 Lost in translation Can anyone produce a large-language model as dominant in Chinese as ChatGPT is in English? “The answer is a decisive no,” Robert Wu, the head of a Beijing-based research firm, wrote in the Baiguan newsletter. His logic: LLMs are — for now — not inventive, but based on source material, and given widespread political, social, and cultural censorship in the world’s biggest Chinese-speaking society, it is unlikely at any point in the foreseeable future to rival the English internet. Still, that does not preclude two potential outcomes, Wu writes. For one, Chinese companies could still create LLMs for the Chinese market, in much the same way that Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba have built themselves to cater to domestic audiences, attaining financial success in the process, with fitful experiments abroad. A second, bigger threat to Western firms is the LLM equivalent of TikTok: “Having poor Chinese-language training material will not prevent Chinese companies from making a globally competitive LLM product, catering to the global audience.” What women want Three key elections have just concluded in India, Mexico, and South Africa, with each country making progress — one way or another — in increasing women’s representation in politics: India’s government passed a bill introducing a quota for the number of parliamentary seats to be filled by women (though it has yet to become law, and did not apply in this just-completed election); Mexico saw its first-ever woman elected president; and South Africa saw 15 political parties field more female than male candidates. But as Akshi Chawla notes in #WomenLead, far less is known in many of these places about the women actually casting the ballots. “For those of you who follow Indian politics, you’d have noticed – the ‘woman’ question has been a big part of the political discourse,” Chawla writes. “But the woman here is the woman voter, not so much the politician. All political parties have been trying their best to attract women’s votes. But how women vote remains a little enigmatic.” Child’s play Social norms, Kevin Maguire argues, teach fathers that their parenting must compete for time and attention with their careers and their interests, and many men take the lesson that they must then distance themselves from their emotions in order to succeed. In fact, he writes in The New Fatherhood, the opposite is true: Truly exploring the depth of their feelings for their children “is additive,” ultimately offering “new abilities to funnel back into your career and interests.” “For generations gone by, boys have been introduced to The Well of Feelings at an early age,” he writes: “They come to equate the well with darkness and fear. They learn to stay away from it.” But if they have children, “these tiny humans pull you towards the darkness as you wonder what was down there all along, carefully prying nails out of old boards that kept you out — or that kept something else in. And then you realise it might not be so scary after all. In fact, it’s rather beautiful.” |
