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When it comes to spurring the development of cutting-edge technologies, the Chinese government is rather pragmatic in its policymaking process. In the field of autonomous driving, the country has made some big strides in defining the parameters and limitations for service providers, removing regulatory ambiguity and granting industry players the freedom to test the nascent technology.

The trial guidelines, unveiled by the Ministry of Transport recently, target AV services like robotaxis, self-driving trucks and robobuses. The release arrived about 16 months after the department began seeking public opinions on the regulatory framework, and policymakers have reached a consensus that self-driving vehicles are subject to rigorous surveillance measures to ensure utmost safety.

Prior to the introduction of the nationwide guidelines, policymaking for AVs in China had been playing out in a more decentralized fashion, with local governments formulating their own rules for service providers on their turf. Major tech clusters like Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, for example, have been frontrunners in allowing companies to test AVs with minimum human interference.

It turns out that billionaire tech moguls aren’t that different from regular people when it comes to industry gossip.


But no one seemed to know the real reason behind Altman’s firing. The Times reported that a flurry of messages ensued, including speculation about what Altman might have done to get the chop.

The WhatsApp group includes big names like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Dropbox chief Drew Houston, per The Times.

Altman’s abrupt ouster saw the appointment of two interim CEOs before he was reinstated just days later.

Google has released a new Pro model of its latest AI, Gemini, and company sources say it has outperformed GPT-3.5 (the free version of ChatGPT) in widespread testing. According to performance reports, Gemini Ultra exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development. Google has been accused of lagging behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, widely regarded as the most popular and powerful in the AI space. Google says Gemini was trained to be multimodal, meaning it can process different types of media such as text, pictures, video, and audio.

Insider also reports that, with a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities.

The Google-based AI comes in three sizes, or stages, for the Gemini platform: Ultra, which is the flagship model, Pro and Nano (designed for mobile devices). According to reports from TechCrunch, the company says it’s making Gemini Pro available to enterprise customers through its Vertex AI program, and for developers in AI Studio, on December 13. Reports indicate that the Pro version can also be accessed via Bard, the company’s chatbot interface.