Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1639
The number of visitors to the Canton Fair hit a new high, but the turnover did not keep up
The 133rd Canton Fair was held from April 15 to May 5. During the period, 35,000 companies participated in the exhibition, and a total of 2.9 million people entered the exhibition hall, all of which reached new highs. Among them, 370,000 people entered the museum on the first day.
However, the turnover did not increase accordingly. According to official statistics, the cumulative export turnover of the exhibition was 25.1 billion US dollars, about 84.5% of the same period in 2019. Among them, 86% are on-site transactions, and the rest are online transactions.
The Canton Fair has a long history. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 became a catalyst for the Canton Fair. Until the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, the turnover of the Canton Fair in the spring of each year has been increasing (except for 2003, which was affected by SARS).
According to official statistics, more than 80% of the visitors on the first day were domestic buyers. Some exhibitors said that not all of them came to purchase, some of them came to visit and study, some to understand the market, and some to promote their business along the way. Since 2021, the Canton Fair has relaxed the procurement qualifications for mainland companies to enter the exhibition hall. Before the epidemic, it was only open to companies from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas, and a small number of mainland companies were invited.
Due to various reasons, there are fewer and fewer European and American guests. Exhibitors concluded that this year’s Canton Fair saw more than 70% fewer European and American buyers, and two-thirds fewer interested guests. Both traffic and high overseas inventory pressures may have an impact. According to a Caixin report, some exhibitors mentioned visa and flight issues. Some of them contacted old customers in advance and were told that there was a queue for visas and that visa fees had also risen sharply. The proportion of merchants from Russia, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and the Middle East has increased.
Merchants also tend to be conservative when placing orders. According to “China Economic Weekly”, some exhibitors said that in the past, customers might negotiate on the spot, and send an email to pay a deposit when they return home. Now customers who have been with them for several years may not necessarily place an order. There is also less bulk buying. As we mentioned before, Europe and the United States are destocking . On the other hand, China’s exports to ASEAN and Russia increased . ( Lin Guangying)
“Father of artificial intelligence” talks about AI risks: it is better to worry about the nuclear bomb crisis
In March of this year, it is said that Musk signed an open letter with thousands of scientists and business leaders , calling for a moratorium on AI research that is more powerful than GPT-4. So far, the letter has collected more than 27,000 signatures. Due to the lack of sufficient authentication mechanism, the signature is easy to be counterfeited.
Even if they were genuine signatures, German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber (Jürgen Schmidhuber) thinks these voices are misleading, because whether people like it or not, there is a conflict between governments, scientific research institutions and companies. The AI race has begun, and since it is unavoidable, we should learn to accept it.
Schmidhuber’s research on neural networks in the 1990s eventually developed into a language processing model LSTM (long short-term memory), which has been widely used in voice assistants and automatic translation software such as Apple Siri and Google Translate. Before ChatGPT appeared, Bloomberg Businessweek called it the most commercially successful AI achievement. Schmidhuber is therefore known by some as the “father of artificial intelligence” or “the father of deep learning”.
Unlike other pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, Schmidhuber does not believe that AI research should stop at all. He said that 95% of the time, the purpose of artificial intelligence research is no different from other scientific research, all of which are to make human beings live longer, healthier and easier. He worries more about “the old nuclear bomb crisis” than “the new artificial intelligence with small risks.”
Schmidhuber regards AI more as a tool. He said that the same tool can be used to improve life, but it can also be used by evil people. The best way to fight against the so-called malicious use of AI is to develop better AI tools. Schmidhuber also believes that artificial intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence, but even if they are smarter than humans, they will lose interest in humans at some point. Schmidhuber once talked to Musk for hours, and tried to use this point of view to allay the latter’s fear of AI.
Last week, in order to be able to talk more freely about the risks of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, the Turing Award winner known as the “Godfather of AI”, announced his departure from Google. Musk, who stopped communicating with Google founder Larry Page a few years ago because of AI issues, said he believed that Page did not take AI safety seriously, but was trying to create a “digital god.” (Qiu Hao)
Why is the White House’s debt reaching the ceiling again?
The scale of US government debt has reached a record 31.4 trillion US dollars, and it is almost reaching the debt ceiling.
In this regard, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (Janet Yellen) recently stated that if Congress does not raise the federal government’s debt ceiling, the White House will face a shortage of funds, which may lead to a crisis of economic or sharp decline. Yellen said in a letter to the Speaker of the California House of Representatives that the debt ceiling trigger point (X-date) is expected to be brought forward to early June.
The astronomical figures are mainly affected by the large-scale tax cuts of the Trump administration and the large-scale fiscal stimulus policies launched by the Biden administration during the epidemic. For example, the US$1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan”, the US$2.25 trillion infrastructure plan, the “Inflation Reduction Act” to stimulate the new energy industry, and so on.
The advance of the X-date this time is also related to the lower-than-expected tax revenue in the United States in April. Funds used by the White House to pay bills rose by just $108.47 billion last month, below the usual range of $150 billion to $200 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Congress must reach an agreement on the debt ceiling issue in the next month to avoid a government shutdown. But the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House are deadlocked over a plan to raise the debt ceiling. The Biden administration has proposed an unconditional increase of the U.S. debt ceiling to $51 trillion, but House Republicans offered a fraction of what the Democrats offered: either raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, or extend the suspension of the debt ceiling until the end of March next year , and require the government to cut spending and policy incentives.
Since 1960, the US debt ceiling has been raised, extended or modified 78 times, but the US government has never actually defaulted on its debt. For example, the debt ceiling deadlock in 2011 led to a government shutdown and credit rating downgrade, and the 2018 budget deadlock led to a 35-day government shutdown, which hit the real economy, and ultimately ended in bipartisan compromise. (Intern Fu Xiaoyu)
ChatGPT can replace some, but also relies on a lot of human work
A few days ago, two OpenAI contractors told the media how they participated in training ChatGPT. 34-year-old Alexej Savreux mainly tags pictures and tells AI what text to generate next. He has worked as a fast food clerk and cleaner before. Now the starting salary of this job is $15, which is higher than the local average salary, but there are no benefits.
Jatin Kumar, who just graduated from college and has his own software startup, is mainly responsible for training dialogue: according to the task, ask questions to the chat program and give feedback to correct the answer. Kumar said that there are other people who are responsible for classifying the conversations reported by users and feeding them back to the AI for further training.
It has long been known that AI still relies on a lot of human work. As of January, OpenAI had about 375 employees. CEO Sam Altman said the figure doesn’t include contract workers and doesn’t reflect its size or ambitions.
Contract work means job insecurity with little to no benefits. It’s entry-level, starting at $15 an hour, but could also “benefit humanity,” reads a job ad for a “senior AI data trainer.” “Think of it as a language arts teacher or a personal tutor in world-leading technology.” .
In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, OpenAI hired local people through the middleman Sama to mark content involving hate speech, pornography, abuse, violence, etc. Wages are much lower, though, ranging from $1.32 to $1.44 an hour, according to media reports, while local operators earn a minimum of $1.52 an hour. It is also reported that OpenAI also employs about 1,000 contract workers engaged in similar work in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
OpenAI confirmed that Kenyan employees helped train a sensitive content detection tool that has been applied to ChatGPT. However, many media have reported that some employees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to long-term processing of extreme information. Last Monday, about 150 Kenyan employees who worked on training data for ChatGPT, Facebook, and TikTok voted to unionize, citing low wages and trauma. Although unions may cost them their jobs.
The nonprofit Partnership on AI (PAI) released industry guidelines last year, including paying AI data workers at least a local living wage. But so far only Google subsidiary DeepMind has publicly promised to do so. (Lin Guangying)
Know it later丨The pharmaceutical company that developed the domestic herpes zoster vaccine lost about 1.3 billion yuan in two years
There are at least 2 IPOs for A shares this week.
- Jingwei shares: power engineering and geographic information technology service provider. Jingwei Co., Ltd. provides power consulting design and power engineering construction services for customers such as State Grid’s subsidiaries, Inner Mongolia Electric Power and Power Design Institute affiliated to China Power Construction, and provides geographic information data services and geographic information smart application services for customers such as the three major operators. Nearly 90% of the company’s revenue comes from power engineering technology service business, and about 10% of revenue comes from geographic information technology service business. It closed up 11.11% today.
- Haidar: Manufacturer of precision slide rails. Haidar is a supplier of domestic and foreign home appliance manufacturers such as Haier, Hisense, Midea, and Panasonic, and also provides server slide rails to server manufacturers such as Huawei and H3C. Haidar’s main products are home appliance slide rails and server slide rails. Home appliance slide rails contribute over 90% of its revenue, while server slide rails are its future growth point.
Hong Kong stocks have at least 3 IPOs this week.
- Green Bamboo Bio: an innovative drug company. Founded in 2001, Green Bamboo Biotech has not yet approved commercial sales of products and income. The products under research include vaccines and biological agents, and it has lost about 1.3 billion yuan in the past two years. Green Bamboo Bio is developing a herpes zoster vaccine. At present, there are only two herpes zoster vaccines approved in the world, and only one imported vaccine has been approved in China, and the domestic vaccine has not yet been approved. The price of Green Bamboo’s shingles vaccine is expected to be about half of the unit price of imported vaccines. It closed down 32.93% today.
- Yijun Group: subcontractor of passive fire protection engineering in Hong Kong, China. The company primarily designs, selects, procures and installs suitable materials and components for buildings to prevent fire effects. Passive fireproof materials and components include fireproof boards, fireproof paints and fireproof mortars.
- Pulushi Group: marketing service provider. Puleshi mainly provides on-site sales and marketing services for leading fast-moving consumer brands and distributors that conduct business in offline retail stores such as supermarkets and department stores. The business income accounts for about 70% of its revenue on average.
There is at least one IPO in US stocks this week.
- Strong Global Entertainment: American movie screen manufacturer. The company provides projection screens and ancillary services to theater operators including IMAX, Cinemark and AMC, and its Strong Studios division also produces feature films and related content. (Intern Chang Junfei)
OTHER NEWS
The joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council stated that the possibility of a large-scale epidemic is unlikely.
On the afternoon of May 8, the joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council held a press conference. The spokesperson of the National Health and Medical Commission, Mi Feng, said that the current domestic epidemic situation is generally sporadic and that the new crown epidemic no longer constitutes a “public emergency of international concern”. After the “Sanitary Incident”, all localities and departments should continue to implement various measures of “Class B and Control”. Liu Qing, deputy director of the Department of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control of the National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention, said that it is expected that the epidemic situation in some areas may rebound slightly after the “May 1st” holiday, and the number of places where clustered epidemics occur may increase, but the possibility of large-scale epidemics is low. It will not have a significant impact on medical treatment and social operations in the short term.
According to a paper released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention last week, as of March this year, among the 189 countries or regions in the world where at least two waves of the new crown epidemic caused by the Omicron variant strain occurred, 181 countries and regions The peak of the second wave is significantly lower than the peak of the first wave. On average, the peak of the second wave is only one-fifth of the peak of the first wave.
The working group of the Internet Information Department has been stationed in Douyu to carry out centralized rectification supervision.
According to the State Cyberspace Administration of China, under the guidance of the State Cyberspace Administration of China, the Hubei Cyberspace Administration sent a working group to the Douyu platform today to carry out a one-month centralized rectification supervision. According to the report, this centralized rectification and supervision is aimed at serious ecological problems such as pornography and vulgarity on the Douyu platform. In the first quarter of this year, the cybersecurity and informatization department interviewed Internet platforms such as Douyu about the problem of poor platform management leading to the spread of harmful information.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the State Administration of Market Supervision issued a document requiring intermediaries to “reasonably reduce housing sales and leasing brokerage service fees.”
In the “Opinions on Regulating Real Estate Brokerage Services” jointly issued by the two ministries and commissions, it is proposed that the real estate brokerage service charges shall be determined by the parties to the transaction based on the service content, service quality, and factors such as market supply and demand. Real estate brokerage agencies should reasonably reduce housing sales and leasing brokerage service fees. Encourage the implementation of tiered pricing based on the principle that the higher the transaction price, the lower the service fee rate. The brokerage service fee shall be borne by both parties to the transaction.
The “Opinions” also require that real estate brokerage institutions with market dominance shall not abuse their market dominance to charge brokerage service fees at unfairly high prices. The real estate agency decides the charging standard independently.
Lacking top-level AI chips, Chinese companies such as Huawei and Baidu are trying their best to make up for the lack of computing power.
According to the information learned by the market, the methods these companies have adopted include restricting the use of previously reserved A100 by departments other than the AI large model team, and converting several less advanced chips (such as Nvidia A800 and H800 with weakened performance, old A generation of V100, domestic chips, etc.) are combined to simulate the performance of NVIDIA’s most advanced processors, and software technology is used to reduce the computational intensity of training large models.
BYD will produce electric vehicles in Vietnam, denying that there is a “queue for resignation” at the Changsha plant.
Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, expressed the hope that the Vietnamese government will complete the investment permit for the electric vehicle manufacturing and assembly project as soon as possible. A BYD spokesperson also confirmed to the media the plan to produce electric vehicles in Vietnam. Wang Chuanfu said that BYD will use the best technology to expand into the field of electric vehicle manufacturing and assembly, serve the Vietnamese market and export to Southeast Asia. Currently, BYD has an electronics factory in Phu Tho City, Phu Tho Province, Vietnam, which mainly produces tablet computers and optical lenses.
At the same time, some media reported that workers at BYD’s Wangcheng and Yuhua factories in Changsha “resigned in batches” mainly due to reduced workload and reduced wages at this stage. BYD responded that this statement was not true. BYD said that the recruitment of personnel in the Changsha Park is currently proceeding normally. The company’s order sales are good, and its market share has risen steadily. The sales volume from January to April this year ranked first in the industry.
The total retail sales of social consumer goods in Zibo in the first quarter was 2.5 percentage points higher than that of the whole country.
According to Zibo’s economic data for the first quarter, the total retail sales of consumer goods reached 31.36 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8.3%, 2.7 and 2.5 percentage points higher than the province’s and the country’s respectively. In the past two months, the popularity of topics such as “Zibo barbecue” has continued to rise, coupled with the promotion of Zibo’s official online and offline positive measures, “Zibo” has become a new top trend on the Internet. During the “May 1st” period, Zibo Station sent a total of 240,000 passengers, an increase of 55% over the same period in 2019. In addition, after Zibo’s “Duck Head Brother” became popular, the live broadcast helped the families who were looking for relatives release the news of their relatives.
The People’s Bank of China has increased its gold holdings for six consecutive months, and its foreign exchange reserves have increased for two consecutive months.
According to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, as of the end of April, the scale of China’s foreign exchange reserves was 3.2048 billion US dollars, an increase of 0.66% from the end of March, which is an increase of 2.7% over the same period last year. At the end of April, the gold reserve was 66.76 million ounces (2076.47 tons), an increase of 0.39% from the previous month, and an increase of 6.6% from six months ago. We mentioned earlier that global central banks buy gold, and the top five gold buyers last year were all developing countries. The last time China increased its gold holdings was in September 2019.
Cainiao, who was rumored to be listed again, said that he would not comment on market rumors.
According to market news, Cainiao, a logistics subsidiary of Alibaba, plans to IPO in Hong Kong, China, in early 2024, aiming to raise up to US$2 billion. In response, the relevant person in charge of Ali Group Cainiao responded that he would not comment on market rumors. Earlier, it was reported that the listing may be as early as the end of 2023, with a valuation of more than 20 billion US dollars.
The cumulative global box office this year has exceeded US$10 billion, and China is the largest single market.
According to Maoyan Professional Edition data, the cumulative global box office in 2023 has exceeded 10 billion U.S. dollars, which is more than half of the total global box office of 18.199 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. Among them, the cumulative box office in mainland China was 2.952 billion US dollars, temporarily ranking first in the box office of a single market in the world, and “Avatar: Way of Water”, “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “River River” temporarily ranked the top three in the global box office list.
Sea, which returned to profitability, announced a 5% pay rise for most employees.
Founder Li Xiaodong said in a memo to employees that starting from July, all employees who joined the company before the end of March will receive a 5% salary increase. He said that Sea has completed its self-sufficiency goal several months ahead of schedule. increased every quarter. Sea took many cost-cutting measures last year, including wage suspension and substantial layoffs, which helped the company finally make its first profit in the fourth quarter.
Vice could be sold for $400 million, avoiding bankruptcy.
Vice, a North American digital media whose readers are mainly young people, is expected to avoid bankruptcy and liquidation. They are close to reaching an agreement with creditors such as Fortress Investment Group to sell at a valuation of US$400 million. In 2015, Vice rejected a $3 billion offer from Disney, and its valuation peaked at $5.7 billion in 2017. Vice, which is chronically loss-making, tried and failed to raise capital by merging with a SPAC. In late April, Vice announced layoffs and the closure of its high-profile news program.
UBS is shrinking its executive leadership team at Credit Suisse.
Only CFO Dixit Joshi, COO Francesca McDonagh and Swiss business head André Helfenstein, who joined Credit Suisse late last year, are likely to remain on Credit Suisse’s previous executive leadership team, according to people familiar with the matter. , was not affected by the previous Credit Suisse scandal. UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti (Sergio Ermotti) plans to announce the new senior team this week, and believes that the new team will play a major role in the integration of mergers and acquisitions.
This article is transferred from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1639
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.