Russian disinformation narratives about illicit organ harvesting and biological experiments in Ukraine have no basis in fact. Russia intentionally distorts Ukrainian law intended to support vital medical procedures.
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Day: January 28, 2025
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — As pet parents in China usher in the Year of the Snake and host Lunar New Year’s Eve dinners with their loved ones, some are also making sure that their fur babies, or “mao hai zi,” are not left out.
Over the past month, a growing number of consumers have been ordering pet-friendly versions of the traditional New Year’s Eve reunion dinner, ranging from freshly made meals to gift boxes of dried food.
A search for “dogs’ and cats’ Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner” on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok and the most popular short-video app in China, lists dozens of choices.
‘Lucky’ dumplings
Some vendors even tout traditional Chinese delicacy dishes such as “Buddha jumps over the wall,” which includes seafood and meats, and “eight treasures duck rice” in addition to common ones such “lucky” dumplings and rice cake, adapted for dog palates.
The prices range from 19.9 to 168 yuan ($2.8 to $24) per set.
One vendor on Douyin, LAOTOU Pet Bakery, told VOA in a written reply Monday that it sold out of the special holiday pet meals more than a week before the Lunar New Year, which starts on Wednesday this year.
Lou Yu, vice president of Favor Pets Company in Beijing, also that the pet service firm has seen a boom year in holiday sales of pet food.
Business peaked during the Dragon Boat Festival in June, Mid-Autumn Festival in September and the Christmas holidays in December, when, respectively, rice dumplings, moon cakes and special Christmas treats were offered for pets, he said.
Booming holiday sales
“For [pets’] reunion dinner on Lunar New Year’s Eve, we’ve probably seen a 45% to 50% growth in sales this year, compared to a year ago, when sales were still tepid,” Lou told VOA by phone on Monday.
The company ran out of stock before the eight-day-long holiday began this week as a growing number of owners splurge on their pets.
Festive Fido and feline food have become an emerging and “under-supplied” niche market that is bucking the trend despite China’s economic slowdown. China’s “cat and dog parents” total more than 120 million, more than double from a decade ago, according to Lou.
Last year, there were some 9.54 million babies born in China. Pets are expected to outnumber children under 4 years of age by a ratio of 2 to 1 by 2030 — a shift that will likely create a substantial $12 billion market for pet food in China, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs forecasted in a report late last year.
Authorities in China ended the country’s one-child policy in 2016 and started encouraging young couples to have three children in 2021 as the country’s population ages and the number of newborns declines.
Pets over kids
By contrast, many couples who find it too expensive to raise children are instead choosing pets over kids.
On Saturday, 11 dogs were treated with plates of shredded chicken and lettuce — a special Lunar New Year meal — in a Shanghai restaurant. Their owners were all female.
“He’s my soulmate! He gives me a lot of emotional support … and he’s a good friend that I’d like to be with and enjoy the New Year atmosphere together,” attendee Momo Ni told Reuters news agency, referring to her border collie, Yakult.
Daisy Xu, another 28-year-old owner, said her dog, named Niu Niu, is already a beloved member of the family.
“We will make her another dog meal. … When it comes to New Year gifts, I think my parents will probably give their granddaughter a red envelope,” Xu told Reuters. Adults traditionally give red envelopes containing money to children during the Lunar New Year.
Rich people’s world
While some Chinese social media users share postings of their pets’ special holiday treats, some users were not as enthusiastic, with several complaining that “these dogs and cats are better fed than I am.”
A Guizhou province-based Weibo user named “magnolia0526” said, “The luxurious lifestyle of cats and dogs highlights the uneven distribution of resources in human society, which is not cute at all.” The post was in response to the hashtag “sales of reunion dinner and dumplings for pets has seen a 480% growth.”
Another Shandong province-based user mocked the trend, saying “this is the world of the rich people.”
Aside from pet food, Favor Pet’s Lou said China has experienced a booming pet economy in recent years with growing business opportunities from pet grooming and sitting services, especially during holiday seasons.
He said that a growing number of job seekers have signed up for the company’s training programs as they shift career paths to find opportunities in the pet service sector.
This article originated in VOA’s Mandarin Service.
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Conservationists in Kenya are using an artificial intelligence-powered application to monitor forest degradation and launch reforestation. The data collected by the application is also used to project the amount of carbon that can be stored by a growing patch of forest. Juma Majanga reports from Nyeri, Kenya.
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Chinese researchers backed by a Hangzhou-based hedge fund recently released a new version of a large language model (LLM) called DeepSeek-R1 that rivals the capabilities of the most advanced U.S.-built products but reportedly does so with fewer computing resources and at much lower cost.
High Flyer, the hedge fund that backs DeepSeek, said that the model nearly matches the performance of LLMs built by U.S. firms like OpenAI, Google and Meta, but does so using only about 2,000 older generation computer chips manufactured by U.S.-based industry leader Nvidia while costing only about $6 million worth of computing power to train.
By comparison, Meta’s AI system, Llama, uses about 16,000 chips, and reportedly costs Meta vastly more money to train.
Open-source model
The apparent advance in Chinese AI capabilities comes after years of efforts by the U.S. government to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors and the equipment used to manufacture them. Over the past two years, under President Joe Biden, the U.S. put multiple export control measures in place with the specific aim of throttling China’s progress on AI development.
DeepSeek appears to have innovated its way to some of its success, developing new and more efficient algorithms that allow the chips in the system to communicate with each other more effectively, thereby improving performance.
At least some of what DeepSeek R1’s developers did to improve its performance is visible to observers outside the company, because the model is open source, meaning that the algorithms it uses to answer queries are public.
Market reaction
The news about DeepSeek’s capabilities sparked a broad sell-off of technology stocks on U.S. markets on Monday, as investors began to question whether U.S. companies’ well-publicized plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers and other infrastructure would preserve their dominance in the field. When the markets closed on Monday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was down by 3.1%, and Nvidia’s share price had plummeted by nearly 17%.
However, not all AI experts believe the markets’ reaction to the release of DeepSeek R1 is justified, or that the claims about the model’s development should be taken at face value.
Mel Morris, CEO of U.K.-based Corpora.ai, an AI research engine, told VOA that while DeepSeek is an impressive piece of technology, he believes the market reaction has been excessive and that more information is needed to accurately judge the impact DeepSeek will have on the AI market.
“There’s always an overreaction to things, and there is today, so let’s just step back and analyze what we’re seeing here,” Morris said. “Firstly, we have no real understanding of exactly what the cost was or the time scale involved in building this product. We just don’t know. … They claim that it’s significantly cheaper and more efficient, but we have no proof of that.”
Morris said that while DeepSeek’s performance may be comparable to that of OpenAI products, “I’ve not seen anything yet that convinces me that they’ve actually cracked the quantum step in the cost of operating these sorts of models.”
Doubts about origins
Lennart Heim, a data scientist with the RAND Corporation, told VOA that while it is plain that DeepSeek R1 benefits from innovative algorithms that boost its performance, he agreed that the general public actually knows relatively little about how the underlying technology was developed.
Heim said that it is unclear whether the $6 million training cost cited by High Flyer actually covers the whole of the company’s expenditures — including personnel, training data costs and other factors — or is just an estimate of what a final training “run” would have cost in terms of raw computing power. If the latter, Heim said, the figure is comparable to the costs incurred by better U.S. models.
He also questioned the assertion that DeepSeek was developed with only 2,000 chips. In a blog post written over the weekend, he noted that the company is believed to have existing operations with tens of thousands of Nvidia chips that could have been used to do the work necessary to develop a model that is capable of running on just 2,000.
“This extensive compute access was likely crucial for developing their efficiency techniques through trial and error and for serving their models to customers,” he wrote.
He also pointed out that the company’s decision to release version R1 of its LLM last week — on the heels of the inauguration of a new U.S. president — appeared political in nature. He said that it was “clearly intended to rattle the public’s confidence in the United States’ AI leadership during a pivotal moment in U.S. policy.”
Dean W. Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, was also cautious about declaring that DeepSeek R1 has somehow upended the AI landscape.
“I think Silicon Valley and Wall Street are overreacting to some extent,” he told VOA. “But at the end of the day, R1 means that the competition between the U.S. and China is likely to remain fierce, and that we need to take it seriously.”
Export control debate
The apparent success of DeepSeek has been used as evidence by some experts to suggest that the export controls put in place under the Biden administration may not have had the intended effects.
“At a minimum, this suggests that U.S. approaches to AI and export controls may not be as effective as proponents claim,” Paul Triolo, a partner with DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, told VOA.
“The availability of very good but not cutting-edge GPUs — for example, that a company like DeepSeek can optimize for specific training and inference workloads — suggests that the focus of export controls on the most advanced hardware and models may be misplaced,” Triolo said. “That said, it remains unclear how DeepSeek will be able to keep pace with global leaders such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, Meta and others that will continue to have access to the best hardware systems.”
Other experts, however, argued that export controls have simply not been in place long enough to show results.
Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown’s University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology told VOA that it would be “very premature” to call the measures a failure.
“The CEO of DeepSeek has gone on record saying the biggest constraint they face is access to high-level compute resources,” Bresnick said. “If [DeepSeek] had as much compute at their fingertips as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc, there would be a significant boost in their performance. So … I don’t think that DeepSeek is the smoking gun that some people are claiming it is [to show that export controls] do not work.”
Bresnick noted that the toughest export controls were imposed in only 2023, meaning that their effects may just be starting to be felt. He said that the real test of their effectiveness will be whether U.S. firms are able to continue to outpace China in coming years.
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The multibillion-dollar Stargate Project announced by U.S. President Donald Trump will focus on building data centers with the goal of turning the U.S. into a computing power empire, according to experts.
Some believe the significant boost in U.S. computational capabilities will widen the gap with China in artificial intelligence.
“And this is an industrial buildout that, at least right now, China really is not in a position to do because of the [semiconductor] export controls that the United States is placing,” said Dean W. Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. However, there are signs that China is catching up with U.S. companies in key AI metrics by relying on open-source software.
Click here for the full report in Mandarin.
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