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Yahoo
13 minutes ago
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Albo fires back on China trip claim
Anthony Albanese has hit back against the Coalition's criticism of his 'indulgent' trip to China, accusing them of 'constant negativity' and a failure to acknowledge the importance of Australia's 'most important trading partner'. Liberal frontbencher James Paterson earlier said the Prime Minister's six-day trip was 'starting to look a little bit indulgent,' which he described as 'a Gough Whitlam history tour on the Great Wall of China' and questioned whether 'a visit to Chengdu to pose with some pandas, and whether a hit of tennis is strictly necessary'. 'I hope it's not for the Prime Minister's personal enjoyment,' Senator Paterson told Sky News on Thursday. 'I mean, the appropriate time to do a nostalgic history tour of Labor Party mythology is after you retire, in your own time, at your own expense, not on the taxpayer dime.' Sussan Ley also said she was 'disappointed' Mr Albanese 'didn't get the assurances that he should' about circumnavigation of Chinese navy warships in Australia, or the live firing exercises which were done without advanced notice. Asked for his response to the comment during a press conference in the city of Chengdu, Mr Albanese rejected the claims. 'I think the opposition have got some issues they need to sort out within themselves, including over the relationship with China,' he told reporters. He said China was Australia's 'most important trading partner', with one in four Australian jobs dependent on the relationship, and reiterated the importance of a stable relationship. 'They've just had an election result because in part, they themselves have characterised it as their constant negativity' and said the trip had been 'very successful'. 'They need to stop looking for reasons to say they're against and decide what they're for.' Mr Albanese also described Chinese President Xi Jinping as 'warm and engaging' and said China was a 'confident,' 'creative' and 'dynamic' country. Mr Albanese said he wanted to see Australia and China establish a 'stronger relationship' with 'more agreement and less disagreement' over the next three years, while acknowledging the two countries had different political systems, cultures and values. 'We have different values. So we understand that,' he said. 'What I'd like to see is to be able to talk about those issues regularly, get as much agreement as possible, but understanding of where our nations are coming from, out of understanding, can come greater co-operation.' Speaking after the press conference, Coalition education spokesman Jonno Duniam said while it was important to show 'deference to your host,' he questioned the value of the trip. 'We have our prime minister there on a multi-day trip, a range of high-level meetings with very little in the way of outcomes that can be perceived back here home in Australia,' he told Sky News. 'At the same time, we've got drills occurring in Taipei for potential and perhaps eventual invasion by Chinese forces of Taiwan's territory there. 'There's a lot of water to go under the bridge, but I'm failing to see the benefits of what you've don, or what will come from this visit.'
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities AUSTIN, Texas, July 17, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations. "Today's announcement emphasizes Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," said Mani Vembu, CEO at Zoho. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale." Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimized for Business Zoho has successfully launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future. While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management). Agents available today include: New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. AI Agent Studio and Marketplace First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organizations. Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are: Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation. With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission structures. Zoho's MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM). Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Zia Agent Marketplace - Full list of available agents at launch Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional costs. Zoho Privacy Pledge Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 130 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit: About Zoho With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 18,000 employees. For more information, please visit: View source version on Contacts Media Contacts: Sandra Loslo@ Nanya Srivastavananya.s@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Highlights: Record Revenues and ...
Net Revenues: $14.6 billion for the second quarter. Earnings Per Share (EPS): $10.91. Return on Equity (ROE): 12.8% for the quarter, 14.8% for the first half of the year. Global Banking and Markets Revenues: $10.1 billion for the quarter. Advisory Revenues: $1.2 billion, up 71% year-over-year. Equity Underwriting Revenues: $428 million, flat year-over-year. Debt Underwriting Revenues: $589 million, down 5% year-over-year. FICC Net Revenues: $3.5 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Equities Net Revenues: $4.3 billion, a record for the quarter. Asset and Wealth Management Revenues: $3.8 billion. Management and Other Fees: $2.8 billion, up 11% year-over-year. Private Banking and Lending Revenues: $789 million, up 12% year-over-year. Total Assets Under Supervision: $3.3 trillion, a record high. Alternative Assets Under Supervision: $355 billion. Net Interest Income: $3.1 billion for the second quarter. Total Loan Portfolio: $217 billion at quarter-end. Operating Expenses: $9.2 billion for the quarter. Effective Tax Rate: 20.2% for the first half of 2025. Capital Returned to Shareholders: $4 billion, including $957 million in dividends and $3 billion in stock repurchases. Common Equity Tier 1 Ratio: 14.5% at the end of the second quarter. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 10 Warning Signs with GS. Release Date: July 16, 2025 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Positive Points The Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS) reported strong financial performance in Q2 2025 with net revenues of $14.6 billion and earnings per share of $10.91. The company's Investment Banking division saw a 30% year-over-year increase in announced M&A volumes, indicating a resilient dealmaking environment. Asset and Wealth Management achieved record client assets of $1.7 trillion, with continued momentum in alternatives and long-term fee-based net inflows. The firm set a new record for total assets under supervision at $3.3 trillion, marking the 30th consecutive quarter of long-term fee-based net inflows. The Board approved a 33% increase in the quarterly dividend, reflecting confidence in the firm's financial durability and commitment to returning capital to shareholders. Negative Points Despite strong performance, there is ongoing uncertainty in industries sensitive to trade policy, which could impact future results. The company faces challenges in the harvesting environment for private equity-type portfolio assets, which may affect future returns. Geopolitical concerns, particularly in the Middle East, and unresolved trade agreements pose risks to the global economic outlook. The firm is navigating a complex regulatory environment, with ongoing discussions around capital requirements and stress testing transparency. There is a need for more transparency in the capital process, which currently lacks clarity and affects strategic planning. Q & A Highlights Q: What will Goldman Sachs do with its excess capital now that regulatory reforms have been implemented? A: David Solomon, Chairman and CEO, stated that the first priority is to deploy capital towards client franchises to produce accretive returns and support client activity. Opportunities are seen in M&A and financing. After that, the focus will be on returning capital to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. Q: How is Goldman Sachs handling the challenging environment for harvesting historical principal investments? A: Denis Coleman, CFO, explained that while asset prices and credit markets are improving, the environment for harvesting private equity-type assets remains challenging. The firm is committed to reducing historical principal investments, which now stand at about $8 billion, and will continue to do so as market conditions allow. Q: What is Goldman Sachs' approach to capital deployment opportunities, particularly regarding inorganic acquisitions? A: David Solomon emphasized that while the firm is always looking for ways to accelerate its franchise, especially in Asset and Wealth Management, the bar for significant acquisitions is very high. Opportunities must align with strategic priorities and offer a high level of confidence in the people and cultural fit. Q: How does Goldman Sachs view the impact of AI on efficiency and growth? A: David Solomon highlighted that AI presents a significant opportunity to automate processes, create efficiency, and drive productivity. The firm is investing in AI to enhance software development and client service, which will lead to both cost savings and growth opportunities. Q: What is Goldman Sachs' outlook on M&A activity, and what gives them confidence in this area? A: David Solomon noted that announced M&A is up 30% year-over-year, and the backlog driven by Advisory growth is strong. The level of dialogue with clients has increased significantly, and there is confidence in regulatory environments allowing for significant industry consolidation. For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data