Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university

In January China released a plan to become an "education power…with global influence" by 2035. Not long ago that goal would have looked overly ambitious. Now, places like Zhe Da have made it look surprisingly likely.

Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/02/19/behind-deepseek-lies-a-dazzling-chinese-university
from The Economist

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Seetha Ram

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AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:

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Drinking Water is Like Food— bottle it and deliver it to the poor immediately K E Seetharam The Asia Water Watch 2015 , commissioned by ADB, WHO, UNDP, and UNESCAP, estimates that another 700 million people—at minimum—will need to be served in Asia over the next decade to meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 10 on safe drinking water alone. When I started to coordinate the preparation of report in 2005, the big question that I had in my mind was how can this massive target be achieved expeditiously? Developing country governments and development organizations are attempting to partly answer this question. In early 2006, I assisted ADB in announcing its Water Financing Program 2006-2010. The Program, one of the most concrete actions publicly announced so far by international organizations, will double ADB's investments in the water sector to over $2 billion annually for the next five years. But typical development projects take at least 3 to 5 five years for their ...

Think Pieces reviewed and written by Lakshmi and Seetha Ram

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