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MOFCOM refutes EU comments on anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EVs

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) on Monday rejected remarks from the EU Ambassador to China on the anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles (EVs).

MOFCOM said China had expressed strong opposition through various channels since October 2023 and has always advocated for handling economic and trade frictions through dialogue and consultation in order to maintain the overall strategic partnership between China and Europe.

EU Ambassador to China Jorge Toledo claimed on Sunday that the EU has been trying to engage with China for months regarding the imposition of tariffs on Chinese EVs but that China had only recently sought to initiate discussions. This is false, the spokesperson said.

MOFCOM said that after the European Commission (EC) officially filed a case, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao sent a letter to European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis on October 24, 2023, expressing hope to resolve the case through dialogue and negotiation.

On November 13, 2023, Wang sent another letter to the European side proposing negotiation suggestions.

In February 2024, Wang met with Dombrovskis during the WTO's 13th Ministerial Conference face to face and proposed dialogue and negotiation with the European side.

On May 19, 2024, Wang reiterated the hope for dialogue and negotiation to resolve the case in a letter to the European side.

Additionally, Chinese technical experts have been sending signals to the European side regarding on-site inspections, hearings, and other channels since the case was filed, expressing willingness to resolve trade frictions through dialogue and negotiation.

On the day the preliminary ruling was announced on June 12, Dombrovskis replied to Wang in a letter, expressing the desire for both sides to strengthen dialogue to resolve the case.

On June 22, Wang held a video conference with Dombrovskis, and they agreed to start negotiations on the EU's anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EVs.

Subsequently, China sent a working group to Europe for negotiations on June 23, and multiple rounds of technical consultations were held simultaneously via video.

MOFCOM said that China has shown the utmost sincerity and hopes that the European side will meet China halfway, show sincerity, and push forward the negotiation process to reach a mutually acceptable solution as soon as possible.

China has always believed that trade protectionist measures are not conducive to the development of global green industries and automotive industry cooperation. Efforts should be made to adhere to dialogue and cooperation to promote economic green transformation, rather than creating divisions and disrupting global industrial and supply chains, MOFCOM said.

China firmly opposes any unilateralism and protectionism that politicizes and weaponizes economic and trade issues, and will take all necessary measures to defend its own interests against any abuse of rules and suppression of China, MOFCOM added.

Former Microsoft CEO Ballmer wealth surpassed Gates, he only did one thing
On July 1, former Microsoft CEO and President Steve Ballmer surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for the first time on the Bloomberg list of the world's richest people to become the sixth richest person in the world. According to the data, as of the same day, Ballmer's net worth reached $157.2 billion, while Gates's wealth was $156.7 billion, falling to seventh place. The latest figures, as of July 6, show that Ballmer's wealth has grown further to $161 billion, and Gates' wealth is $159 billion. This is the first time Ballmer's net worth has surpassed Gates', and it is also the rare time in history that an employee's net worth has surpassed that of a company founder. Unlike Musk, Jeff Bezos and others, Ballmer's wealth was not accumulated through entrepreneurial success as a business founder, but simply because he chose to hold Microsoft "indefinitely." As Fortune previously reported, Ballmer is the only individual with a net worth of more than $100 billion as an employee rather than a founder.
Boeing will be fined 3.5 billion yuan for "conspiracy to defraud" in two air crashes. Will the company slide into the abyss?
Taking the initiative to plead guilty to Boeing is not small, but it can avoid being exposed to more problems when it is publicly tried, which is a "minor penalty" for Boeing. So now the families of the crash victims are very opposed to the move, demanding that the trial continue to be open. But after all, Boeing is America's oldest industrial son, whether it is Trump or Biden, and finally have to gently put down, give a chance. The Justice Department had been seeking a guilty plea from Boeing as early as May, when it launched the investigation. After all, if you plead guilty, you only need to pay a fine, and if you really go to court, you don't know how many quality problems Boeing will be exposed by your witnesses. Boeing also knew it had too many flaws, and paying a $243.6 million fine and bringing in a third party to monitor its compliance for three years, totaling more than $400 million in additional expenses, is small change for Boeing. Given Boeing's style in the past few years, this fine may not even force Boeing to tighten production line management. Just this kind of "reconciliation" that completely excludes the victims of the crash can not get the families to agree. Paul Cassell, an attorney for the victims' families, said he plans to ask the federal judge overseeing the case to reject the agreement and "hold this case to an open trial so that all the facts of this case can be presented in a fair and public manner before a jury." The demand is reasonable, but the US judge will most likely side with Boeing.
Stanford AI project team apologizes for plagiarizing Chinese model
An artificial intelligence (AI) team at Stanford University apologized for plagiarizing a large language model (LLM) from a Chinese AI company, which became a trending topic on the Chinese social media platforms, where it sparked concern among netizens on Tuesday. We apologize to the authors of MiniCPM [the AI model developed by a Chinese company] for any inconvenience that we caused for not doing the full diligence to verify and peer review the novelty of this work, the multimodal AI model Llama3-V's developers wrote in a post on social platform X. The apology came after the team from Stanford University announced Llama3-V on May 29, claiming it had comparable performance to GPT4-V and other models with the capability to train for less than $500. According to media reports, the announcement published by one of the team members quickly received more than 300,000 views. However, some netizens from X found and listed evidence of how the Llama3-V project code was reformatted and similar to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, an LLM developed by a Chinese technology company, ModelBest, and Tsinghua University. Two team members, Aksh Garg and Siddharth Sharma, reposted a netizen's query and apologized on Monday, while claiming that their role was to promote the model on Medium and X (formerly Twitter), and that they had been unable to contact the member who wrote the code for the project. They looked at recent papers to validate the novelty of the work but had not been informed of or were aware of any of the work by Open Lab for Big Model Base, which was founded by the Natural Language Processing Lab at Tsinghua University and ModelBest, according to their responses. They noted that they have taken all references to Llama3-V down in respect to the original work. In response, Liu Zhiyuan, chief scientist at ModelBest, spoke out on the Chinese social media platform Zhihu, saying that the Llama3-V team failed to comply with open-source protocols for respecting and honoring the achievements of previous researchers, thus seriously undermining the cornerstone of open-source sharing. According to a screenshot leaked online, Li Dahai, CEO of ModelBest, also made a post on his WeChat moment, saying that the two models were verified to have highly similarity in terms of providing answers and even the same errors, and that some relevant data had not yet been released to the public. He said the team hopes that their work will receive more attention and recognition, but not in this way. He also called for an open, cooperative and trusting community environment. Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Christopher Manning also responded to Garg's explanation on Sunday, commenting "How not to own your mistakes!" on X. As the incident became a trending topic on Sina Weibo, Chinese netizens commented that academic research should be factual, but the incident also proves that the technology development in China is progressing. Global Times
United Airlines Boeing 757 loses tire during takeoff
United Airlines confirmed that a tire fell off a Boeing 757 passenger plane when it took off from Los Angeles International Airport in the early morning of July 8, local time. It is reported that there has been no report of any material damage or casualties in this accident. United Airlines said in a statement that the aircraft tire has been found and the investigation is ongoing. There were 174 passengers and 7 crew members on the flight involved. The flight left Los Angeles International Airport at around 7:15 on July 8 and flew to Denver. Unlike the aircraft tire falling incident on a United Airlines flight in March, the pilot of this flight continued the journey to Denver and landed smoothly there.
WhatsApp's new feature will let Meta AI edit your photos for you
WhatsApp beta version 2.24.14.20 has a new feature that allows users to share photos with Meta AI. The AI chatbot will analyze uploaded images and provide information or context about the content. Users may be able to request specific edits to their photos directly through Meta AI, though the extent of this feature is still unknown. As the battle for AI dominance heats up, Meta is adding a new trick to its AI chatbot, Meta AI, which is already part of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. While Meta AI already has impressive text capabilities, such as replying to questions, suggesting captions, and holding conversations, users cannot currently share or upload photos to the Meta AI chat. WaBetaInfo has uncovered the exciting new feature in the WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.24.14.20. This feature will allow Meta AI to interact with photos shared by users, reply to photos, and even edit them. As shown in the attached screenshot, WhatsApp is testing a new camera button in the Meta AI chat, designed to function similarly to the camera button in regular chats. This addition will allow users to manually share photos with Meta AI, a capability that is currently unavailable. With this new functionality, users will be able to ask questions about their photos, presumably allowing users to ask the AI to identify objects or locations or provide context about the photo’s content. Moreover, the screenshot suggests that Meta AI will also offer the option to edit photos, enabling users to make changes to their images directly within the chat by sharing a prompt. The exact scope of this image editing feature remains unclear, leaving us to wonder if it will be limited to simple tweaks or if it will unleash a powerful AI-driven photo editing suite. The possibilities are both exciting and intriguing, and this feature could definitely be a big hit, especially if it performs as promised. While this new image-sharing feature would mean Meta will analyze and face-scan the photos you upload, the screenshot includes a disclaimer indicating that users will have the option to delete their photos whenever they want. As of now, it seems that the feature is still in development, so it might be some time before we finally get to see it roll out publicly. Recently, we also reported about WhatsApp working on an “Imagine Me” feature that would allow Meta AI to generate AI avatars of you based on a set of your photos. WhatsApp in our newsletters WhatsApp is a leading messaging app, keep up to date on the latest, and learn about more Android apps today!