The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently said that China filed 38,000 artificial intelligtion-related generative AI patents from 2014-23, while the United States filed 6,276 of the 50,000 patents filed by all countries. Of the 50,000 applications, 25 percent were filed last year.The top five inventor regions are: China (38,210 inventions), the United States (6,276 inventions), the Republic of Korea (4,155 inventions), Japan (3,409 inventions) and India (1,350 inventions).

Samsung Electronics expects its profits for the three months to June 2024 to jump 15-fold compared to the same period last year. An artificial intelligence (AI) boom has lifted the prices of advanced chips, driving up the firm's forecast for the second quarter. The South Korean tech giant is the world's largest maker of memory chips, smartphones and televisions. The announcement pushed Samsung shares up more than 2% during early trading hours in Seoul. The firm also reported a more than 10-fold jump in its profits for the first three months of this year. In this quarter, it said it is expecting its profit to rise to 10.4tn won ($7.54bn; £5.9bn), from 670bn won last year. That surpasses analysts' forecasts of 8.8tn won, according to LSEG SmartEstimate. "Right now we are seeing skyrocketing demand for AI chips in data centers and smartphones," said Marc Einstein, chief analyst at Tokyo-based research and advisory firm ITR Corporation. Optimism about AI is one reason for the broader market rally over the last year, which pushed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq in the United States to new records on Wednesday. The market value of chip-making giant Nvidia surged past $3tn last month, briefly holding the top spot as the world's most valuable company. "The AI boom which massively boosted Nvidia is also boosting Samsung's earnings and indeed those of the entire sector," Mr Einstein added. Samsung Electronics is the flagship unit of South Korean conglomerate Samsung Group. Next week, the tech company faces a possible three-day strike, which is expected to start on Monday. A union of workers is demanding a more transparent system for bonuses and time off.

On the afternoon of July 8, local time, the Vietnamese Ministry of Health issued a notice stating that an 18-year-old girl in the country died of diphtheria. The Ministry of Health asked Nghe An Province and Bac Giang Province to take urgent action to control the epidemic. Diphtheria is an acute respiratory infectious disease caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which is mainly transmitted through droplets and can also be indirectly transmitted by contact with objects containing Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Severe cases may show symptoms of poisoning throughout the body, complicated by myocarditis and peripheral nerve paralysis.

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

New York CNN — A record number of passengers are expected to pass through US airports this holiday travel week. You’d think this would be a great time to run an airline. You’d be wrong. Airlines face numerous problems, including higher costs, such as fuel, wages and interest rates. And problems at Boeing mean airlines have too few planes to expand routes to support a record numbers of flyers. Strong bookings can’t entirely offset that financial squeeze. The good news for passengers is they will be spared most of the problems hurting airlines’ bottom lines — at least in the near term. Airfares are driven far more by supply and demand, not their costs. But in the long run, the airlines’ difficulties could mean fewer airline routes, less passenger choice and ultimately a less pleasant flying experience. Profit squeeze Industry analysts expect airlines to report a drop of about $2 billion in profit, or 33%, when they report financial results for the April to June period this year. That would follow losses of nearly $800 million across the industry in the first quarter. Labor costs and jet fuel prices, the airlines’ two largest costs, are both sharply higher this year. Airline pilot unions just landed double-digit pay hikes to make up for years of stagnant wages; flight attendant unions now want comparable raises. Jet fuel prices are climbing because of higher demand in the summer. According to the International Air Transport Association’s jet fuel monitor, prices are up 1.4% in just the last week, and about 4% in the last month. Adding to the airlines’ problems is the crisis at Boeing, as well as the less-well-publicized problems with some of the jet engines on planes from rival Airbus. Since an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max jet lost a door plug on a January 5 flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane 10 minutes after takeoff, the Federal Aviation Administration has limited how many jets Boeing can make over concerns about quality and safety. As a result, airlines have dramatically reduced plans to expand their fleets and replace older planes with more fuel efficient models. In some cases, airlines have asked pilots to take time off without pay, and carriers such as Southwest and United have announced pilot hiring freezes. In addition to the problems at Boeing, hundreds of the Airbus A220 and A320 family of jets globally have also been grounded for at least a month or more to deal with engine problems. Just about all the planes with those engines have been out of sevice for at least a few days to undergo examinations. And Airbus has also cut back the number of planes it expects to deliver to airlines this year because of supply chain problems. Problems for flyers For now, competition in the industry remains fierce: There are 6% more seats available this month compared to July of 2023, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. And that’s helped to drive fares down — good news for passengers, but more bad news for airlines’ profits. Southwest announced in April that it would stop serving four airports to trim costs — Bellingham International Airport in Washington state, Cozumel International Airport in Mexico, Syracuse Hancock International Airport in New York and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Many more cities lost air service during the financial hard times of the pandemic. While upstart airlines are driving prices lower for travelers, those discount carriers might not survive long term. As the major carriers are making less money, many of the upstarts are flat-out losing money.