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Time of India
12-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
The AI inflection point: Why every CXO must act now
In 1999, internet pioneer Vint Cerf equated a single year in the digital world to seven in the real one. Today, artificial intelligence has made even that dizzying pace look AI isn't just another buzzword—it's a potent mix of data, computing muscle, rapid investment, and relentless user growth, accelerating far beyond previous technological leaps. If it feels like change has never come faster, that's because it hasn't. And the numbers back that up. Here are some insights from Mary Meeker's whopping 340 page 'AI Trends Report': Rapid Adoption: The New NormalRemember Tom Cruise's iconic "need for speed" from Top Gun? Consider this: ChatGPT took just 17 months to hit 800 million weekly users, compared to the internet's 23 years to reach similar global ecosystems are booming too. Google's Gemini platform alone saw a staggering five-fold growth in its developer base in a single year. But this surge isn't mere consumer fascination. Enterprises and governments are scaling AI in critical areas—operations, customer engagement, R&D, and even regulatory frameworks. Case in point: The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is pushing for complete AI integration across all departments by mid-2025. CXO Takeaway: Rapid adoption means CXOs must proactively integrate AI into core business strategies—not just dabble on the sidelines. Quick experiments and swift deployments are no longer optional, they're survival imperatives. Spending Surges, Monetization Lags Last year, the Big Six tech giants (Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, AWS, and Meta) spent a whopping $212 billion on infrastructure—up 63% YoY—mostly directed at AI. Yet, the financial returns aren't matching the investment fervor. OpenAI illustrates this vividly: it generated $3.7 billion last year but spent $5 billion just maintaining operations. Such economics are common in early tech cycles—expensive to build, unclear monetization paths, yet bursting with potential. However, the rapidly declining cost of deploying AI models hints at an imminent inflection. True value might soon shift from the models themselves to the innovative products and business models built atop them. CXO Takeaway: Investment is necessary, but monetization and strategic patience are crucial. CXOs should carefully balance short-term financial realities against the long-term transformative potential of AI-driven initiatives. The New Global Battleground Competition is heating up—and fast. Open-source AI, especially from China, is rapidly closing gaps, with Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max surpassing GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on certain performance benchmarks. This race is no longer merely commercial; it's geopolitical. As Mary Meeker's report warns, "AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership—and not vice versa." CXO Takeaway: CXOs must consider AI not just as a competitive advantage, but as a strategic imperative influencing geopolitical positioning, partnerships, and risk management. Real-World Impact: AI Moves Off Screens AI is swiftly transitioning from digital experimentation to tangible, physical impact. Autonomous taxis now constitute 34% of San Francisco's ride bookings. Kaiser Permanente's doctors have already leveraged AI scribes over 2.5 million times, dramatically reducing paperwork. Yum! Brands, the parent company behind KFC and Pizza Hut, has deployed AI across 25,000 outlets to rethink operations fundamentally. CXO Takeaway: CXOs must now envision AI beyond traditional digitization—rethinking workflows, physical operations, and customer interactions from the ground up. Your People Strategy Is Your AI Strategy AI-related job postings surged by 448%, while non-AI roles fell 9%. This dramatic shift isn't just about hiring—it's a critical leadership imperative for retraining, reorienting, and realigning workforce capabilities. Despite heavy AI spending, adoption remains uneven. A Morgan Stanley survey from 2024, cited in the Meeker report, reveals that although 75% of CMOs are exploring AI, most implementations remain incremental, not transformative. Further underscoring the strategic gap, only half of the S&P 500 companies mention AI during earnings calls—suggesting a significant disconnect at the board level. Even when companies adopt AI, the tendency to limit usage to superficial applications persists. The highest returns come only when businesses fundamentally redesign workflows, reshape teams, and recenter strategies around AI. CXO Takeaway: CXOs must spearhead a deeper cultural and operational shift toward AI-centric thinking. This means investing heavily in training, restructuring teams for AI readiness, and embedding AI into board-level strategy discussions—not treating it as a technology afterthought. In a Nutshell: AI is redefining the rules of speed, strategy, and global competition. For CXOs, this isn't a future scenario—it's happening now. Those who embrace these insights and act decisively will shape their industries; those who delay risk becoming case studies in disruption.
Hindustan Times
10-06-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Chandigarh: Unauthorised structures near power lines to invite action
City residents who have constructed or extended buildings, balconies, boundary walls or other structures close to overhead power lines or have encroached poles/lines may soon face consequences, officials of Chandigarh Power Distribution Limited (CPDL) said in an official press release on Monday. 'Unauthorised constructions that pose significant safety risks and violate electrical safety regulations may lead to penal action,' CPDL said. According to the Regulations 60 and 61 of Central Electricity Authority (Measures Relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2010, and along with the provisions of the Electricity Act, 2003 (Section 53 and 68(5) and 161), there are mandated minimum clearances/distance that must be maintained between electrical lines/installations and nearby structures. These regulations aim to prevent accidents and ensure public safety. The specified clearances (distance) are crucial to prevent electrical hazards and ensure the safety of residents and property. CPDL officials stated that any loss of life or property resulting from non-compliance with these regulations will hold the violators accountable. Penal action may be initiated against those who fail to adhere to the prescribed safety standards. Building owners are advised to remove any unauthorised structures that violate these clearance requirements. Failure to comply may result in the removal of such structures by municipal authorities or local bodies, etc., in accordance with the provisions of the relevant rules and regulations, officials added. For more information, consumers can contact the helpline number 9240216666 or email at connectcpdl@ Minimum specified distances Low voltage lines (up to 415 Volts): Minimum vertical clearance: 2.5 metres Minimum horizontal clearance: 1.2 metres High voltage lines (above 415 Volts and up to 11 kV): Minimum vertical clearance: 3.7 metres Minimum horizontal clearance: 1.2 metres High voltage lines (above 11 kV and up to 33 kV): Minimum vertical clearance: 3.7 metres Minimum horizontal clearance: 2.0 metres Extra high voltage lines (above 33 kV): Minimum vertical clearance: 3.7 metres (plus 0.30 metres for every additional 33 kV or part thereof) Minimum horizontal clearance: 2.0 metres (plus 0.30 metres for every additional 33 kV or part thereof)
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
Apple Researchers Just Released a Damning Paper That Pours Water on the Entire AI Industry
Researchers at Apple have released an eyebrow-raising paper that throws cold water on the "reasoning" capabilities of the latest, most powerful large language models. In the paper, a team of machine learning experts makes the case that the AI industry is grossly overstating the ability of its top AI models, including OpenAI's o3, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Google's Gemini. In particular, the researchers assail the claims of companies like OpenAI that their most advanced models can now "reason" — a supposed capability that the Sam Altman-led company has increasingly leaned on over the past year for marketing purposes — which the Apple team characterizes as merely an "illusion of thinking." It's a particularly noteworthy finding, considering Apple has been accused of falling far behind the competition in the AI space. The company has chosen a far more careful path to integrating the tech in its consumer-facing products — with some seriously mixed results so far. In theory, reasoning models break down user prompts into pieces and use sequential "chain of thought" steps to arrive at their answers. But now, Apple's own top minds are questioning whether frontier AI models simply aren't as good at "thinking" as they're being made out to be. "While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood," the team wrote in its paper. The authors — who include Samy Bengio, the director of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Research at the software and hardware giant — argue that the existing approach to benchmarking "often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces' structure and quality." By using "controllable puzzle environments," the team estimated the AI models' ability to "think" — and made a seemingly damning discovery. "Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier [large reasoning models] face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities," they wrote. Thanks to a "counter-intuitive scaling limit," the AIs' reasoning abilities "declines despite having an adequate token budget." Put simply, even with sufficient training, the models are struggling with problem beyond a certain threshold of complexity — the result of "an 'overthinking' phenomenon," in the paper's phrasing. The finding is reminiscent of a broader trend. Benchmarks have shown that the latest generation of reasoning models is more prone to hallucinating, not less, indicating the tech may now be heading in the wrong direction in a key way. Exactly how reasoning models choose which path to take remains surprisingly murky, the Apple researchers found. "We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation," the team concluded in its paper. "They fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles." The researchers claim their findings raise "crucial questions" about the current crop of AI models' "true reasoning capabilities," undercutting a much-hyped new avenue in the burgeoning industry. That's despite tens of billions of dollars being poured into the tech's development, with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Meta, constructing enormous data centers to run increasingly power-hungry AI models. Could the Apple researchers' finding be yet another canary in the coalmine, suggesting the tech has "hit a wall"? Or is the company trying to hedge its bets, calling out its outperforming competition as it lags behind, as some have suggested? It's certainly a surprising conclusion, considering Apple's precarious positioning in the AI industry: at the same time that its researchers are trashing the tech's current trajectory, it's promised a suite of Apple Intelligence tools for its devices like the iPhone and MacBook. "These insights challenge prevailing assumptions about LRM capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundamental barriers to generalizable reasoning," the paper reads. More on AI models: Car Dealerships Are Replacing Phone Staff With AI Voice Agents
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
Apple Researchers Just Released a Damning Paper That Pours Water on the Entire AI Industry
Researchers at Apple have released an eyebrow-raising paper that throws cold water on the "reasoning" capabilities of the latest, most powerful large language models. In the paper, a team of machine learning experts makes the case that the AI industry is grossly overstating the ability of its top AI models, including OpenAI's o3, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Google's Gemini. In particular, the researchers assail the claims of companies like OpenAI that their most advanced models can now "reason" — a supposed capability that the Sam Altman-led company has increasingly leaned on over the past year for marketing purposes — which the Apple team characterizes as merely an "illusion of thinking." It's a particularly noteworthy finding, considering Apple has been accused of falling far behind the competition in the AI space. The company has chosen a far more careful path to integrating the tech in its consumer-facing products — with some seriously mixed results so far. In theory, reasoning models break down user prompts into pieces and use sequential "chain of thought" steps to arrive at their answers. But now, Apple's own top minds are questioning whether frontier AI models simply aren't as good at "thinking" as they're being made out to be. "While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood," the team wrote in its paper. The authors — who include Samy Bengio, the director of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Research at the software and hardware giant — argue that the existing approach to benchmarking "often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces' structure and quality." By using "controllable puzzle environments," the team estimated the AI models' ability to "think" — and made a seemingly damning discovery. "Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier [large reasoning models] face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities," they wrote. Thanks to a "counter-intuitive scaling limit," the AIs' reasoning abilities "declines despite having an adequate token budget." Put simply, even with sufficient training, the models are struggling with problem beyond a certain threshold of complexity — the result of "an 'overthinking' phenomenon," in the paper's phrasing. The finding is reminiscent of a broader trend. Benchmarks have shown that the latest generation of reasoning models is more prone to hallucinating, not less, indicating the tech may now be heading in the wrong direction in a key way. Exactly how reasoning models choose which path to take remains surprisingly murky, the Apple researchers found. "We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation," the team concluded in its paper. "They fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles." The researchers claim their findings raise "crucial questions" about the current crop of AI models' "true reasoning capabilities," undercutting a much-hyped new avenue in the burgeoning industry. That's despite tens of billions of dollars being poured into the tech's development, with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Meta, constructing enormous data centers to run increasingly power-hungry AI models. Could the Apple researchers' finding be yet another canary in the coalmine, suggesting the tech has "hit a wall"? Or is the company trying to hedge its bets, calling out its outperforming competition as it lags behind, as some have suggested? It's certainly a surprising conclusion, considering Apple's precarious positioning in the AI industry: at the same time that its researchers are trashing the tech's current trajectory, it's promised a suite of Apple Intelligence tools for its devices like the iPhone and MacBook. "These insights challenge prevailing assumptions about LRM capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundamental barriers to generalizable reasoning," the paper reads. More on AI models: Car Dealerships Are Replacing Phone Staff With AI Voice Agents
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Romania Construction Industry Report 2025: Output to Grow by 2.4% this Year Supported by Increase in EU Funds, Increased Construction Activities, Rising Building Permits, Export Activities
Explore Romania's construction market growth fueled by EU funds and investments in transport and energy. Despite challenges like inflation and political uncertainty, the industry projects an average annual growth of 3.7% from 2026 to 2029. Discover insights and opportunities in our detailed market report. Dublin, June 05, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Romania Construction Market Size, Trends, and Forecasts by Sector - Commercial, Industrial, Infrastructure, Energy and Utilities, Institutional and Residential Market Analysis to 2029 (H1 2025)" report has been added to Romanian construction industry is expected to grow by 2.4% in 2025, supported by an increase in the absorption of the European Union (EU) funds, coupled with an increase in construction activities, evidenced by the rising number of building permits issued, alongside export activities. Growth will also be boosted by increased investment in transport and energy projects. According to the National Statistics Institute (NIS), the total number of residential building permits issued in the country rose by 3.4% year on year (YoY) in the first two months of 2025, preceded by an annual growth of 2.9% in 2024, while the total number of permits issued for wholesale and retail buildings grew by 5.4% YoY in the first two months of 2025. Furthermore, the total value of exports grew by 0.7% YoY in the first two months of 2025, preceded by an annual decline of 0.4% in 2024, according to the INS. In February 2025, Romania's Parliament approved a national budget of RON802.2 billion ($174.6 billion), marking a 10.3% increase from the 2024 budget. The budget prioritizes economic growth, infrastructure development, sustainability, and public service improvements, while also aiming to reduce the fiscal deficit through policy reforms. However, the falling Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), elevated inflation, budget deficit and construction cost amid political uncertainty are expected to negatively impact demand and project financing, particularly for residential and transport infrastructure construction activity. Over the remainder of the forecast period, the construction industry is expected to record an average annual rate of 3.7% from 2026 to 2029, aided by investments in transport infrastructure and renewable energy. In March 2025, the government allocated RON2.9 billion ($629.7 million) to the State Aid Scheme to support industrial development and green transition in the countryScope Historical (2020-2024) and forecast (2025-2029) valuations of the construction industry in Romania, featuring details of key growth drivers. Segmentation by sector (commercial, industrial, infrastructure, energy and utilities, institutional and residential) and by sub-sector Analysis of the mega-project pipeline, including breakdowns by development stage across all sectors, and projected spending on projects in the existing pipeline. Listings of major projects, in addition to details of leading contractors and consultants Reasons to Buy Identify and evaluate market opportunities using our standardized valuation and forecasting methodologies Assess market growth potential at a micro-level with over 600 time-series data forecasts Understand the latest industry and market trends Formulate and validate business strategies using the analyst's critical and actionable insight Assess business risks, including cost, regulatory and competitive pressures Evaluate competitive risk and success factors Key Topics Covered: 1 Executive Summary2 Construction Industry: At-a-Glance3 Context3.1 Economic Performance3.2 Political Environment and Policy3.3 Demographics3.4 Risk Profile4 Construction Outlook4.1 All Construction Outlook Latest news and developments Construction Projects Momentum Index 4.2 Commercial Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments 4.3 Industrial Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments 4.4 Infrastructure Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments 4.5 Energy and Utilities Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments 4.6 Institutional Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments 4.7 Residential Construction Outlook Project analytics Latest news and developments Key Industry Participants 4.8 Contractors4.9 Consultants5 Construction Market Data6 Appendix For more information about this report visit About is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends. CONTACT: CONTACT: Laura Wood,Senior Press Manager press@ For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./ CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900Sign in to access your portfolio
