Category: Technology

BEIJING: Alibaba, a renowned Chinese tech company, on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. DeepSeek’s popularity and meteoric rise in the past three week has placed both overseas and local rivals under pressure and it is highlighted with Qwen 2.5-Max’s unusual release timing on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most people are off work and with their families. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms […] almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit…

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UK experts have expressed apprehensions over the rapid increase in the use of DeepSeek, urging users to remain vigilant of the Chinese artificial intelligence platform. The experts cited concerns about the chatbot spreading misinformation and alleged that the Chinese state can possibly exploit information and data handed over by the users. Joining the bandwagon, the British government has left it up to the people to use the new AI but it says the officials are monitoring anything that might threaten the national security and added that necessary actions will be…

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WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX will “soon” begin a mission to repatriate two American astronauts who have been stranded for months on the International Space Station. In June, veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner, and were due to spend only eight days on the orbiting laboratory, but technical problems on the spacecraft prompted Nasa to change plans. The US space agency announced in August that Boeing rival SpaceX would bring the crew home in…

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WASHINGTON: Amid looming uncertainty surrounding the future of TikTok, there is a glimpse of hope for millions of users over the possibility of an American TikTok owned by a US-based company. The possibility exists in light of United States President Donald Trump’s statement who has said that ech giant Microsoft was in talks to acquire popular video-sharing platform. Asked late Monday if Microsoft was in discussion for acquiring TikTok, Trump told reporters: “I would say yes”. “There’s a lot of interest in TikTok, there’s great interest in TikTok,” he added…

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Chinese AI sensation DeepSeek on Monday said it was limiting the registration of new users due to large-scale cyberattacks on its services. The company, whose chatbot took over OpenAI’s ChatGPT as Apple’s top downloaded app on Monday, cited “large-scale malicious attacks” for outages and its inability to take on new users. DeepSeek, which was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, has shown the ability to match the capacity of AI pace-setters such as Nvidia. Its success on the US app store sent shares in…

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BEIJING: Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI Assistant overtook artificial intelligence giant ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available on Apple’s App Store in the United States of America. The AI is powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model and its creators say it “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally”. The application’s popularity has skyrocketed in the US since it was released on January 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower. The milestone highlights how DeepSeek has left a deep impression on Silicon…

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US startup Perplexity AI has revised the merger proposal it had submitted to TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to create a new entity combining Perplexity and TikTok US, a person familiar with the proposal told Reuters on Sunday. The proposal calls for the US government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future initial public offering (IPO), the person said. A Perplexity document shared with ByteDance and new investors proposed the creation of a new US holding company called “NewCo”, the person said. Under the proposal, ByteDance would sell…

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A new green mutant named “Chonkus” microbe has been discovered by scientists which appears to have ability to fight climate change. Chonkus was found in shallow, sunlit waters off the coast of Italy’s Vulcano Island by a team led by microbiologist Max Schubert, according to Science News.  The team had ventured towards the waters in search of micro-organisms that take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis but instead, they found this naturally occurring microbe strain of  Synechococcus elongatus a type of microbe that performs photosynthesis and is a species of cyanobacterium. Synechococcus…

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Nasa plans to fly two rocket through an active aurora borealis to study the phenomenal lights that flash and dance across the northern hemisphere sky. The two rockets are expected to launch into space from the Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska as part of two missions led by space physicists Marilia Samara and Robert Michell from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. The mission aims to delve deep as to why some auroras flicker, others pulsate and the rest appear to have missing patches of light in them, as…

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NEW YORK: US TikTok users have sensed signs of censorship on the video-sharing platform, which is owned by China’s ByteDance and was revived by an executive order from President Donald Trump. TikTok users are noting a difference in the short-video app following its revival after going dark on Saturday under a new law — enacted over national security concerns during the Biden administration with bipartisan support — that requires it to be sold to a US buyer. Trump has vowed to find a solution to the ban, with several bidders…

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