- 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 related ultrafast-fashion firms for his or her adverse environmental influence—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 $)
- Meanwhile, a US official accused the Chinese chip foundry SMIC of breaking US legislation by making a chip for Huawei. (South China Morning Post $)
5. Instead of the same old 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 may very well be the rationale. (Bloomberg $)
6. TikTok remains to be having loads of troubles. A brand new political TV advert (paid for by a mysterious new nonprofit), taking part in 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 Universal Music Group, customers have needed to get artistic to search 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 $)
Lost in translation
The most-hyped generative AI app in China today is Kimi, based on the Chinese publication Sina Tech. Released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese “unicorn” startup, Kimi made headlines final week when it introduced it had began supporting inputting textual content utilizing over 2 million Chinese characters. (For comparability, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo presently helps inputting 100,000 Chinese characters, whereas Claude3-200K helps about 160,000 characters.)
While a number of the app’s virality will be credited to a advertising push that intensified just lately. Chinese customers are actually busy feeding fashionable and traditional books to the mannequin and testing how properly it might probably perceive the context. Feeling threatened, different Chinese AI apps owned by tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba have adopted go well with, saying that they are going to quickly help 5 million and even 10 million Chinese characters. But processing massive quantities of textual content, whereas spectacular, may be very pricey within the generative AI age—and a few observers fear this isn’t the business route that firms ought to move in.
One thing more
Fluffy pajamas, sweatpants, outdated apparel: younger Chinese 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 just don’t think it’s worth spending money to dress up for work, since I’m just sitting there,” considered one of them informed the New York Times.