhi:  Sam Altman, the young CEO of OpenAI, the company that recently launched its revolutionary Generative AI app ChatGPT, was in India as part of a six-nation tour to discuss AI regulation.  ChatGPT has been trained on massive amounts of data and text from the internet, textbooks, newspapers, magazines and academic journals. It can write computer code and carry on sophisticated...

Source: US Government's Bureau of Economic Affairs  A GAO study showed that U.S. data on offshoring of services to India are more than 20 times smaller than India’s data. What’s the story? The GAO study showed that U.S. imports from India of business, professional, and technical (BPT) services as published by BEA are substantially lower than India’s data on exports of BPT services to the U.S. (chart 1, left panel). 1  However, when adjusted to a similar conceptual basis using information from the GAO report, the difference is actually quite small (chart 1, center panel). The large gap between the U.S. and Indian data mainly reflects differences in how BEA and India define BPT services. BEA data are consistent with international standards for balance of payments accounting; India’s data, which are based on data from an Indian trade association, do not conform to international standards.    In fact, a 2005 study published by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) sho...