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Tesla issued a downbeat earnings report. Net profit fell by 44% in the third quarter, year on year; its operating margin, a closely tracked measure of the difference between its income and expenses, plunged to 7.6%. The carmaker also said that although it will start delivering its long-delayed Cybertruck to customers in November it could take up to 18 months for the vehicle to turn a profit.
The American government tightened its ban on selling chips to China for use in artificial intelligence, extending the rules to capture sales of chips that had previously fallen just outside the ban’s technical parameters. The clampdown is bad news for Nvidia, which said that the new restrictions would apply to its H800 AI chip. Chinese tech companies have been rushing to buy up the modified chip in case of a prohibition. Meanwhile, Nvidia announced a partnership with Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer, to build data centres powered by Nvidia’s technology.
The race for dominance in AI was thrown into focus when Baidu announced that its ERNIE 4 chatbot was now as good as OpenAI’s GPT-4. The Chinese tech giant showed off ERNIE’s capabilities at an event in Beijing by getting it to complete tasks, such as writing a martial-arts novel. ERNIE has 45m users, a fraction of ChatGPT’s 180m, though the American bot was launched several months earlier.
2023-10-19 07:32:02
Article from www.economist.com
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