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BEIJING, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Chinese tech company Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition. "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,"...

01-29-25 This happened over Alaska. Pilot ejected and is OK https://www.eielson.af.mil/News/Display/Article/4047595/press-release-f-35-aircraft-crash-update/ Press Release: F-35 aircraft crash update Published Jan. 29, 2025 By 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska -- An F-35A Lightning II aircraft crash occurred on Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, at 12:49 p.m. Jan. 28, 2025. The aircraft was preparing to land during a training flight when an in-flight emergency occurred. The pilot successfully ejected prior to the crash in accordance with emergency procedures. The pilot was transported to Bassett Army Hospital in Fairbanks for further evaluation and has...

Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people from the internet using dating apps? Well, look no further. Australia’s News.com.au profiled one such person this week, a young worker inside of a “mass scamming call center”. The person, named “Beard”, said that he “fled war-torn Syria for Dubai” and was desperately looking for work. Thinking he landed an advertising role, he told news.com.au he found himself at a “bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport”. He was eventually held captive and forced to scam...

The website for the US Agency for International Development, or USAid, appeared to be offline on Saturday, as the Trump administration moves to put the free-standing agency, and its current $42.8bn budget for global humanitarian operations, under state department control. A message stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appeared when attempts were made to access the website on Saturday. Two sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters on Friday that the Trump administration was moving to strip USAid of its independence as a government agency and put it under state department control. The apparent failure of...

Is DeepSeek inaccurate? … claims of plagiarism … how DeepSeek’s technology works … the risks it represents … a roundtable discussion with our expertsThe DeepSeek story continues to evolve as new information comes to light.Let’s begin with Reuters:Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini.The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting...

This brief post is for recommended extensions and themes for Gecko-based browsers (such as Floorp, Firefox, Waterfox Classic) browsers. First, as one who "needs" multiple tab rows, then unlike with minimalist Chrome, these are possible to obtain in Firefox via The Patcher (as well as Vivaldi - the best Chromium-based browser IMO), but since this takes some time, then I recommend trying Floorp, a Gecko/Firefox-based browser, originally built by two Japanese students, that has no Firefox telemetry options, and comes with the powerful tracking blocker/ad blocker uBlock Origin. And within the Settings section are a multitude of GUI customization...

Dell workers are being called back to the office full-time. The company’s CEO, Michael Dell, wrote that they are “retiring hybrid policy,” starting March 3rd for all employees that live near the office—according to a memo as obtained by Business Insider. The email, sent Friday morning, lauds in-person human collaboration as the most efficient form of working, an interesting argument for a tech company. “What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” wrote Dell, claiming that a “thirty second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes...

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that Contec CMS8000 devices, a widely used healthcare patient monitoring device, include a backdoor that quietly sends patient data to a remote IP address and downloads and executes files on the device. Contec is a China-based company that specializes in healthcare technology, offering a range of medical devices including patient monitoring systems, diagnostic equipment, and laboratory instruments. CISA learned of the malicious behavior from an external researcher who disclosed the vulnerability to the agency. When CISA tested three Contec CMS8000 firmware packages, the researchers discovered anomalous network traffic to a...

Chinese tech company Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims outperforms its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek. The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max model yesterday (Jan. 29) is the second major AI announcement from China this week, after DeepSeek's R1 open-weight model took the world by storm following claims that it performs better and is more cost-effective than its American competitors. Now, Alibaba claims that Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partly open-source, is even more impressive — surpassing a number of rival models in various tests run by the company. "In benchmark tests such as...

In the video Trump appears as saying: "I do think Putin is a strong leader, and I respect that, but he plays bad games. And that always ends badly. We all remember the story of Saddam, Ceausescu, and, of course, Gadhafi ... terrible death. I tell you, but that's how it ends. So, Vladimir, let's not let it come to that." The video went viral by Jan. 24, spilling over to other social media platforms and even news outlets. Then, BAZA, ce Hʼyuston Telegram channel’s SMM specialists announced in the comment to the original post that the video is a...

The evolution of technology is unrelentingly swift. Generations have witnessed state-of-the-art inventions become obsolete in the blink of an eye. The fax machine, the pager, and the landline, all once revolutionary, have earned their place in the annals of history. Yet email — born in 1971 when engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the very first “ping” — has remarkably endured. This persistent form of communication continues to redefine itself for the digital age, but one enigmatic email feature hasn’t changed for over 50 years: the “cc.” The “cc” field is a familiar sight perched within the recipient line of an email....

DeepSeek, China’s new artificial intelligence model, refuses to answer certain questions about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and responds to others with brazen propaganda. DeepSeek has captivated Silicon Valley this week, with U.S. tech leaders simultaneously impressed and concerned over the model matching the capabilities of firms like OpenAI at substantially lower costs. While the language model performs similarly to mainstream U.S. companies in programming and scientific benchmarks, it differs in its apparent reverence for China’s ruling party. The AI system refused to answer the Daily Caller News Foundation’s questions entirely when prompted to critique Chinese President Xi Jinping, or...

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting in an 83% fail rate, according to a report published by trustworthiness rating service NewsGuard on Wednesday. That was worse than an average fail rate of 62% for its Western rivals and raises doubts about AI...

OpenAI has claimed it found evidence suggesting that DeepSeek used distillation, a technique that extracts data from larger models to train smaller ones. OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which cost over $100 million to train, is an example of a large and complex AI system.OpenAI has raised serious concerns about Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, suspecting the company of using its data to train its own models. DeepSeek has gained significant attention for its cost-effective AI solutions, which are seen as strong competitors to OpenAI’s offerings. Following this, OpenAI and its partner Microsoft are now investigating whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s API to integrate...

While we’re on the subject of school daze, our friend John Mauldin of Mauldineconomics.com wonders whether the news of China’s Deepseek AI breakthroughs means America may be facing another “Sputnik Moment.” America has completely dominated the global tech sector for fifty years, but U.S. tech leadership now may be hard to maintain in the years ahead. This chart showing that China graduates more than five times as many iSTEM students each year is certainly worrisome. The silver lining is that if OUR kids aren’t learning math and science skills, we can always hand out visas to the brainiacs of the...

I am thinking of changing cell phone plans, and have been looking at Pure Talk. I make very few calls on my cell phone, and maybe a couple of texts a week, both usually from home. I need to have some data, in case I’m out and need to call someone, or a cab, road service, find a map, etc. – but I have almost never used that. I do NO business on the cell phone, and most of our telephone use is VOIP from home. Frankly, the main thing I use a cell phone for is listening to the...

Researchers have designed a cutting-edge optical security system that uses holograms to encode information, rendering it unreadable without an AI-driven decryption key. Credit: SciTechDaily.com By combining AI with holographic encryption, scientists have developed an ultra-secure data protection system.Their method scrambles laser beams into chaotic patterns, making decryption impossible without a trained neural network. This innovation could revolutionize cryptography.Holograms for Next-Level EncryptionAs the demand for digital security grows, researchers have developed a new optical system that uses holograms to encode information, creating a level of encryption that traditional methods cannot penetrate. This advance could pave the way for more secure communication...

As artificial intelligence continues to redefine industries, fears about job displacement have grown. While automation is reshaping the workforce, certain careers remain resilient, relying on skills, creativity, and judgment that machines can’t easily replicate. These “AI-proof” roles leverage uniquely human traits, offering stability in a rapidly evolving world.Mental Health ProfessionalsAI may assist with diagnostics or administrative tasks in healthcare, but it lacks the emotional intelligence to provide compassionate mental health care. Along with empathy, mental health professionals possess excellent communication, active listening, and problem-solving skills, most of which are uniquely human. Further, mental health care relies heavily upon deep interpersonal...

It was only a matter of time before an innovative mind created the next mainstream AI tool to compete with ChatGPT. In a massive step toward AI advancement, Liang Wenfeng of China launched DeepSeek, an open-source large language models (LLM) intended to compete if not one day overshadow ChatGPT. The launch immediately wiped $1 trillion off the US stock exchange and the tech competition between China and the US is coming to a head. ChatGPT is run by OpenAI. Its creation marked the dawn of a new way of interacting with the internet and accessing information. Users can ask AI...

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