Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5443422

Thoughts?

The Chinese expert community is focused on competition between China and the USA for AI domination. China's local AI companies in contrast to country's authorities are skeptical towards achieving global AI leadership by 2030 amid the American sanctions, lack of state support, variety of technologies and lack of staff. Many of the Western countries acknowledged China's lagging from the developed world.

The recent article of China's minister of science and technology Yin Hejun rates highly the AI achievements of China. It mentioned the volume of local AI market in 2023 was 500 billion yuan, the number of AI companies is above 4400, among these companies 108 with capitalization over 1 billion US dollars. About 500 institutes of high education introduced programs to study AI.

The article highlights the 2017 plan to develop the next generation AI to make China the global AI leader by 2030.

But according to the unanimous opinion of local experts, China is still behind the US. Americans are almost monopolized the global AI market by bringing Open AI's advanced ChatGpt to the masses. Fast development of this tool became possible due to the feedback from users, including China where this service is officially banned, and this made the gap between America and China even bigger.

China's local companies responded with creation of series of competitive LLM products that are the basis for generative instruments which are used at least for now only on China's local market. At the moment the technological giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Iflytek) achieved only the level of ChatGpt 3.5 and plan within the year to surpass the actual ChatGpt 4.

However, the Americans also keep pushing and taking leadership on the market of generative AI. OpenAI's text to video Sora was presented in February and has no Chinese analogs and repeats the ChatGpt history.

According to the representatives of IT companies, the pace of AI development in China is on hold by a number of factors. In March the head of Iflytek Liu Qingfeng pointed that technological gap between China and America is not decreasing because of the US sanctions that limited access to the global LLM achievements. He believes the solution is promoting the AI by relying on local projects. As example he mentioned the LLM model of his company Spark that got a push to development after the Western sanctions and by making a contract with another sanctioned Chinese company Huawei.

The head of China Electronic Corporation Zeng Yi also said that the lack of state support of local developers, start-ups and IT companies in the AI race makes the gap between China and the West even bigger. The businessman asks the developers to cooperate with the local producers since the Western technologies may at any moment lose functionality and support.

The representatives of the local IT business believe the uncontrolled development of national hardware base requires too much resources and hinders the pace of AI development. The chairman of JD.com's Technology Committee Peng Cao notes that scattered technical chip solutions make it hard to develop software. This way local companies should consolidate their efforts to create AI platforms and lower their amounts.

At the same time, China's developers are still highly dependent on Western software solutions. This March the analysts of Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence marked in their report to China's State Council Li Qiang the problem of high popularity of Western tools with free access. According to their data the biggest part of local AI developers uses 2023 LLAMA model of American company META, which owns Facebook and Instagram and is among global AI leaders, for their own LLMs.

According to Xiaomi founder Lei Jun the key flaws of Chinese AI ecosystems are lack and turnover of staff. Only 40% represent the qualified personnel while the graduates prefer West to build careers. For instance, in Sora two of thirteen employees are from China. Xiaomi believes the only way to achieve the ambitious aim of overtaking the US and becoming the global AI leader is tight cooperation of state and business to bring back the best and young professionals to work on the breakthrough projects.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/23949437

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18741586

Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages. How is this possible? Enshittification.

Surveillance technology and spyware are being used to target and suppress journalists, dissidents, and human rights advocates everywhere.

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map that documents the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. Founded by privacy advocates, most of whom were personally harmed by surveillance tech, our mission is to shed light on the companies profiting from this exploitation with significant risk to our lives.

By mapping out the intricate web of surveillance companies, their subsidiaries, partners, and financial backers, we hope to expose the enablers fueling this industry's extensive rights violations, ensuring they cannot evade accountability for being complicit in this abuse.

Surveillance Watch is a community-driven initiative, and we rely on submissions from individuals passionate about protecting privacy and human rights. Acknowledging that we are barely scratching the surface of this industry, our interactive map is just the beginning – we are continuously working to expand this resource to include other information and integrate with existing databases that track this data.

Our right to privacy is non-negotiable, and anyone who threatens it must be held accountable. Support our mission by sharing this map and staying informed.

So I've read the linked policy and believe it or not, but turns out we literally cannot use Microsoft Services to conduct crimes against Humanity or do things that are illegal in +99% of all countries.

I'm usually not easily triggered, but why should I pay for a Corp that seems to view me as a malware and spam distributing pedophile terrorist bully that is involved in drug trade and human trafficking?

And who exactly is this aimed for? Which criminal on god's forsaken earth will read this and conclude, oh darn it, guess I need to stop my operations then?

Also, the Services Agreement etc. is full of language like "we might delete your account and Data for reason X, Y or Z or maybe for no reason at all lol", which is itself bullying and causes stress, cuz for example, it's still not clear whether we can use stuff like Cryptomator, Joplin or Duplicati (never had a Problem with it, but still, why not clarify that instead of "don't commit stuff that will land you in a Cell in Den Haag")

I know most of you use Linux, and this might be what finally pushes me to that step too. Never saw an Ad in MS, it's not bloated, and I trust Defender, BitLocker, Core Isolation, Secure Boot and the Memory and Folder Protection stuff, but don't need to be insulted like that. Just need to find an Office Writer with tracked Changes in Balloons, LanguageTool support and something like AHK.

Bonus Question. Has anyone a batch/torrent Download link for 1 TB of Public Domain Images? Doesn't matter what it is, Art, Space, Stock images, just something that is ok with the MS Guidelines. I might not use the storage anymore, but I'm sure gonna use it.