- Right here’s an inside look into ASML’s manufacturing facility and the way it managed to dominate superior chipmaking. (MIT Technology Review)
2. Hong Kong handed a tricky nationwide safety legislation that makes it extra harmful to protest Beijing’s rule. (BBC)
3. A brand new invoice in France suggests imposing hefty fines on Shein and comparable ultrafast-fashion firms for his or her destructive environmental impression—as a lot as $11 per merchandise that they promote in France. (Nikkei Asia)
4. Huawei filed a patent to make extra superior chips with a low-tech workaround. (Bloomberg $)
- In the meantime, a US official accused the Chinese language chip foundry SMIC of breaking US legislation by making a chip for Huawei. (South China Morning Post $)
5. As a substitute of the standard six and a half days every week, Tesla has instructed its Shanghai manufacturing facility to scale back manufacturing to 5 days every week. The slowdown of EV gross sales in China might be the rationale. (Bloomberg $)
6. TikTok continues to be having loads of troubles. A brand new political TV advert (paid for by a mysterious new nonprofit), enjoying in three US swing states, assaults Zhang Fuping, a ByteDance vice chairman that only a few folks have heard of. (Punchbowl News)
- As TikTok nonetheless hasn’t reached a licensing cope with Common Music Group, customers have needed to get inventive to seek out different soundtracks for his or her movies. (Billboard)
7. China launched a communications satellite tv for pc that may assist relay alerts for missions to discover the darkish aspect of the moon. (Reuters $)
Misplaced in translation
Probably the most-hyped generative AI app in China nowadays is Kimi, in line with the Chinese publication Sina Tech. Launched by Moonshot AI, a Chinese language “unicorn” startup, Kimi made headlines final week when it introduced it had began supporting inputting textual content utilizing over 2 million Chinese language characters. (For comparability, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo at present helps inputting 100,000 Chinese language characters, whereas Claude3-200K helps about 160,000 characters.)
Whereas a few of the app’s virality will be credited to a advertising push that intensified not too long ago. Chinese language customers are actually busy feeding well-liked and basic books to the mannequin and testing how nicely it may well perceive the context. Feeling threatened, different Chinese language AI apps owned by tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba have adopted swimsuit, saying that they’ll quickly help 5 million and even 10 million Chinese language characters. However processing massive quantities of textual content, whereas spectacular, could be very expensive within the generative AI age—and a few observers fear this isn’t the industrial path that firms ought to move in.
Yet another factor
Fluffy pajamas, sweatpants, outdated apparel: younger Chinese language individuals are dressing themselves in “gross outfits” to work—an intentional provocation to their bosses and an expression of silent resistance to the development that glorifies profession hustle. “I simply don’t assume it’s value spending cash to decorate up for work, since I’m simply sitting there,” one in every of them told the New York Times.