Amazon launches air cargo service in India; Salesforce in Elliott’s crosshairs – report; Log9 raises $40 mln
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Amazon has launched Amazon Air, its dedicated air cargo fleet in India, partnering with Quickjet, the ecommerce giant said in a press release yesterday. It will start with Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Activist investor Elliott Management’s next target is Salesforce, Wall Street Journal reports. Also in this brief, Microsoft invests more money in OpenAI, and GPT3, the AI chatbot, just passed an MBA exam at the prestigious Wharton School, NBC News reports. Notes: Amazon has launched Amazon Air, its dedicated air cargo fleet, in India the e-commerce giant said in a press release yesterday. Amazon has partnered with Bengaluru-based cargo airline Quikjet to launch this service, which it said will speed up its deliveries. Amazon, using Boeing 737-800 for the service, will initially use Amazon Air to deliver goods in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Microsoft yesterday announced in a post what it called the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment. This agreement follows Microsoft’s previous investments in 2019 and 2021, extending the ongoing collaboration in AI supercomputing and research. The two companies can independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies, according to the post. Microsoft didn’t say how much it was investing, but the figure could be $10 billion according to Semafor. Meanwhile, new research conducted by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that the AI chatbot GPT3 was able to pass the final exam for the school's MBA program, NBC News reported earlier today. Professor Christian Terwiesch, who authored the research paper "Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA? A Prediction Based on Its Performance in the Operations Management Course," said that the bot scored between a B- and B on the exam, according to NBC News. Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. has made a multi-billion-dollar investment in Salesforce, adding to the pressures facing the business-software provider that has just announced a 10 percent reduction of its workforce, Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the matter. Back in India, in some computer hardware news, Rashi Peripherals, a Mumbai-based distributor of computers and computer peripherals, is seeking to raise Rs. 750 crore in an IPO, according to a press release. Log9, a battery technologies startup in Bengaluru, has raised $40 million as a part of its Series B funding, the company said in a press release yesterday. The investment comprises equity funding and loans, led by Amara Raja Batteries and Petronas Ventures. Several other investors also participated. Founded in 2015 by Akshay Singhal, Kartik Hajela and Pankaj Sharma, Log9 says it has in-house competencies ranging from electrode materials to cell fabrication to battery packs. The new investment will help Log9 raise its manufacturing capacity to 2 GWh by the end of 2024, and commission India's first fully integrated lithium-ion cell production line, Singhal said in the press release. The company will also invest about $12 million in developing its cell and battery technologies.
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