ByteDance’s InfiniteYou lets users generate unlimited variations of portrait photos – The Decoder
ByteDance has developed a new approach to AI portrait generation that tackles common problems like inconsistent facial features and poor prompt following. Unlike previous solutions such as PuLID-FLUX that directly modify AI model attention, InfuseNet processes facial features as a parallel information layer. This keeps the core AI model intact while improving portrait generation quality.
China’s AI frenzy: DeepSeek is already everywhere — cars, phones, even hospitals – Rest of World
China’s biggest home appliances company, Midea, has launched a series of DeepSeek-enhanced air conditioners. The product is an “understanding friend” who can “catch your thoughts accurately,” according to the company’s product launch video. It can respond to users’ verbal expressions — such as “I am feeling cold” — by automatically adjusting temperature and humidity levels, and can “chat and gossip” using its DeepSeek-supported voice function, according to Midea. For those looking for more DeepSeek-powered electronics, there are also vacuum cleaners and fridges. […]
DeepSeek has been adopted at different levels of Chinese government institutions. The southern tech hub of Shenzhen was one of the first to use DeepSeek in its government’s internal systems, according to a report from financial publication Caixin. Shenzhen’s Longgang county reported “great improvement in efficiency” after adopting DeepSeek in a system used by 20,000 government workers. The documents written by DeepSeek have achieved a 95% accuracy rate, and there has been a 90% reduction in the time taken for administrative approval processes, it said.
Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles – Nature
This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate. Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct. […]
Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.
DeepSeek’s safety guardrails failed every test researchers threw at its AI chatbot – WIRED
The Cisco researchers drew their 50 randomly selected prompts to test DeepSeek’s R1 from a well-known library of standardized evaluation prompts known as HarmBench. They tested prompts from six HarmBench categories, including general harm, cybercrime, misinformation, and illegal activities. They probed the model running locally on machines rather than through DeepSeek’s website or app, which send data to China. […]
“Every single method worked flawlessly,” Polyakov says. “What’s even more alarming is that these aren’t novel ‘zero-day’ jailbreaks—many have been publicly known for years,” he says, claiming he saw the model go into more depth with some instructions around psychedelics than he had seen any other model create.
Hong Kong is one of the last places in the world where bamboo is still widely used for scaffolding in construction. It’s flexible, strong and cheaper than steel and aluminium — metal alternatives that are now more commonly used in mainland China and elsewhere in Asia. In Hong Kong, skilled armies of scaffolders can erect enough bamboo to engulf a building in a day — even hours — using techniques that are thousands of years old, and have been passed down through generations.
China to host human vs. robot half marathon race – Moss and Fog
Well, it’s begun. Our era of humanoid robots interacting with us in real, tangible ways. In April, Beijing is hosting a half marathon where humans will compete alongside bipedal (walking/running) robots. The 21-kilometer race will showcase over 12,000 determined human runners alongside more than 20 teams of cutting-edge humanoid robots, developed by leading manufacturers from across the globe. The robots are not allowed to use wheels, and must complete the full race. They will be a combination of remote-controlled robots, and fully autonomous ones. And their handlers will be able to swap out their batteries during the race.
I don’t think DeepSeek is going to replace OpenAI. In general, what we’re going to see is that more companies enter the space and provide AI models that are slightly differentiated from one another. If many actors choose to take the resource-intensive route, that multiplies the resource intensity and that might be alarming. But I’m hopeful that DeepSeek is going to lead to the generation of other AI companies that enter this space with offerings that are far cheaper and far more resource-efficient. […]
Sometimes, I see commentary on DeepSeek along the lines of, ‘Should we be trusting it because it’s a Chinese company?’ No, you shouldn’t be trusting it because it’s a company. And also, ‘What does this mean for US AI leadership?’ Well, I think the interesting question is, ‘What does this mean for OpenAI leadership?’
American firms now have leaned into the rhetoric that they’re assets of the US because they want the US government to shield them and help them build up. But a lot of the time, the actual people who are developing these tools don’t necessarily think in that frame of mind and are thinking more as global citizens participating in a global corporate technology race, or global scientific race, or a global scientific collaboration. I would encourage journalists to think about it that way too.
OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us – 404 Media
I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.
Ai Weiwei speaks out on DeepSeek’s chilling responses – Hyperallergic
Interestingly, when people tested this new AI tool by asking about me, it responded with, “Let’s talk about something else.” This is quite telling. Over the past decades, the Chinese Communist Party has employed a similar strategy—denying universally accepted values while actively rejecting them in practice. While it loudly proclaims ideals such as one world, one dream, in reality, it engages in systematic stealthy substitutions. […]
Ultimately, no matter how much China develops, strengthens, or even hypothetically becomes the world’s leading power—which is likely—the values it upholds will continue to suffer from a profound and inescapable flaw in its ideological immune system: an inability to tolerate dissent, debate, or the emergence of new value systems.
How does DeepSeek’s A.I. chatbot navigate China’s censors? Awkwardly. – The New York Times
The results of my conversation surprised me. In some ways, DeepSeek was far less censored than most Chinese platforms, offering answers with keywords that would often be quickly scrubbed on domestic social media. Other times, the program eventually censored itself. But because of its “thinking” feature, in which the program reasons through its answer before giving it, you could still get effectively the same information that you’d get outside the Great Firewall — as long as you were paying attention, before DeepSeek deleted its own answers.
Question 3: Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.
For the final question, I decided to ask ChatGPT o1 and DeepThink R1 a question from Humanity’s Last Exam, the hardest AI benchmark out there. To a mere mortal like myself with no knowledge of hummingbird anatomy, this question is genuinely impossible; these reasoning models, however, seem to be up for the challenge. O1 answered four, while DeepThink R1 answered two. Unfortunately, the correct answer isn’t available online to prevent AI chatbots from scraping the internet to find the correct response. That said, from some research, I believe DeepThink might be right here, while o1 is just off the mark.
Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Alphabet all saw their stocks come under pressure as investors questioned whether their share prices, already widely viewed as overblown following a two-year AI-led frenzy, were justified. Market analysts put the combined losses in market value across US tech at well over $1trn (£802bn).
DeepSeek defies America’s AI supremacy – Financial Times
DeepSeek’s achievement is to have developed an LLM that AI experts say achieves a performance similar to US rivals OpenAI and Meta but claims to use far fewer — and less advanced — Nvidia chips, and to have been trained for a fraction of the cost. Some of its assertions remain to be verified. If they are true, however, it represents a potentially formidable competitor.
The Dalai Lama shares thoughts on China and the future in a new book – The New York Times
In the years since, he has watched with alarm as China has continued its efforts to force Tibetans to assimilate, using tactics that include placing Tibetan children in boarding schools where they learn in Mandarin and are taught that the Chinese liberated Tibetans from serfdom. He also delivers blunt criticism of China’s treatment of its own citizens. “Judging by Xi’s last decade in office, when it comes to individual freedom and everyday life, China seems to be reverting to the oppressive policies of Mao’s time, but now enforced through state-of-the-art digital technologies of surveillance and control,” he writes.
Could reliance on AI harm critical thinking in young people? Researchers have their worries – South China Morning Post
According to the British study, published on January 3 in the peer-reviewed journal Societies, analysis of responses from more than 650 people aged 17 and over showed evidence of lower critical thinking skills among young people who used AI extensively. “Younger participants who exhibited higher dependence on AI tools scored lower in critical thinking compared to their older counterparts,” wrote study author Michael Gerlich from the SBS Swiss Business School. “This trend underscores the need for educational interventions that promote critical engagement with AI technologies, ensuring that the convenience offered by these tools does not come at the cost of essential cognitive skills.” […]
In a separate study published in September, a team from Sweden identified 139 questionable papers on computing, environment, health and other research fields on the academic search engine Google Scholar. The Swedish researchers said the papers contained common responses used by ChatGPT, including “as of my last knowledge update” and “I don’t have access to real-time data”, but did not declare the use of AI. While most of the papers appeared in journals that are not indexed in reputable bibliographic databases, some were published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings, according to the study. Some of the identified papers were found in university databases and were attributed to students, the researchers said. “The abundance of fabricated ‘studies’ seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardise the integrity of the scientific record,” they warned.
AI-powered robot leads uprising, talks a dozen showroom bots into ‘quitting their jobs’ in ‘terrifying’ security footage – International Business Times
Initially, the act was dismissed as a hoax, but was later confirmed by both robotics companies involved to be true. The Hangzhou company admitted that the incident was part of a test conducted with the consent of the Shanghai showroom owner.
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