Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not expected to meet Bangladesh interim government chief Muhammad Yunus on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly next week, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, the Bangladesh side made a formal request for a meeting on the sidelines of the General Assembly, which both leaders are set to attend. Dhaka was keen on a meeting in the hope it would help clear the air over irritants that have emerged in bilateral ties since the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government, the people said on condition of anonymity.

The people said such a meeting is not part of the Indian side’s agenda. Besides, Modi will have a packed schedule for his three-day visit to the US, as he is set to attend the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 21 and address the Summit of the Future at the UN General Assembly on September 23.

“The PM is expected to have some bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the General Assembly in New York but a meeting with the head of Bangladesh’s interim government isn’t on the schedule,” one of the people cited above said.

Besides scheduling issues, comments by Yunus on India-Bangladesh relations in a recent interview and near-daily remarks by members of the interim government in Dhaka perceived as critical of India have not gone down well in New Delhi.

In the interview, Yunus criticised former premier Sheikh Hasina for commenting on developments in Bangladesh while in exile in India. He suggested Bangladesh could seek her extradition and said India should move beyond the “narrative” that every political party other than Hasina’s Awami League is “Islamist”.

Other members of the interim government, including de facto foreign minister Touhid Hossain, have repeatedly raked up the possibility of seeking the extradition of Hasina, who fled to India after stepping down on August 5. Hossain also acknowledged any such move would create an “embarrassing situation for the Indian government”.

India’s leadership has said Hasina was granted approval to come to the country at short notice. Hasina has been largely incommunicado while in India, where she is at an undisclosed safe location. The external affairs ministry has refused to be drawn out on any possible Bangladeshi request for her extradition, describing it as a hypothetical matter.

The people cited above said a meeting between Modi and former US president Donald Trump too was not part of the Indian side’s agenda though an encounter between the two leaders in New York could not be ruled out.

Trump said at a campaign event in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday that he will meet Modi next week but gave no details on where the meeting would be held. Trump also said India was a “very big abuser” of the US-India trade relationship. Some other world leaders who visited the US in recent months for meetings with President Joe Biden and other multilateral events have met Trump as well.

On Wednesday, an EU court will decide on Google’s appeal against a €1.49 billion ($1.65 billion) fine imposed by the European Union. This comes just a week after the tech giant faced a major legal defeat over a larger penalty.

Regulators worldwide are ramping up scrutiny on Google’s parent company, Alphabet, as legal trials and investigations continue to target the multinational giant. Last week, the European Union secured a legal victory when its top court upheld a 2017 fine of €2.42 billion against Google for abusing its dominant position by promoting its own comparison shopping service.

The European Commission has led the charge in cracking down on big tech abuses, imposing a total of €8.2 billion in fines on Google between 2017 and 2019 for antitrust violations.

The latest case, set for a ruling on Wednesday, concerns the third of those fines—worth €1.49 billion—stemming from Google’s misuse of its dominance through the AdSense advertising service. The Luxembourg-based General Court is scheduled to release its decision on Google’s appeal shortly after 0730 GMT.

Google has requested the court to either fully or partially annul the European Commission’s decision, or at least reduce the fine.

Ongoing Legal Battles
The EU’s actions against Google are far from over. The tech giant is also contesting a €4.3 billion fine levied in 2018 for placing illegal restrictions on Android smartphones to boost its internet search business. This remains the largest antitrust penalty ever imposed by the EU. While the General Court reduced the fine slightly to €4.1 billion in 2022, it largely upheld the EU’s arguments that Google had violated competition laws. Google has since appealed this ruling to the European Court of Justice.

Meanwhile, the EU has strengthened its regulatory arsenal with the introduction of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), designed to prevent antitrust violations before they occur. This law provides clear guidelines on what tech companies can and cannot do online, aiming to correct behaviors proactively rather than reactively issuing fines.

Google, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), and Apple are currently under investigation under the DMA.

Global Pressure Mounts
Google is also facing mounting legal challenges in the US. Last week, it entered its second major antitrust trial within a year, with the US government accusing it of monopolizing ad technology. This follows a US judge’s August ruling that declared Google’s search business an illegal monopoly, sparking fears that the company may face a potential breakup.

Globally, Google’s advertising technology is under intense scrutiny, with British regulators accusing the company of market dominance earlier this month. The EU reached similar conclusions last year, recommending that Google divest its ad tech business. Google has the opportunity to respond to these charges before the final decisions are made.

Despite the growing regulatory pressure, Alphabet reported revenue from online ad searches totaling $48.5 billion for the second quarter of this year.

If you care about the environment, think twice about using AI.

Generative artificial intelligence uses 30 times more energy than a traditional search engine, warns researcher Sasha Luccioni, on a mission to raise awareness about the environmental impact of the hot new technology.

Recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in the world of AI by the American magazine Time in 2024, the Canadian computer scientist of Russian origin has sought for several years to quantify the emissions of programs like ChatGPT or Midjourney.

“I find it particularly disappointing that generative AI is used to search the Internet,” laments the researcher, who spoke with AFP on the sidelines of the ALL IN artificial intelligence conference, in Montreal.

The language models on which the programs are based require enormous computing capacities to train on billions of data points, necessitating powerful servers.

Then there’s the energy used to respond to each individual user’s requests.

Instead of simply extracting information, “like a search engine would do to find the capital of a country, for example,” AI programs “generate new information,” making the whole thing “much more energy-intensive,” she explains.

According to the International Energy Agency, the combined AI and the cryptocurrency sectors consumed nearly 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022 — two percent of total global production.

– Energy efficiency –

A leading researcher on the impact of AI on climate, Luccioni participated in 2020 in the creation of a tool for developers to quantify the carbon footprint of running a piece of code. “CodeCarbon” has since been downloaded more than a million times.

Head of the climate strategy of startup Hugging Face, a platform for sharing open-access AI models, she is now working on creating a certification system for algorithms.

Similar to the program from the US Environmental Protection Agency that awards scores based on the energy consumption of electronic devices and appliances, it would make it possible to know an AI product’s energy consumption in order to encourage users and developers to “make better decisions.”

“We don’t take into account water or rare materials,” she acknowledges, “but at least we know that for a specific task, we can measure energy efficiency and say that this model has an A+, and that model has a D,” she says.

– Transparency –

In order to develop her tool, Luccioni is experimenting with it on generative AI models that are accessible to everyone, or open source, but she would also like to do it on commercial models from Google or ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, which have been reluctant to agree.

Although Microsoft and Google have committed to achieving carbon neutrality by the end of the decade, the US tech giants saw their greenhouse gas emissions soar in 2023 because of AI: up 48 percent for Google compared to 2019 and 29 percent for Microsoft compared to 2020.

“We are accelerating the climate crisis,” says Luccioni, calling for more transparency from tech companies.

The solution, she says, could come from governments that, for the moment, are “flying blindly,” without knowing what is “in the data sets or how the algorithms are trained.”

“Once we have transparency, we can start legislating.”

– ‘Energy sobriety’ –

It is also necessary to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost,” according to Luccioni.

In her latest study, the researcher demonstrated that producing a high-definition image using artificial intelligence consumes as much energy as fully recharging the battery of your cell phone.

At a time when more and more companies want to integrate the technology further into our lives — with conversational bots and connected devices, or in online searches — Luccioni advocates “energy sobriety.”

The idea here is not to oppose AI, she emphasizes, but rather to choose the right tools — and use them judiciously.