Current affairs 02 May 2023

India becomes Europe's largest supplier of refined fuels: Kpler.

• According to the Kpler report, India has become Europe's largest supplier of refined fuels, surpassing Saudi Arabia.
• Europe’s reliance on Indian crude oil products has grown since the ban on Russian oil.
• It also showed that Europe's refined fuel imports from India are set to surge above 360,000 barrels a day.
• Russia was the largest exporter of crude oil to India by value in February in spite of the Western price cap of USD 60 per barrel.

Russia’s Sberbank launches AI to compete with ChatGPT.

• The Russian-based company Sberbank launched its own AI chatbot GigaChat to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
• It was initially designed to support multimodal interaction and communicate in Russian more intelligently.
• The GigaChat architecture is based on the neural network ensemble model called NeONKA (Neural Omnimodal Network with Knowledge-Awareness).
• It includes several neural network models along with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback.

1st batch of 5 women Army officers commissioned into Regiment of Artillery.

• In a historic first, the Indian Army has inducted five women officers into its Regiment of Artillery and three of them have been posted to frontline formations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China.
• Lt Mehak Saini, Lt Sakshi Dubey, Lt Aditi Yadav, Lt Pious Mudgil and Lt Akanksha have joined the Army's premier artillery units after successfully completing their training at the Officers Training Academy (OTA) in Chennai.
• Out of the five women officers, three are posted to units deployed along the borders with China and the other two in "challenging locations" near the frontier with Pakistan.

Satwiksairaj Rankireddy-Chirag Shetty Win Historic Gold in 2023 Badminton Asia Championships.

• Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty scripted history by becoming the first doubles pair to win a Gold medal at the Badminton Asia Championships.
• The World No. 6 pair defeated the 8th-ranked pairing of One Yew Sin and Teo Ee Yi of Malaysia in a stunning 3-game battle at Sheikh Rashid Bin Hamdan Indoor Hall, Al Nasr Club.
• The previous best performance by an Indian men’s doubles pair in a continental event was in 1971 by Dipu Ghosh and Raman Ghosh who won a bronze medal.
• Overall, this is India’s second gold medal in the event. Dinesh Khanna won the men’s singles gold in Lucknow in 1965 by defeating Thailand’s Sangob Ratnusorn.

HDFC Bank launches digital distribution platform for agents and partners.

• HDFC Bank has introduced a Digital Distribution Platform, 'Smart Saathi' for its agents and business correspondents to sell services, especially in rural areas.
• HDFC Bank Smart Saathi provides a secure and user-friendly experience to its users.
• The newly launched feature will use advanced technology solutions to connect Business Correspondents/Business Facilitators to the bank.
• Aim: To boost financial inclusion by taking banking products and services to the last mile.