From BRICS to India's Space Industry & beyond
This edition focuses more on technology news around the space industry & AI, while starting with BRICS and the new DSA of the EU
Expansion of BRICS
While there has been a formal announcement on the expansion of BRICS and most of the media houses have covered extensively on that, what remains to be seen is the impact of this expansion from a geopolitical perspective, financial perspective and from a world order perspective.
The BRICS group has expanded its membership for the first time in 13 years. New members include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Iran, Argentina, and Ethiopia. This development aims to enhance the global influence of the existing five members. The new members will formally join on 1st January, 2024.
This expansion increases the BRICS population to 46% of the world's total, totaling around 400 million individuals.
The combined GDP of these new members accounts for 30-40% of the world GDP, surpassing that of the G7 nations.
Additionally, they represent 25% of global exports and have significant control over oil production and raw materials.
Saudi Arabia's inclusion in BRICS raises questions about the future of the petrodollar arrangement, as China's involvement in brokering peace deals in the Middle East potentially reduces Saudi Arabia's reliance on the US.
The expansion of BRICS, coupled with China's global influence, presents a challenge to the dominance of the US dollar in international transactions.
EU’s new digital protection laws & its impact
The European Union’s digital protection laws went into effect from 25th Aug 2023, and it primarily aims to rein in algorithms the big tech companies use and prevent some personalised advertising, which raised concerns on privacy.
The laws, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), are primarily reserved for 19 websites, which are being used by more than 40 million users in EU.
The new law requires tech platforms to make it easier for users to understand how their sites work. This includes making the process of content moderation more transparent, requiring pornography sites to identify the users who upload material, and explaining how content recommendations are generated. The law also bans companies from using "dark patterns," which are manipulative techniques designed to nudge users into clicking on content they were not originally interested in.
In addition, the law bans surveillance advertising for minors. This type of advertising uses data collected from users' online habits and search history to target them with ads. An earlier draft of the bill included a ban on surveillance advertising for all users, but this was watered down by tech lobbyists. Personalized advertising is a major source of revenue for tech companies, such as Google and Meta.
This has the potential to have big impact not just within the EU, but also across the world.
Current state of India’s space industry
Everybody across the world has already read, watched and discussed India’s successful landing of Chandrayan-3 at the south pole of the moon, the first country in the world to do so. It’s more significant because the terrain in the south pole of the moon is full of craters and hence poses a big challenge for successful landing. Also, after USA, Russia & China, India is the fourth country in the world to have successfully landed on the moon. However, let’s focus on India’s space industry as a whole:
Since June 2020, India announced a push for the space sector, opening it up to all kinds of private enterprise. As a result of this, new investments in this space has been in the order of $120 million, doubling or tripling every year.
Over the last 20 years, India has launched 381 satellites for 34 countries, establishing itself as a preferred destination for satellite launches globally.
The number of space-tech startups in India has surged to over 140, making it a sought-after sector for venture capital investments.
India’s vendor ecosystem is staggering in size - there are around 400 private companies around certain clusters, out of which around 100 collaborate for a single launch.
ISRO's success rate of around 95% has reduced the insurance cost by almost 50% and has placed India as one of the most competitive countries in the world.
Geo-politically, India is better placed with Russia and China having huge tensions with the western world. OneWeb, a British satellite start-up, took a $230 million hit after Russia impounded 36 of its space-craft in September. OneWeb then turned to India’s ISRO to send its next constellation of satellites into orbit.
India's space market is currently valued at around $8 billion, as estimated by ADL’s recent study. It's growing at a CAGR of 4%, surpassing the global average of 2%. ADL's report suggests India's space economy could reach $40 billion by 2040.
AI helping detect Parkinson’s much early
AI continues to dominate the technology news this week as well - I am sure no one’s surprised on that ! AI will be touching our lives in both positive and negative ways - however, we will be focusing on the positive news which will be all about AI helping human beings in the long run. Here’s one of these.
Researchers have developed an AI tool that will predict the deadly Parkinson’s disease 15 years before the symptoms are likely to come. That too with more than 95% accuracy.
Based on blood samples, Machine Learning tools have been used to examine the correlations between the metabolites and the disease. Metabolites are the chemicals the body creates when breaking down food, drugs, chemicals, and its own tissue. Then the outcome is fed to the AI tool named CRANK-MS to analyse the data. The AI tool then predicts which metabolites are driving the prediction.
Since the detection can happen years before the symptoms appear, it provides the opportunity for early interventions and treatment at a much earlier stage, than currently detected.
In another development, a new study in London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital and the University College has enabled detection of Parkinson’s much earlier (to the extent of 7 years before the first onset of the symptoms) based on studies in eye scans using AI.
Growth in AI in next few years
One of the basic measures to estimate the growth of AI is by monitoring the AI chip market and how it’s growing over the years. Because of the requirements of handling huge amount of data and parallel processing demands, AI needs the deployment of high-performance graphics processing units (GPU’s) and optimised semiconductor devices. This is resulting in a huge demand of such AI chips in the years to come.
Based on Gartner’s forecast, it’s evident that the growth in this space will be phenomenal:
AI semiconductors revenues were at $44B (billion) in 2022 - that has grown by 20% in 2023 to reach at $53.4B
In 2024, it’s expected to grow by 25.6% to reach at $67.1B
In 2022, the value of AI-enabled application processors was at $558M (million) - it’s now predicted that the same number in 2023 will almost double to $1.2B
For most of the organisations, who have been used the current chip architecture of discrete GPU’s, it’s likely they will move to large scale deployments of custom AI chips to handle the AI workloads - specially in the area of generative AI.