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Li Bin: No driverless taxis; Honeywell considers IPO of its quantum computing company with a valuation of US$10 billion; He Youjun's e-sports company goes public, with an opening price increase of more than 45%

Meiyi2024/07/28

Summary

MuskX platform uses user tweets to train Grok AI model; SpaceX says it is ready to launch again on Saturday; Nvidia RTX 3050 A mobile graphics card exposed

NIO CEO Li Bin says he will never make driverless taxis: The value of autonomous driving is not to "kill" online car-hailing drivers

July 27 news, at today's NIO IN 2024 NIO Innovation Technology Day event, NIO founder Li Bin accepted an interview with the media and talked about the current hot topic of driverless taxis.

Li Bin said, "NIO is determined not to make driverless taxis." "Assisted driving is to increase safety and reduce accidents. This is also something that NIO has been thinking about since 2017. I think the value of autonomous driving is not to get rid of the hard-working private car drivers. I don't think this is exciting at all. We still believe that autonomous driving should be safer and reduce human fatigue."

Li Bin said that the technology of driverless taxis will definitely mature, and there is no problem with that. "But is it really a sustainable business? No, that's overthinking. Driverless taxis can't solve the problem of traffic volume, so in the end, the number of operating vehicles that a city can accommodate, whether it is driven by people or not, is a certain amount. This "quantity" makes Robotaxi never become a business that has no boundaries like software and cloud services."

Li Bin also talked about the topic of "weekly sales chart". He said frankly, "We have not authorized any organization or individual to use the so-called weekly sales chart with our name, which has not been audited. We also call on relevant departments to regulate it." (Source: IT Home)

Honeywell considers IPO of Quantinuum at $10 billion valuation

Honeywell International Inc is considering an initial public offering of its majority-owned quantum computing company Quantinuum as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has discussed the possibility of a U.S. listing with several investment banks and may seek a valuation of about $10 billion for Quantinuum, the people said.

Honeywell shares jumped as much as 2.6% on Friday after the Bloomberg News report, their biggest intraday gain since early June. Honeywell shares are down about 2% this year, valuing the company at about $133 billion.

The above-mentioned person said that the current discussions are at an early stage and the details of the plan may change. Representatives of Honeywell declined to comment, and representatives of Quantinuum did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Source: cnBeta)

Intel Demonstrates World’s First 8K OTT Broadcast at Paris Olympics

Intel will leverage the power of its fifth-generation Xeon CPUs and Arc GPUs to demonstrate 8K OTT broadcasts for the first time at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

To ensure high-quality 8K broadcasts can reach every home at the highest possible quality, Intel will introduce new AI innovations through its latest hardware and software.

The servers will be powered by Intel’s fourth-generation (Sapphire Rapids) and latest fifth-generation Xeon processors (Emerald Rapids), and will be equipped with Intel AMX AI accelerators to perform complex operations and improve the performance of deep learning training.

This key technology will enable Intel to compress live raw feeds of up to 48 gigabits per second down to just 40-60 megabits per second, allowing content to be played effortlessly.

Through an AI-optimized broadcast server, OBS will encode and compress the data to deliver 8K live signals to selected media rights holders.

Not only can Intel-powered servers maintain high quality at lower bit rates, but the latest high-end Intel CPUs paired with Arc GPUs will also be responsible for decoding end-to-end 8K VVC live content. (Source: cnBeta)

SpaceX releases update after rocket accident, says it's ready to launch again on Saturday

Earlier this month, SpaceX suffered a rare flight anomaly that resulted in the loss of the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.

Once the investigation is completed, SpaceX plans to conduct its next Falcon 9 launch on Saturday.

As part of the corrective work following the anomaly, SpaceX will remove the "failed sensing wires and sensors on the second stage engine."

The company has tested the design changes at its facility in McGregor, Texas, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has also been involved in the certification analysis.

SpaceX added that it had conducted similar anomaly assessments of its active booster fleet and inspected the rocket's induction wires and clamps, with the result of this review and inspection being "the proactive replacement of the part."

Through these inspections and the report SpaceX submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration, the company believes it can resume launches on Saturday. The latest news from the Federal Aviation Administration stated that "the Falcon 9 vehicle can resume flight operations, but the overall investigation is not yet completed." (Source: cnBeta)

Enabled by default, MuskX platform uses user tweets to train Grok AI models

Musk's social platform X used user tweets to train the Grok AI model without explicitly notifying the user, and the option was enabled by default.

The X platform wrote in the relevant settings description, “In order to continuously improve your experience, we may use your X posts and user interactions, inputs, and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning.

This also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may also be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes. " (Source: IT Home)

European auto giant Stellantis plans to shut down or sell "unprofitable" brands after first-half performance plunge

On July 27, it was reported that after a sharp decline in profits in the first half of this year, Stellantis CEO Tang Weishi may sell his company's underperforming brands.

In the first half of this year, Stellantis, a European auto giant that owns brands such as Peugeot, Vauxhall and Fiat, saw its profits plummet 48% year-on-year to about 5.6 billion euros (IT Home Note: currently about 44.097 billion yuan).

According to Autocar local time on the 26th, Tang Weishi warned in an interview, "If they don't make money, we will shut them down. We can't afford brands that don't make money."

It is reported that Maserati reported an adjusted operating loss of 82 million euros (currently about 646 million yuan). Analysts believe that this may prompt Stellantis to put Maserati up for sale. (Source: IT Home)

It can really be used as a boat! BYD is approved for patents related to amphibious vehicles

BYD has made significant progress in the field of amphibious vehicles. Its latest approved invention patent "Amphibious Vehicle and Its Control Method" marks a new breakthrough in the company's technological innovation.

This patent not only demonstrates the design features of amphibious vehicles, but also details their control methods, providing a significant improvement in the safety and controllability of wading vehicles.

The patented amphibious vehicle design includes a vehicle body and paddle wheels with adjustable steering angles, which allow the wheels to rotate in the liquid, providing the vehicle with the necessary thrust to enable it to move stably in a wading environment.

In addition, another highlight of this patent is that it innovatively avoids simply superimposing the structures of the vehicle and the ship, and there is no need to add additional propellers and power mechanisms.

This design enables a single paddle wheel to travel on land as well as in wading environments, effectively filling a gap in the market and reducing production costs. (Source: Fast Technology)

TikTok launches a feature to search for short videos by listening to songs

On July 27, it was reported that identifying songs by listening to them is a common feature of many music apps, and TikTok is introducing similar features into the short video field.

According to TechCrunch, the short video platform TikTok is gray-testing the "Sound Search" function. Users can find the songs they want to listen to and related short video content by simply humming, singing or playing songs.

TikTok told foreign media that the feature was built specifically for finding songs, but it can also be used to find some popular sounds or hot memes.

TikTok users only need to click the microphone icon in the "Search" option. This feature is currently only available to a small number of users, and is expected to be launched to more users in the future. IT Home tested that Douyin in China currently does not have a similar song recognition function. (Source: IT Home)

First in the industry, NIO fully releases SkyOS, the vehicle-wide operating system

At the NIO IN 2024 Innovation Technology Day held on July 27, NIO officially launched the industry's first full-vehicle operating system - SkyOS.

It is reported that the SkyOS system has seven major characteristics: high bandwidth, low latency, large computing power and heterogeneous hardware, cross-domain integration, flexible and continuous evolution, high reliability, and information security.

At the bottom layer, we connect intelligent hardware, computing platforms, communications and energy systems to achieve unified management and coordination of full-domain applications such as vehicle networking, vehicle control, intelligent driving, digital cockpits, mobile applications, and build true full-domain intelligence for the entire vehicle in the AI ​​era.

Li Bin said that in the history of automobiles, there has never been a complete vehicle-wide operating system.

Therefore, NIO created SkyOS, a full-vehicle operating system.

At the same time, NIO announced that its first automotive-grade 5nm smart driving chip, the Shenji NX9031, has been successfully taped out. NIO's "Shenji NX9031" chip and underlying software have been independently designed. The Shenji NX9031 has more than 50 billion transistors, and can achieve the performance of four industry flagship chips in terms of comprehensive capabilities and execution efficiency. (Source: TechWeb)

Google's upcoming Pixel 9 event has new leaks

Yet another leak of the Google Pixel 9 has surfaced, this time in the form of marketing materials shared by leaker OnLeaks and 91mobiles. These marketing images detail the specs and features of the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Leaked marketing materials also offer some of the features that the Pixel 9 series may be equipped with. In addition to Google's Gemini AI assistant and Circle to Search, the Pixel 9 series is rumored to be equipped with a feature that allows users to search screenshots. An image shows that "Pixel Screenshots" can help you "save information you want to remember later - such as event locations, etc."

The leak also revealed that the Pixel 9 will come with an Emergency SOS feature with crisis alerts, seven years of security and Pixel feature updates, and free one-year access to Google's artificial intelligence model, Gemini Advanced.

With all this information now public, there may not be many surprises at Google's hardware event on August 13. (Source: cnBeta)

Nvidia RTX 3050 A mobile graphics card exposed

On July 27, technology media Tom's Hardware published a blog post, obtaining key specifications of the GeForce RTX 3050 A mobile graphics card from NVIDIA.

The A in the new GeForce RTX 3050 A mobile graphics card may stand for Ada, using only part of the performance provided by the AD106 chip.

NVIDIA officially stated that this mobile graphics card has a 64-bit bit width, only 4GB GDDR6 video memory, a total of 1792 CUDA cores, and a TGP power consumption of 30W-50W. The clock frequency of the graphics card is currently unclear, but Ada's clock speed is often much higher than Ampere.

The media speculated that Nvidia achieved this in the GeForce RTX 3050 A mobile graphics card mainly by shutting down non-functional parts in the chip and downgrading them to lower-level components. (Source: IT Home)

China's first e-sports stock: He Youjun's Star Esports Weiwu Group was listed on Nasdaq, with an opening increase of more than 45%

On July 26, Eastern Time, NIP Group (the parent company of eStar Gaming and Ninjas in Pyjamas e-sports clubs), in which Ho Yau-kwan, the son of former Macau richest man Stanley Ho (known as the "King of Gambling" by the media), holds a 14.2% stake, was listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange with the stock code "NIPG", and the first Chinese e-sports stock was officially born.

He Youjun, Chairman and Co-CEO of Xingjing Weiwu Group, Hicham Chahine, Co-CEO of Xingjing Weiwu Group, and Sun Liwei, President of Xingjing Weiwu Group, attended the Nasdaq bell ringing ceremony. NIPG's US IPO opened up 45.66% on the first day, closing at $13.11.

In this IPO, Xingjing Weiwu Group sold a total of 2.25 million ADS (American Depositary Shares), with an issue price of US$9 per ADS, raising a total of US$20.25 million. (Source: IT Home)

BYD Intel NIO