Breaking News today –  Wednesday 10 October 2024

Business & Tech News

Nvidia Challenger Chip Announced: American Tech company, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has made a significant stride in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector by unveiling its new Instinct MI325X chip during Computex 2024 in Taipei. The new processing chip will position AMD directly against Nvidia, the global leading manufacturer in the data centre processing unit market. With demand for advanced AI technologies escalating rapidly, it is evident that investment rates are on the rise across the board. AMD is positioning itself to increase its market share in what it estimates will become a $500 billion industry by 2028. The company is expected to begin full production of the MI325X chip by the end of 2024.  The MI325x AI chip is designed to compete directly with Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, which are widely considered the industry gold standard for AI workloads. With the MI325x, AMD promises significant gains in processing power and energy efficiency.

New Ai Aria – Breaking Barriers for Developers: A team of researchers from Rhymes AI have introduced Aria, an open multimodal AI model designed from scratch and was specifically developed to fill the gap that other free GenAi modela lack. Aria will be able to handle various tasks, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video inputs. The new multimodal Native MoE model offers State-of-the-Art performance across diverse language, vision, and coding tasks. Aria utilizes a fine-grained mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, ensuring efficient computational resource utilization and superior performance. According to the development team Aria boasts 3.9 billion activated parameters per visual token and 3.5 billion per text token, making it a powerful tool for multimodal tasks. In addition, Aria’s model size includes 24.9 billion parameters in total, and it activates only a fraction of these parameters at a time, resulting in lower computation costs than fully dense models. The developers state that it has clear advantages over Pixtral-12B and Llama3.2-11B across a range of multimodal, language, and coding tasks. Also competitive against proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 on some multimodal tasks 

China has detained four employees of Foxconn: Four employees of the world’s largest iPhone producer, Foxconn were detained by Chinese officials in the city of Zengzhou yesterday. This latest move was described by Taiwan as “strange.” The detentions in Zhengzhou are allegedly for ‘breach of trust’. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council suspects it is linked to corruption of Chinese security officials. Foxconn said the detained staff were not a threat to the company. The move comes in the wake of a travel advisory issued by China, and Taiwanese President William Lai vowing to resist Beijing’s attempts to annex Taiwan

Market News

Markets: Us Indices all closed marginally down yesterday after inflation and unemployment numbers disappointed the market, with the NASDAQ down by -0,14%, the S&P 500 -0,13% down and the Dow Jones closing -0,31% down. In trade in Asian markets today, the Nikkei was up by 0,57%, to close at 39608 and the Hang Seng has gained 2,98% and is at 21251 currently.

Currencies: The US Dollar is currently trading at 1.0936 against the Euro, at 1,3057 against the Pound, and at 148.68 against the Yen. The rand has strengthened against the dollar, and is currently trading at R17.43 to the US dollar.

Commodities:

• Gold prices are slightly up in early trade today and currently trading at $2,641
• Platinum is currently trading upwards at $977, with Palladium gaining more momentum for the third consecutive day and is currently trading at $1082
• Brent crude prices have traded upwards this morning and is currently trading at $78.56 with WTI also trading upwards at $75.02 currently.
• Cocoa prices are showing more momentum today after big gains and is currently trading at 5477 pounds

Other News in Africa Today

Mozambique Election Results Due Today: The preliminary results are to be released later today however, the final full election results could take up to two weeks to be released according to the election authority. Initial indications are that the Frelimo Party will retain the Presidential seat after 49-years in power. Independent observers have raised concerns that there are indications that there may be election fraud, with 210 polling stations having denied access to the voting stations by independent observers and the media. Previous elections in Mozambique had been criticised for having major discrepancies between the official count and observer parallel counts.

Healthcare Inequality in South Africa Questioned: In what is increasingly becoming a national outrage, escalating costs of SA’s presidential medical unit for south Africa’s top politicians have come under scrutiny, as taxpayers foot the bill for non-emergency treatments of high-ranking politicians. In contrast the National healthcare system in the country is basically on life-support with many hospitals and clinics under-staffed and lacking equipment. The medical unit, intended for emergency medical support during official travels, has now expanded to include 60 personnel, 45 vehicles and provides 24/7 medical support, costing almost R500 million in tax payers money since 2017. According to Health Minister, Angie Motshekga, the medical costs for the politicians were close to R80 million in 2019-20, R68 million in 2020- 21, R87 million in 2021-22, R91 million in 2022-23, and R97 million in 2023-24. Between April and September this year, nearly R50 million had already been spent, causing widespread outrage while hundreds of thousands of citizens lack even the most basic care and sit for days waiting for medical assistance at state run medical units.