Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s multilingual capabilities and open-source nature serve as an attractive alternative for users in Southeast Asia, but its true potential can only be realised if security and legal concerns are addressed, according to analysts. As the US and China continue their AI rivalry, businesses and governments in Southeast Asia are taking a pragmatic approach – weighing costs, performance and regulatory concerns. While platforms such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are prominent among Southeast Asian users, Chinese AI models are “steadily making inroads”, according to Ali Fazeli, chief technology officer at NexVision Lab, a technology company specialising in artificial intelligence and machine-learning solutions. “Their multilingual capabilities, such as support for Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia and Thai, coupled with partnerships with local tech companies, give them an edge in catering to
Category Archives: SCI-TECH
Feb
For the full year 2024, Amazon’s net income jumped to $59.2 billion from $30.4 billion in 2023. Photo: Julio Cesar AGUILAR / AFP/FileSource: AFP E-commerce giant Amazon reported strong earnings Thursday but, like its big tech peers Microsoft and Google, saw its stock price fall on concerns over high AI investment costs. The mounting expenses of data-intensive artificial intelligence and its infrastructure have cast a shadow over this earnings season, with only Facebook owner Meta winning Wall Street’s approval. Meta’s stock surged 18 percent in January as investors endorsed its AI strategy. Amazon’s AWS cloud division, along with rivals Microsoft and Google, are investing heavily in AI data centers while meaningful returns remain uncertain. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy defended the spending, saying the company was on track to spend $100
Feb
Rivian will allow owners to set their car’s wheel size in the software without going to a service center. Software version 2025.06 includes this change and will be released “soon.” Rivian’s electric trucks and SUVs are known for their impressive off-roading abilities. The R1S and R1T are marketed as adventure vehicles, and if you know the world of overlanding and off-roading, you know that people like to put bigger wheels on their cars to better cope with big obstacles. The problem is that Rivian owners have to schedule a service visit to have their cars’ brains updated so they know what wheels they’re running. The cars still run fine without having their software updated, but the range estimates will be off. That’s a big pain, especially if the closest service
Feb
Automaker-backed charging firm Ionna has opened its first “Rechargery” to the public in North Carolina. It’s got 100 more sites contracted, with some opening this week. Ionna says it’ll bring Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology to on-site convenience stores, allowing you to grab what you want and leave without needing to check out. As a huge group of automakers prepares to take on electric vehicle charging headaches by teaming up, they’ll also allow you to grab some snacks while your car is recharging and then Just Walk Out. The new Ionna Rechargeries will implement the AI-powered Amazon solution for automatic, cashier-less payments at some stations, the company announced Tuesday. The new tech rollout comes as Ionna begins the next phase of its nationwide charging network rollout. The company is aiming to
Feb
Two men in Thailand have been arrested for allegedly running an AI-assisted scam call centre that cost Thai-British beauty queen Charlotte Austin 4 million baht (US$118,000), raising fears about the growing threat of technologically sophisticated fraud in the region. Police identified the suspects as 31-year-old Ramil Pantawong, who was apprehended in the Wang Nam Yen district of Sa Kaeo on Sunday, and 28-year-old Thanawut Kanyaphanthe, who was detained in the Bang Lamung district of Chon Buri on Monday. They are accused of belonging to a 50-strong gang operating from a building in Poipet, a city in northern Cambodia near the Thai border. Police Lieutenant General Jiraphop Bhuridej, commissioner of the Central Investigation Bureau, said the group had targeted at least 163 people by impersonating Thai officers with the goal of
Feb
The top official at the US AI Safety Institute is stepping down, raising new uncertainty about the future of a key government group focused on artificial intelligence under the Trump administration. Elizabeth Kelly, the director of the safety institute and a face of US AI policy on the world stage, is set to leave her position by the end of the week, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Kelly and the safety institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Housed under the Commerce Department, the US AI Safety Institute works with academics and developers to identify and mitigate risks from cutting-edge AI systems. It was created after former President Joe Biden signed an executive order in
Feb
Following an immensely successful launch, the Honor X9c brings unrivalled durability and unmatched AI capabilities to the market. Global technology brand Honor on Monday announced that the highly anticipated Honor X9c, the unbreakable AI smartphone, is now available online at leading retailers. After last week’s fire launch, Mzansi has been buzzing about the Honor X9c’s next-level durability and AI-powered smarts. Now, it’s officially available for purchase, proving itself as a mid-range beast with flagship-level features. Part of the legendary Honor X Series, the X9c brings the solid build and slick performance that fans know and love. Built tough to handle the daily grind, this smartphone doesn’t just look good – it goes the distance. Honor is levelling up the game by packing premium durability and AI intelligence into a mid-tier
Feb
Major figures in artificial intelligence (AI) acknowledge the accomplishment of Chinese start-up DeepSeek , but caution against exaggerating the company’s success, as the tech industry weighs the implications of the firm’s advanced models developed at a fraction of the usual cost. Industry heavyweights from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to former Baidu and Google scientist Andrew Ng have praised the open-source approach of DeepSeek, following its release of two advanced AI models. Based in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, DeepSeek stunned the global AI industry with its open-source reasoning model, R1. Released on January 20, the model showed capabilities comparable to closed-source models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, but was said to be developed at significantly lower training costs. DeepSeek said its foundation large language model, V3, released a few weeks
Jan
Hangzhou -based Unitree forecasts a breakthrough in humanoid robot capabilities by 2026, when these automatons are enabled with more advanced perception, comprehension and task-execution capabilities. That is expected to turn up more clear-cut commercial uses for humanoid robots within three to five years. The Lunar New Year eve performance marked the world’s “first large-scale, fully AI-driven and fully automated cluster humanoid robot performance in history”, Unitree said in a statement. That milestone showing at the Spring Festival Gala reflects the progress being made by Unitree, which has accelerated its humanoid robot efforts over the past two years, as the field gets increasingly crowded with more foreign and domestic players amid recent advances in AI models. 01:01 Dancing robots take the stage at China’s Spring Festival Gala performance Dancing robots take
Jan
The US should welcome China’s best scientific minds into its universities to compete with the mainland’s success in AI , American lawmakers in Washington heard on Thursday, as Chinese start-up DeepSeek unnerved the global tech market this week. “Let’s steal their best engineers,” said Melanie Hart of the Washington-based Atlantic Council at a hearing convened by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Referencing the Chinese talent behind DeepSeek’s AI models, Hart testified that “we’d be better off if the engineers behind that were working here in the US”. To achieve that, she continued, students from the mainland would need to feel safe in America, adding: “We can beat Beijing at making Chinese scientists feel safe.” Hart’s comments came as Washington debates how best to retain top talent while safeguarding US intellectual
Jan
Forget the EV tax credit. Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe is far more concerned about another threat from President Donald Trump: tariffs. “It has, in some ways, bigger implications, far bigger, than what happens with the IRA tax credits,” Scaringe told reporters last week, referring to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contains pro-EV policies that Trump has attacked time and time again. “There’s not a car company in the world that’s not thinking about moving supply chains around right now,” Scaringe said. More From Our Chat With Rivian’s CEO Trump plans to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada on February 1, in an attempt to pressure those governments into preventing the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants into the U.S. But it’s American consumers and
Jan
Alibaba Group Holding released on Wednesday an upgraded version of its Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model, which it said “comprehensively outperformed” in certain benchmark tests DeepSeek-V3 , the large language model (LLM) launched in December by China’s hottest start-up . In a statement posted on WeChat, the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing and AI arm Alibaba Cloud said its new Qwen 2.5-Max model also outperformed OpenAI ’s GPT-4o and Meta Platforms ’ Llama-3.1-405B in LLM performance benchmark platforms Arena-Hard and LiveBench. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The benchmark performance of Qwen 2.5-Max, part of Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen LLM family, was on par with Anthropic ’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet model, according to Alibaba Cloud. LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT . Alibaba’s multimodal model is offered in various
Jan
The 2026 BMW iX gets a larger 113 kilowatt-hour battery with up to 340 miles of estimated range. A new entry-level xDrive45 trim with a smaller 100 kWh battery is good enough for 280-300 miles of range. It gets a new silicon carbide inverter that helps with a more efficient energy transmission from the battery to the motors. The BMW iX is a range champ. In one of InsideEVs’ long-term tests last year, it covered 351 miles on a single charge, smashing its 307-mile EPA range. Granted, the summer weather helped, but even in winter, it’s a solid road-tripper. Now BMW has upgraded the iX with new trims and a bigger battery which delivers even more range and power along with improved efficiency. Gallery: BMW iX (2025) The iX LCI—short for
Jan
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek has gone quiet this week as it enters “holiday mode” for Lunar New Year while its recent technological developments continue to send shock waves through Wall Street and Silicon Valley, prompting reflections about current industry strategies and business models. DeepSeek’s rapid rise in AI has attracted attention across the Pacific this week with comments from US President Donald Trump and OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, after stocks related to the industry saw significant declines on Monday. The correction resulted in the largest single-day loss ever for semiconductor giant Nvidia . Yet the Hangzhou-based start-up, including founder Liang Wenfeng and the firm’s young scientists, has shunned public attention as China entered its week-long Lunar New Year holiday. The company made its last update at
Jan
The world’s 500 richest people, led by Nvidia Corp. co-founder Jensen Huang, lost a combined US$108 billion on Monday as a tech-led sell-off tied to Chinese AI developer DeepSeek sent major indices plunging. Billionaires whose fortunes are linked to artificial intelligence were the biggest losers: Huang saw his fortune fall US$20.1 billion, a 20 per cent drop, while Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison’s US$22.6 billion loss was larger in absolute terms, but represented just 12 per cent of his fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Dell Inc.’s Michael Dell lost US$13 billion, and Binance Holdings co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao shaved US$12.1 billion. Tech-sector titans as a group saw US$94 billion of wealth evaporate – roughly 85 per cent of the Bloomberg index’s total decline. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell