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Israeli strike kills a senior Hezbollah commander in south Lebanon

BEIRUT/JERUSALEM July 3 (Reuters) - An Israeli strike killed one of Hezbollah's top commanders in south Lebanon on Wednesday, prompting retaliatory rocket fire by the Iran-backed group into Israel as their dangerously poised conflict rumbled on.

The Israeli military said it had struck and eliminated Hezbollah's Mohammed Nasser, calling him commander of a unit responsible for firing from southwestern Lebanon at Israel.

Nasser, killed by an airstrike near the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, was the one of the most senior Hezbollah commanders to die yet in the conflict, two security sources in Lebanon said.

Sparked by the Gaza war, the hostilities have raised concerns about a wider and ruinous conflict between the heavily armed adversaries, prompting U.S. diplomatic efforts aimed at deescalation.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israeli forces were hitting Hezbollah "very hard every day" and will be ready to take any action necessary against the group, though the preference is to reach a negotiated arrangement.

Hezbollah began firing at Israeli targets at the border after its Palestinian ally Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, declaring support for the Palestinians and saying it would cease fire when Israel stops its Gaza offensive.

Hezbollah announced at least two attacks in response to what it called "the assassination", saying it launched 100 Katyusha rockets at an Israeli military base and its Iranian-made Falaq missiles at another base in the town of Kiryat Shmona near the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Israel's Channel 12 broadcaster reported that dozens of rockets were fired into northern Israel from Lebanon. There were no reports of casualties. The Israeli Defence Ministry said that air raid sirens sounded in several parts of northern Israel.

Israel's military did not give a number of rockets launched but said most of them fell in open areas, some were intercepted, while a number of launches fell in the area of Kiryat Shmona.

Google Pixel 9 series phones will use Qualcomm ultrasonic fingerprint recognition technology
Google's new generation of flagship smartphone Pixel 9 series is expected to be officially released in mid-August, and the new machine is likely to be equipped with ultrasonic fingerprint recognition technology for the first time to replace the original optical fingerprint recognition. According to core intelligence, Google Pixel 9 series will use the same Qualcomm 3D Sonic Gen 2 ultrasonic fingerprint recognition sensor as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. This ultrasonic technology under the screen fingerprint sensor is Qualcomm released at the CES2021 conference, compared with the previous generation of solutions, the module thickness is further reduced to 0.2mm, while the scanning area is expanded to 8mm×8mm, that is, the recognition area is increased by 77%. This will also allow users to realize fingerprint recognition without having to point their fingertips 100% accurately at the identification area indicated on the screen.
Samsung Electronics wins cutting-edge AI chip order from Japan's Preferred Networks
SEOUL, July 9 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), opens new tab said on Tuesday it won an order from Japanese artificial intelligence company Preferred Networks to make chips for AI applications using the South Korean firm's 2-nanometre foundry process and advanced chip packaging service. It is the first order Samsung has revealed for its cutting-edge 2-nanometre chip contract manufacturing process. Samsung did not elaborate on the size of the order. The chips will be made using high-tech chip architecture known as gate all-around (GAA) and multiple chips will be integrated in one package to enhance inter-connection speed and reduce size, Samsung said in a statement. South Korea's Gaonchips Co (399720.KQ), opens new tab designed the chips, Samsung said. The chips will go toward Preferred Networks' high-performance computing hardware for generative AI technologies such as large language models, Junichiro Makino, Preferred Networks vice president and chief technology officer of computing architecture, said in the statement.
Exclusive: India's Paytm gets government panel nod to invest in payments arm, sources say
NEW DELHI, July 9 (Reuters) - India's beleaguered Paytm (PAYT.NS), opens new tab has secured approval from a government panel that oversees investments linked to China to invest 500 million rupees ($6 million) in a key subsidiary, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The approval, which still has to be vetted by the finance ministry, will remove the main stumbling block to the unit, Paytm Payment Services, resuming normal business operations. Paytm Payment Services is one of the biggest remaining parts of the fintech firm's business, accounting for a quarter of consolidated revenue in the financial year ended March 2023. A separate unit, Paytm Payments Bank, was wound down this year by order of the central bank due to persistent compliance issues, triggering a meltdown in Paytm's stock. The government panel had earlier held back approval due to concerns about the 9.88% stake in Paytm held by China's Ant Group. India has intensified scrutiny of Chinese businesses since a 2020 border clash between the two countries. All in all, Paytm has been waiting for the nod from the government panel for about two years and without it, it would have had to also wind down its payment services business, which was forbidden from taking on new customers in March 2023. Once the approval has been formalised, it will be able to seek a so-called "payment aggregator" licence from the Reserve Bank of India. The sources, two of whom are government sources, declined to be identified as the decision has not been formally announced. India's foreign, home, finance and industries ministries, whose representatives sit on the panel, did not reply to emails seeking comment. A Paytm spokesperson said the company does not comment on market speculation. "We will continue to make disclosures in compliance with our obligations under the SEBI Regulations, and will inform the exchanges when there is any new material information to share," the spokesperson said.
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
Autonomous driving is not so hot
From the perspective of the two major markets of the United States and China, the autonomous driving industry has fallen into a low tide in recent years. For example, last year, Cruise Origin, one of the twin stars of Silicon Valley autonomous driving companies and once valued at more than $30 billion, failed completely, its Robotaxi (driverless taxi) operation qualification was revoked, and autonomous driving models have been discontinued. However, as a new track with the deep integration of digital economy and real economy, automatic driving is a must answer: on the one hand, automatic driving will accelerate the process of technology commercialization and industrialization, and become an important part of the game of major powers; On the other hand, autonomous driving will also promote industrial transformation and upgrading by improving the mass travel service experience, seeking new engines for urban development, and injecting new vitality into the urban economy.