Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, remarked that 2025 will be a decisive year for the company while emphasising the need to lift the AI stakes. Speaking at the strategy meeting held on December 18, Pichai, with an undisclosed group of executives, detailed plans for the next year but did so wearing sweaters in the spirit of the holidays. “The stakes are high,” Pichai said, urging the employees to recognise how important this moment is. His statements come even as the race for dominance in AI continues toe-to-toe with industry giant Google adamant about reinforcing its leadership by scaling Gemini in the consumer space. Pichai did not shy away from the reality that Google still has some ground to cover in the competitive game called AI. He emphasised that, although the Gemini model had some early success, 2025 will be a tough time to reach a status where it can meet its competition and still happen to be successful, thus suggesting bonding over a 2025 project. He pointed out that the Gemini application has garnered “incredible momentum”, but said that obstacles lie ahead and urged speed if Google hopes to stay ahead in the race of technology where rapid changes occur almost instantaneously. Gemini, Google’s flagship AI model, is set to play a central role in the company’s strategy next year. Pichai described scaling Gemini for consumers as Google’s “biggest focus” for 2025, signalling an all-hands-on-deck approach to expanding the model’s capabilities and applications. This includes integrating Gemini into more products and services to enhance user experiences. As AI continues to reshape the tech industry, Google is betting big on Gemini to secure its place at the forefront of innovation. Pichai’s rallying call underscores the high stakes in the AI race, where speed and execution could determine long-term success. With 2025 on the horizon, Google is gearing up for what could be one of its most defining years yet. Get Latest News Live on Times Now along with Breaking News and Top Headlines from Technology Science and around the world.
NoneHARTFORD, CT – US Sen. Richard Blumenthal on Monday joined leaders of the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to warn parents and caregivers about the potential dangers that specific toys can pose to young children this holiday season. “This is a very festive time of year with Christmas and Hanukkah coming up in a few weeks, a time of great joy, a time when we’re out buying presents for our kids, and we want it to be a very joyous time for the whole family,” said James E. Shmerling, President and CEO of the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CCMC). “There’s also risk when we’re buying these gifts for our kids. Some are not safe. As the only hospital in the state of Connecticut that’s 100 percent focused on children, this is something that we take very seriously.” Along with the usual suspects of toys with small parts and other common safety threats that the wrong toys can pose, Blumenthal and Kevin Borrup, the executive director of the Injury Prevention Center at CCMC, highlighted the dangers of water beads and magnets, which children can ingest with the risk of significant internal injuries that are difficult to treat. According to the (CPSC), water beads are small, water-absorbing, often colorful balls of super-absorbent polymer that can grow 100 times their original size when exposed to water. They are often sold as toys, in craft kits, as sensory tools for children with developmental disabilities, or for agricultural use. “These kinds of toys look absolutely harmless,” Blumenthal said. “They’re colored, they’re attractive, and they look like candy. These little toys look like the stuff that you might actually eat. Little does a child know that these can inflate and literally block the body from working.” When swallowed, water beads absorb liquid inside the body and grow, causing significant and potentially life-threatening internal injuries for small children. CPSC data show that nearly 7,000 water bead-related ingestion injuries were treated in emergency departments in the US from 2018 through 2022. A 10-month-old girl also died from injuries caused by ingesting water beads in 2023. Small magnets pose another danger, as even though they may be ingested individually, their strong forces of attraction will draw them to each other, potentially pinching delicate internal tissues between them and leading to holes in intestinal lining and other critical areas. Another perennial danger are button batteries, which can be found in numerous modern gifts, including everything from LED lights to watches and more. The batteries can become caught in a child’s esophagus, and despite not being plugged in, they can still develop a charge that can burn a hole into the throat lining in as little as two hours. One of the other dangers that Blumenthal discussed is the threat that unregulated toys pose to younger children. Thanks to a loophole known as the “de minimis exemption,” shipments valued at less than $800 enter the United States without duties, taxes, or customs inspections. According to the US Public Interest Research Group’s (US PIRG) annual report, “Trouble in Toyland,” a billion shipments will enter the US in 2024 through the de minimis loophole, including hundreds of thousands of toys and games ordered through internet sellers. “Direct-to-consumer sales through the internet can come from overseas across borders without inspection, from China or elsewhere, and 80% of those toys sold in the United States come from China,” Blumenthal said. “So the mounting threat of unsafe toys, particularly from China, but from all overseas manufacturers, is one that demands action, and I will be introducing legislation to close the loophole for those de minimis shipments that come across our borders, from China and elsewhere.” Borrup offered some simple tips that parents can follow to help make the holidays safer, including: “The most impactful thing you can do as a parent is to give the time to your kids,” Borrup said. “Get down on the floor and play with them, read to them, listen to them. Your time will help your child build the social and emotional skills and protective factors that can provide a lifelong benefit. You can even develop a family game night, the dreaded forced fun that is part of many families and traditions.”Joe Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy
Uttar Pradesh: Prayagraj gears up to host Maha Kumbh
South Korean authorities seek warrant to detain impeached President Yoon in martial law probe
Filmmaking changed forever in the first half of June 2024. On the 10th of that month, Kuaishou Technology announced Kling—a free text-to-video creation AI program. Though OpenAI had announced and teased Sora on February 15th, most of the videos they showcased were enhanced by VFX, and it wouldn’t be released for another 10 months. People only began to create stunning AI videos via Kling and DreamMachine, launched by Luma on June 12th. Whenever such a new tool came out, I told my friends in Bollywood to try it. Six months later, at the end of December, after Sora finally released nearly a year after its announcement, I asked them again which of the many AI video-making tools was the best. The answer was unanimous: Kling. How extraordinary this is can only be gauged when we consider how the US tried to stifle China’s AI advances. The trade war between the US and China has been like a game of ping pong, with each side volleying tariffs and restrictions back and forth. , the US imposed tariffs on over $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, citing unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft. China retaliated with tariffs on $110 billion of US products. The Biden administration continued and even expanded some measures, targeting high-tech sectors like AI and semiconductors, while China banned exports of rare earth metals. The Biden administration’s decision to impose a chip embargo on China was designed to hinder the country’s ability to develop advanced AI systems by denying access to high-performance chips. We will not delve into whether Western fears of a belligerent China justify these sanctions. Instead, we will discuss how this was a blessing in disguise for China and what it can teach us about AI. The embargo—first highlighted by the Huawei affair and recently by —naturally presented significant challenges, but surprisingly spurred innovative strategies and adaptations within the Chinese tech sector. Chinese companies responded by developing new methods to extract more value from weaker chips, focusing on smaller, more specialised AI models, and investing heavily in local chip manufacturing. Hence, despite the restrictions, Chinese AI companies managed to sustain and advance their AI capabilities, often through creative workarounds and a shift in focus from hardware to software and model efficiency. The Chinese Strategy to Circumvent the Embargo was multipronged. One of the primary strategies employed is the development of homegrown AI chip suppliers. Companies like Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent made strides in producing their own AI chips. While the West has its NVIDIA chips like the A100, China now has Huawei’s Ascend 910B and Baidu’s Kunlun Gen 2, both using the 7nm process node technology. While these domestically produced chips may lag behind their Western counterparts in terms of performance and stability, they are increasingly proving to be viable alternatives. Huawei and Baidu’s chips are seen as competitors to Nvidia’s AI chips. The embargo forced Chinese AI companies to focus on other strategies, like developing more efficient code and smaller, specialised AI models. Think of this approach as the difference between a bulked-up gym enthusiast and a well-trained martial artist. Having the brute power of advanced chips is like a gym enthusiast with massive muscles. Still, it is the martial artist, with precise techniques developed through efficient training, who emerges victorious in a street fight with a worthy opponent. The US has the brute power of advanced chips, but the Chinese figuring out the precise movement of martial artists to do more with what they have could prove the eventual winner. In AI terms, this means that instead of relying solely on powerful chips, companies are optimising their models to require fewer resources. Professor Winston Ma, a law professor at New York University, recently noted that “the coming year is the year of small models.” Instead of LLMs (Large Language Models), SMLs (Small Language Models) will see significant adoption and development due to their efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and ability to operate on all devices, making them suitable for a wider range of applications over LLMs. With less training data and speed, they’ll allow for quicker response times. Another aspect is enhancing engineering capabilities and algorithms to compensate for the unavailability of advanced chips. By improving software and model training techniques, Chinese companies like Alibaba and Tencent achieve high performance even with less advanced hardware. Zhang Ping’an, a senior Huawei executive, said it best when he advocated that the mindset of relying solely on the most advanced AI chips needs to be abandoned in favour of innovative engineering and algorithmic advancements. Flexibility over bulky muscles and agility over brute force seems to have become the new Chinese mantra for AI, which even Western AI companies realise is the better approach. Another tactic Chinese companies employ is renting cloud services located in the United States or other regions unaffected by the embargo. This allows them to access advanced computing resources without directly violating the restrictions. Although the US government has not yet addressed this loophole effectively, it remains a viable option for Chinese companies to leverage global cloud infrastructure. Instead of the one-size-fits-all mentality of the West, AI models in China are being trained using different techniques such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and semi-supervised learning. Supervised learning is when models are trained on labelled data, which is crucial for tasks like object recognition and sentiment analysis. Unsupervised learning uses unlabeled data to find patterns and structures useful for clustering and anomaly detection. Semi-supervised learning combines both, leveraging a small amount of labelled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to improve overall performance. China has also been forced to rely on open-source AI model development. This has helped in China’s AI advancements because such models offer transparency, customizability, and flexibility, allowing continuous improvement and refinements. It enables the incorporation of the latest advancements in AI research rapidly and at scale while fostering a collaborative environment that drives future innovations. China’s AI strategy is guided by key documents such as the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (AIDP) from 2017 and the Made in China 2025 initiative launched in 2015. Both emphasise the importance of AI for enhancing national competitiveness and security and outline goals for achieving world-leading levels in AI technology while reducing dependence on foreign technologies. The Made in China 2025 document aimed to transform China’s manufacturing sector from producing low-cost, low-quality goods to becoming a global leader in high-tech innovative products, especially in key industries like AI, robotics, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing. The number of patents coming out of China in each of these sectors in the last five years proves that the Chinese have succeeded. This success is due to significant investments in AI research and development by the Chinese government, with regional governments pledging billions of yuan to foster local AI industries. Take the city of Beijing, which invested heavily in developing its AI ecosystem, focusing on areas such as autonomous vehicles and smart city technologies, emerging as an AI development hub for China and the world. In the novel trilogy, writer Cixin Liu wrote about how an alien species tries to stop Earth’s progress by preventing the advancement of key technologies. The US tried to do something similar to China. In Liu’s novel, the Earth-alien conflict wipes out our solar system. One can only hope that the US-China trade war, leading to attempts to halt China’s AI advancements, will not lead to the same outcome.
Tokyo Electron Limited (OTCMKTS:TOELY) Short Interest Update
DC Edit | Indians don’t need larger families, only a better lifeBills clinch the AFC's No. 2 seed with a 40-14 rout of the undisciplined JetsNone
Jayden Daniels dazzles again as Commanders clinch a playoff spot by beating Falcons 30-24 in OT