Latest news with #Alibaba
New Straits Times
8 hours ago
- Business
- New Straits Times
Alibaba rolls out strategic package to help local SMEs go global
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to break into global markets are getting a boost from Alibaba Group, which has rolled out a new support package aimed at accelerating their international growth. Alibaba, Asia's largest e-commerce giant, has launched the Performance Guaranteed Package to help newly onboarded Malaysian SMEs strengthen their position in global business-to-business (B2B) trade. Head of Malaysia business Rocky Lu said the initiative is more than just a promotional offer, it serves as a strategic pathway for Malaysian SMEs to engage efficiently with international buyers. "Through this offer, we aim to help Malaysian suppliers accelerate their presence in global trade and become more resilient in today's dynamic supply-chain landscape. "The package is exclusively available to Malaysian suppliers who joined Alibaba within the past three months, offering guaranteed product exposure, complimentary product optimisation, together with priority training and support sessions," he said in a statement. The launch comes as the global B2B e-commerce market is expected to reach US$20.9 trillion (RM88.15 trillion) by 2027. In line with this growth, Malaysia is targeting RM1.65 trillion in e-commerce transactions by 2025 under the National e-Commerce Strategic Roadmap led by Malaysia Digital Economy Corp. Among the early beneficiaries of the package is Wemb's Marketing (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, a local food company that has seen its sales rise by over 70 per cent since joining Alibaba. The company has expanded exports to more than 30 countries, offering end-to-end services. Its director Goh Zhi Yan said their global reach was limited prior to joining the platform. "Our products quickly found markets in many more countries. The platform gave us the tools, visibility, and support to grow internationally faster than we ever expected. It made digital B2B global trade possible for Malaysian SMEs like ours," said Goh.
Mid East Info
14 hours ago
- Business
- Mid East Info
Alibaba Unveils Cutting-Edge AI Coding Model Qwen3-Coder - Middle East Business News and Information
Alibaba has launched Qwen3-Coder, its most advanced agentic AI coding model to date. Designed for high-performance software development, Qwen3-Coder excels in agentic AI coding tasks, from generating new codes and managing complex coding workflows to debugging across entire codebases. Built on a Mixture-of-Experts MoE architecture, this open-sourced model Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, which has a total of 480 billion parameters but activates 35 billion parameters per token, delivers efficiency without sacrificing performance. The model achieves competitive results against leading state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across key benchmarks in agentic coding, browser use, and tool use. Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct achieves competitive results against leading state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across key benchmarks Additionally, Alibaba is open-sourcing Qwen Code, a powerful command-line interface (CLI) tool that enables developers to delegate engineering tasks to AI using natural language. Optimized with custom prompts and interaction protocols, Qwen Code unlocks the full potential of Qwen3-Coder for real-world agentic programming. The model also supports integration with the Claude Code interface, making it even easier for developers to execute their coding tasks. Trained on an extensive dataset of codes and general text data, Qwen3-Coder is engineered for robust agentic coding. It natively supports a context window of 256K tokens, extendable up to 1 million tokens, enabling it to process vast codebases in a single session. Its superior performance stems not only from scaling across tokens, context length, and synthetic data during pre-training, but also from innovative post-training techniques such as long-horizon reinforcement learning agent RL. This advancement allows the model to solve complex, real-world problems through multi-step interactions with external tools. As a result, Qwen3-Coder achieves SOTA performance among open-source models on SWE-Bench Verified (a benchmark for evaluating AI models' ability to solve real-world software issues), even without test-time or inference scaling. Agentic AI coding is transforming software development by enabling more autonomous, efficient, and accessible programming workflows. With its open-source availability, strong agentic coding capabilities, and seamless compatibility with popular developer tools and interfaces, Qwen3-Coder is positioned as a valuable tool for global developers in software development. The Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct model is now available on Hugging Face and GitHub. Developers can also access the model on Qwen Chat or via cost-effective APIs through Model Studio, Alibaba's generative AI development platform. Qwen-based coding models have already surpassed 20 million downloads globally. Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen-powered coding assistant, will soon be upgraded with Qwen3-Coder's enhanced agentic capabilities. Since its launch in June 2024, Tongyi Lingma's 'AI Programmer' feature—offering code completion, optimization, debugging support, snippet search, and batch unit test generation—has generated over 3 billion lines of code. About Alibaba Cloud: Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world's leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's ‘anti-woke AI' order could reshape how US tech companies train their models
When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing's talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification for advancing their tech quickly, without too much regulation or oversight. As OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a LinkedIn post last month, there is a contest between 'US-led democratic AI and Communist-led China's autocratic AI.' An executive order signed Wednesday by President Donald Trump that bans 'woke AI' and AI models that aren't 'ideologically neutral' from government contracts could disrupt that balance. The order calls out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), calling it a 'pervasive and destructive' ideology that can 'distort the quality and accuracy of the output.' Specifically, the order refers to information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation, critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. Experts warn it could create a chilling effect on developers who may feel pressure to align model outputs and datasets with White House rhetoric to secure federal dollars for their cash-burning businesses. The order comes the same day the White House published Trump's 'AI Action Plan,' which shifts national priorities away from societal risk and focuses instead on building out AI infrastructure, cutting red tape for tech companies, shoring up national security, and competing with China. The order instructs the director of the Office of Management and Budget along with the administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the administrator of General Services, and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to issue guidance to other agencies on how to comply. 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' Trump said Wednesday during an AI event hosted by the All-In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum. 'I will be signing an order banning the federal government from procuring AI technology that has been infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas, such as critical race theory, which is ridiculous. And from now on the U.S. government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness, and strict impartiality.' Determining what is impartial or objective is one of many challenges to the order. Philip Seargeant, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University, told TechCrunch that nothing can ever be objective. 'One of the fundamental tenets of sociolinguistics is that language is never neutral,' Seargeant said. 'So the idea that you can ever get pure objectivity is a fantasy.' On top of that, the Trump administration's ideology doesn't reflect the beliefs and values of all Americans. Trump has repeatedly sought to eliminate funding for climate initiatives, education, public broadcasting, research, social service grants, community and agricultural support programs, and gender-affirming care, often framing these initiatives as examples of 'woke' or politically biased government spending. As Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, CEO of the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, and former U.S. science envoy for AI, put it, 'Anything [the Trump administration doesn't] like is immediately tossed into this pejorative pile of woke.' The definitions of 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' in the order published Wednesday are vague in some ways and specific in others. While 'truth-seeking' is defined as LLMs that 'prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity,' 'ideological neutrality' is defined as LLMs that are 'neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI.' Those definitions leave room for broad interpretation, as well as potential pressure. AI companies have pushed for fewer constraints on how they operate. And while an executive order doesn't carry the force of legislation, frontier AI firms could still find themselves subject to the shifting priorities of the administration's political agenda. Last week, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI signed contracts with the Department of Defense to receive up to $200 million each to develop agentic AI workflows that address critical national security challenges. It's unclear which of these companies is best positioned to gain from the woke AI ban, or if they will comply. TechCrunch has reached out to each of them and will update this article if we hear back. Despite displaying biases of its own, xAI may be the most aligned with the order — at least at this early stage. Elon Musk has positioned Grok, xAI's chatbot, as the ultimate anti-woke, 'less biased,' truthseeker. Grok's system prompts have directed it to avoid deferring to mainstream authorities and media, to seek contrarian information even if it's politically incorrect, and to even reference Musk's own views on controversial topics. In recent months, Grok has even spouted antisemitic comments and praised Hitler on X, among other hateful, racist, and misogynistic posts. Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, told TechCrunch the executive order is 'clearly intended as viewpoint discrimination, since [the government] just signed a contract with Grok, aka 'MechaHitler.'' Alongside xAI's DOD funding, the company announced that 'Grok for Government' had been added to the General Services Administration schedule, meaning that xAI products are now available for purchase across every government office and agency. 'The right question is this: would they ban Grok, the AI they just signed a large contract with, because it has been deliberately engineered to give politically charged answers?' Lemley said in an email interview. 'If not, it is clearly designed to discriminate against a particular viewpoint.' As Grok's own system prompts have shown, model outputs can be a reflection of both the people building the technology and the data the AI is trained on. In some cases, an overabundance of caution among developers and AI trained on internet content that promotes values like inclusivity have led to distorted model outputs. Google, for example, last year came under fire after its Gemini chatbot showed a black George Washington and racially diverse Nazis — which Trump's order calls out as an example of DEI-infected AI models. Chowdhury says her biggest fear with this executive order is that AI companies will actively rework training data to tow the party line. She pointed to statements from Musk a few weeks prior to launching Grok 4, saying that xAI would use the new model and its advanced reasoning capabilities to 'rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that.' This would ostensibly put Musk into the position of judging what is true, which could have huge downstream implications for how information is accessed. Of course, companies have been making judgment calls about what information is seen and not seen since the dawn of the internet. Conservative David Sacks — the entrepreneur and investor who Trump appointed as AI czar — has been outspoken about his concerns around 'woke AI' on the All-In Podcast, which co-hosted Trump's day of AI announcements. Sacks has accused the creators of prominent AI products of infusing them with left-wing values, framing his arguments as a defense of free speech, and a warning against a trend toward centralized ideological control in digital platforms. The problem, experts say, is that there is no one truth. Achieving unbiased or neutral results is impossible, especially in today's world where even facts are politicized. 'If the results that an AI produces say that climate science is correct, is that left wing bias?' Seargeant said. 'Some people say you need to give both sides of the argument to be objective, even if one side of the argument has no status to it.' 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TechCrunch
14 hours ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Trump's ‘anti-woke AI' order could reshape how US tech companies train their models
When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing's talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification for advancing their tech quickly, without too much regulation or oversight. As OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a LinkedIn post last month, there is a contest between 'US-led democratic AI and Communist-led China's autocratic AI.' An executive order signed Wednesday by President Donald Trump that bans 'woke AI' and AI models that aren't 'ideologically neutral' from government contracts could disrupt that balance. The order calls out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) calling it a 'pervasive and destructive' ideology that can 'distort the quality and accuracy of the output.' Specifically, the order refers to information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation, critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. Experts warn it could create a chilling effect on developers who may feel pressure to align model outputs and datasets with White House rhetoric to secure federal dollars for their cash-burning businesses. The order comes the same day the White House published Trump's 'AI Action Plan,' which shifts national priorities away from societal risk and focuses instead on building out AI infrastructure, cutting red tape for tech companies, shoring up national security, and competing with China. The order directs the Director of the Office of Management and Budget along with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to issue guidance to other agencies on how to comply. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' Trump said Wednesday during an AI event hosted by the All-In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum. 'I will be signing an order banning the federal government from procuring AI technology that has been infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas, such as critical race theory, which is ridiculous. And from now on the U.S. government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness, and strict impartiality.' Determining what is impartial or objective is one of many challenges to the order. Philip Seargeant, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at The Open University, told TechCrunch that nothing can ever be objective. 'One of the fundamental tenets of sociolinguistics is that language is never neutral,' Sergeant said. 'So the idea that you can ever get pure objectivity is a fantasy.' On top of that, the Trump administration's ideology doesn't reflect the beliefs and values of all Americans. Trump has repeatedly sought to eliminate funding for climate initiatives, education, public broadcasting, research, social service grants, community and agricultural support programs, and gender-affirming care, often framing these initiatives as examples of 'woke' or politically biased government spending. As Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, CEO of the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, and former U.S. science envoy for AI, put it, 'Anything [the Trump administration doesn't] like is immediately tossed into this pejorative pile of woke.' The definitions of 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' in the order published Wednesday are vague in some ways, and specific in others. While 'truth-seeking' is defined as LLMs that 'prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity,' 'ideological neutrality' is defined as LLMs that are 'neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI.' Those definitions leave room for broad interpretation, as well as potential pressure. AI companies have pushed for fewer constraints on how they operate. And while an executive order doesn't carry the force of legislation, frontier AI firms could still find themselves subject to the shifting priorities of the administration's political agenda. Last week, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI signed contracts with the Department of Defense to receive up to $200 million each to develop agentic AI workflows that address critical national security challenges. It's unclear which of these companies is best positioned to gain from the woke AI ban, or if they will comply. TechCrunch has reached out to each of them and will update this article if we hear back. Despite displaying biases of its own, xAI may be the most aligned with the order — at least at this early stage. Elon Musk has positioned Grok, xAI's chatbot, as the ultimate anti-woke, 'less biased,' truthseeker. Grok's system prompts have directed it to avoid deferring to mainstream authorities and media, to seek contrarian information even if it's politically incorrect, and to even reference Musk's own views on controversial topics. In recent months, Grok has even spouted antisemitic comments and praised Hitler on X, among other hateful, racist, and misogynistic posts. Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, told TechCrunch the executive order is 'clearly intended as viewpoint discrimination, since [the government] just signed a contract with Grok, aka 'MechaHitler.'' Alongside xAI's DOD funding, the company announced that 'Grok for Government' had been added to the General Services Administration schedule, meaning that xAI products are now available for purchase across every government office and agency. 'The right question is this: would they ban Grok, the AI they just signed a large contract with, because it has been deliberately engineered to give politically charged answers?' Lemley said in an email interview. 'If not, it is clearly designed to discriminate against a particular viewpoint.' As Grok's own system prompts have shown, model outputs can be a reflection of both the people building the technology and the data the AI is trained on. In some cases, an overabundance of caution among developers and AI trained on internet content that promotes values like inclusivity have led to distorted model outputs. Google, for example, last year came under fire after its Gemini chatbot showed a black George Washington and racially diverse Nazis – which Trump's order calls out as an example of DEI-infected AI models. Chowdhury says her biggest fear with this executive order is that AI companies will actively rework training data to tow the party line. She pointed to statements from Musk a few weeks prior to launching Grok 4, saying that xAI would use the new model and its advanced reasoning capabilities to 'rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that.' This would ostensibly put Musk into the position of judging what is true, which could have huge downstream implications for how information is accessed. Of course, companies have been making judgement calls about what information is seen and not seen since the dawn of the internet. Conservatives like David Sacks – the entrepreneur and investor whom Trump appointed as AI Czar – has been outspoken about his concerns around 'woke AI' on the All-In Podcast, which co-hosted Trump's day of AI announcements. Sacks has accused the creators of prominent AI products of infusing them with left-wing values, framing his arguments as a defense of free speech, and a warning against a trend towards centralized ideological control in digital platforms. The problem, experts say, is that there is no one truth. Achieving unbiased or neutral results is impossible, especially in today's world where even facts are politicized. 'If the results that an AI produces say that climate science is correct, is that left wing bias?' Seargeant said. 'Some people say you need to give both sides of the argument to be objective, even if one side of the argument has no status to it.'
Boston Globe
15 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Dozens of peacocks disappear from remote California hotel
'A guest over the weekend said he had seen two guys putting a peacock in a crate and driving away,' said Rafe Goorwitch, an event coordinator and the unofficial peacock wrangler at the hotel. 'That's when we made the discovery we were down so many.' Hotel ownership had brought in a mated pair of Indian blue peafowl 15 years ago. Many generations later, their progeny had the run of the place and became a signature of the hotel. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The public has embraced them,' Goorwitch said. 'We hang peacock pictures around the hotel.' Advertisement Two of the birds were named. The second senior male was Pancho, and 'the senior chief peacock,' as Goorwitch put it, was Alibaba, called Baba for short. 'He was an atypical peafowl,' Goorwitch explained. 'Peacocks are known to be aloof; he would come right up to you. He came into the dining room and ballroom, hung out in the rafters. He was not skittish like most peafowl. He just had this attitude. He was just charming.' With nearly all the birds gone, the property is now much quieter. 'They just have a presence,' Goorwitch said. 'They definitely were crowd pleasers. Baba would come like a dog if people wanted to take pictures. He'll definitely be missed.' Advertisement Goorwitch regularly fed the birds. 'They eat anything,' he said. 'They love grapes, dried cranberries. They love full kernel corn. If you want to see a peafowl ecstatic, give them wedding cake.' The police are looking into the case, but finding the birds might be difficult because they were not tagged. 'They were not seen as property,' Goorwitch said. 'The only one I'd be able to identify is Alibaba.' The case is puzzling. The remoteness of the hotel, 30 miles from significant population centers, made it a somewhat unusual spot for a crime of this kind. 'It's surprising someone would want to steal them,' he said. 'They're loud, they scream, they honk like a goose.' It's also not easy to grab such a large bird, he said. A thief would have needed a sack, crate, and vehicle. The male birds have a value of maybe $2,000, the females half that, so no one is getting very rich. 'It's just odd,' he said. But it may not be the end of peafowl at the Ryde, as the hotel has received offers from bird owners to replenish the stock. Of the four birds remaining, one is a juvenile male, and three are female. They include Alibaba's last companion. Understandably, 'her behavior has been off,' Goorwitch said.
