Tag: china’s
Dow Jones Newswires: China’s consumer inflation eases in April to lowest level since early 2021
Letting China’s Vice President attend coronation is a ‘stick in the eye’, says Hong Kong’s last governor
THE sight of China’s Vice President at the Coronation will be an insult to the people who have fled Hong Kong, its last governor said yesterday.
Lord Chris Patten said Beijing’s decision to send Han Zheng — blamed for a brutal crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong — shows it does not “give a toss” about the UK.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has faced fury for not blocking the visit of the Communist Party politician.
Lord Patten told the BBC: “You can’t ignore the fact he’s there, and it’s a stick in the eye for 140,000 or more HongKongers in exile here.”
“And also I think it’s an indication of the fact that, however much you grovel to China, however much you try to give them face, they don’t give a toss about giving us face because they could have sent lots of other people.
“There are, after all, 1.4 billion of them and they chose to send the guy who’s responsible for breaking their word about Hong Kong.”
Mr Han led Hong Kong affairs for Beijing between 2018 and March this year, during which time it imposed the national security law after mass protests in the city, stifling opposition and criminalising dissent.
The move strained relations with the UK and led to the creation of a visa scheme allowing Hongkongers to come to Britain.
The UK says China remains in breach of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, under which it has a duty to uphold Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and rights and freedoms.
Hong Kong was handed from the UK to China in 1997 with a promise by Beijing to keep Western-style liberties.
Dow Jones Newswires: China’s Caixin services PMI slips, but stays firmly in expansion territory
Dow Jones Newswires: China’s Caixin manufacturing PMI slips into contraction for April
China’s AI Industry Barely Slowed By US Chip Export Rules
Part of the U.S. strategy in setting the rules was to avoid such a shock that the Chinese would ditch U.S. chips altogether and redouble their own chip-development efforts. “They had to draw the line somewhere, and wherever they drew it, they were going to run into the challenge of how to not be immediately disruptive, but how to also over time degrade China’s capability,” said one chip industry executive who requested anonymity to talk about private discussions with regulators. The export restrictions have two parts. The first puts a ceiling on a chip’s ability to calculate extremely precise numbers, a measure designed to limit supercomputers that can be used in military research. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. But calculating extremely precise numbers is less relevant in AI work like large language models where the amount of data the chip can chew through is more important. […] The second U.S. limit is on chip-to-chip transfer speeds, which does affect AI. The models behind technologies such as ChatGPT are too large to fit onto a single chip. Instead, they must be spread over many chips – often thousands at a time — which all need to communicate with one another.
Nvidia has not disclosed the China-only H800 chip’s performance details, but a specification sheet seen by Reuters shows a chip-to-chip speed of 400 gigabytes per second, less than half the peak speed of 900 gigabytes per second for Nvidia’s flagship H100 chip available outside China. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed. Naveen Rao, chief executive of a startup called MosaicML that specializes in helping AI models to run better on limited hardware, estimated a 10-30% system slowdown. “There are ways to get around all this algorithmically,” he said. “I don’t see this being a boundary for a very long time — like 10 years.” Moreover, AI researchers are trying to slim down the massive systems they have built to cut the cost of training products similar to ChatGPT and other processes. Those will require fewer chips, reducing chip-to-chip communications and lessening the impact of the U.S. speed limits.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chess has a New World Champion: China’s Ding Liren
The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China’s first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men’s and women’s titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four “rapid chess” games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and “time management” issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Ding’s triumph means China holds both the men’s and women’s world titles, with current women’s champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July… Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments — including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year…
[Ding] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
It’s the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports:
“I guess I had every chance,” the Russian world No 2 says. “I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. … Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it’s always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that’s it.”
Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports — also sharing this larger story:
“I started to learn chess from four years old,” Ding says. “I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training.”
He continues: “I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.