News round-up, Thursday, February 16, 2023.
Quote of the day…
Some already believe that the hybridisation of generative AI and conventional search engines may be the biggest innovation in consumer technology since Apple released its first iPhone. Bing, which has always lived in the shadow of Google (3% and 90% of the world's search engine share, respectively), is for the first time threatening the colour-letter technology company's placid reign.
Most read…
Why do we keep talking about artificial intelligence?
The fight for ad revenue that is shaping the future of the internet…
Google and Microsoft's headlong rush to launch a search engine you can talk to comes at a time of major change in the tech business.
El País, wtittten in Spanish by MANUEL G. PASCUALTranslation by Germán & CoRaquel Welch, actor, sex symbol, dies aged 82
Welch died Wednesday morning following a brief illness, Media Four announced in a statement.
In newsRussia says U.S. should prove it did not destroy Nord Stream
Moscow considers the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines last September "an act of international terrorism" and will not allow it to be swept under the rug, the embassy said in a statement.
Reuter Putin is staring at defeat in his gas war with Europe
Mild weather this winter is set to help Europe shrug off Russia’s energy threats next year, too.
POLITICO EU by CHARLIE COOPERWorld Bank Group President David Malpass to step down
Climate activists had called for the Trump appointee to be ousted for his climate crisis stance.
Le Monde with AFP
Who Was Pablo Neruda and Why Is His Death a Mystery?
Fifty years on, the true cause of death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in the wake of the country’s 1973 coup d’état, has remained in doubt across the world.
In newsGlencore’s coal fudge risks satisfying no one
That highly polluting bonanza presents a dilemma for Nagle. On the one hand, purely financially motivated investors might want him to make even more money by ramping up production. On the other, green investors like Legal & General Investment Management and HSBC Asset Management are pushing to find out more details about how Nagle reconciles his plans with the objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change, according to the Financial Times. Activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners last year argued that Glencore should spin off the coal division, following in the steps of Anglo American.
Reuters, by Karen Kwok
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Cooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
What is Artificial Intelligency?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. Although there are no AIs that can perform the wide variety of tasks an ordinary human can do, some AIs can match humans in specific tasks.
Why do we keep talking about artificial intelligence?
The fight for ad revenue that is shaping the future of the internet…
Google and Microsoft's headlong rush to launch a search engine you can talk to comes at a time of major change in the tech business.
El País, wtittten in Spanish by MANUEL G. PASCUALTranslation by Germán & Co16 FEB 2023Suddenly, it seems like Google has been wasting its time for the last decade. The great world dominator of search engines has gone in just a few days from being the benchmark technology company in artificial intelligence (AI) to seemingly being overtaken by Microsoft's new proposal. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week unveiled a revamped Bing search engine, which will incorporate a chatbot developed by OpenAI, the makers of the famous ChatGPT.
Google counter-programmed Microsoft by announcing a day earlier Bard, its own version of a search engine with intelligent chat. But it was not able to show how it works, not even at a big international press event in Paris two days later, which EL PAÍS attended. The only thing that could be seen there, in fact, took its toll: Bard's recorded example of intelligent search provided incorrect information about the James Webb telescope. Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, fell by 8% that day. The markets penalised the mistake, with the Mountain View company seen as improvising a response to Microsoft's attack.
Why all of a sudden so much interest in AI? Because ChatGPT has shown the general public its potential. Although the tool invents content, many thought that, by making certain adjustments, it could revolutionise the search engine experience. It is more pleasant to get information by talking to the machine than by typing in keywords. It is also interesting to be able to ask it to generate texts of a certain complexity, such as summaries, itineraries or essays. Large language models (LLM) make this possible, although their reliability is still in question.
Some already believe that the hybridisation of generative AI and conventional search engines may be the biggest innovation in consumer technology since Apple released its first iPhone. Bing, which has always lived in the shadow of Google (3% and 90% of the world's search engine share, respectively), is for the first time threatening the colour-letter technology company's placid reign.
The elephant in the room
But the frantic race to lead in the development of ever smarter search engines goes beyond riding a wave. Controlling the world's most widely used search engine and web browser has allowed Alphabet and Meta to dominate the global advertising market for more than a decade, bringing in an average annual revenue of $220 billion. This cash windfall has allowed it to buy strategic companies and launch a wide range of projects. Among them, his autonomous car Waymo or Calico, the biotechnology company whose aim is to combat ageing.
This bonanza may be coming to an end. Last year was the first since 2014 in which the sum of Alphabet and Meta accounted for less than 50% of the global advertising market, specifically 48.4%. It is the fifth year in a row that figure has fallen since peaking in 2017 (54.7%), and analysts expect it to fall further. The reasons: TikTok is coming on strong, and is already the search engine of choice for many young people; Amazon is also growing; and Apple, since allowing app tracking to be blocked, has hurt Meta's business.
The great manna of advertising may be running out for Google and Facebook. Facebook decided years ago what its answer to this problem and its inability to attract young audiences was: the metaverse. Google, for its part, has no plan B beyond AI. It has been investing in this technology for decades. That would explain its hasty reaction to Microsoft's gamble.
A rushed race
Nadella has turned Microsoft around in less than a decade. When the executive took the helm of the company in 2014, its revenues depended almost exclusively on Windows and the Office suite. He decided to bet big on cloud services and AI. Azure, the cloud division, is already responsible for a quarter of the group's turnover. Two years ago, Microsoft invested 1 billion in OpenAI, to which this year, after seeing the tremendous success of ChatGPT among the general public, it has added another 10 billion to develop the conversational chatbot that will accompany its search engine.
What has Alphabet done in the meantime? Among other things, it has laid the foundations for the technology from which chatbots draw today, as the company's own executives have been at pains to point out lately. Its Google Brain division and the British company DeepMind, which it acquired in 2014, are among the world's elite in the discipline. As the technology company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, recalled last week, the Transformer research project and its foundational paper, presented in 2017, is the touchstone on which the scientific community has built the so-called advanced generative artificial intelligence.
Bard, Google's bid to make its search engine smart, is a pocket-sized version of LaMDA, one of Google's most advanced linguistic modelling projects. Launched two years ago, LaMDA made international headlines last summer, when engineer Blake Lemoine, who was commissioned to review the ethical underpinnings of the robot's responses, said he thought the AI had gained a conscience. DeepMind, meanwhile, plans to offer a beta version of its own model, which it has dubbed Sparrow, this year.
To deny the effect that ChatGPT's emergence has had on the strategy of the big tech companies is, at this stage, unconvincing. And yet that is what Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of Alphabet and one of the multinational's most powerful executives, did last week. "We've been following our own roadmap in artificial intelligence development for years. ChatGPT has not influenced us in any way," he said on Wednesday in Paris in a meeting with several media outlets, including EL PAÍS. It is a fact, however, that Google has introduced Bard, but without a launch date. Raghavan himself said he did not have an approximate one: "What matters most to us is to achieve the quality we want the service to have.
The tech industry is very fad-driven. Generative AI is clearly the hype of the moment. In addition to Microsoft and Google, Chinese tech giant Baidu also announced last week that it is working on its own version of a search engine/intelligent chatbot hybrid. Meta, meanwhile, cancelled its Galactica project, a language model capable of producing scientific articles based on millions of previously analysed documents, in November because it quickly proved to be sexist and racist.
In order to gain traction, chat search engines will have to prove that they provide reliable information. This is not easy. Examples of ChatGPT's fabricated content have flooded social media in recent months. Bard inadvertently showed a mistake in its presentation (that of the James Webb telescope) at last week's event. Bing, currently in testing, also makes up content if the screws are tightened.
Some of the world's leading experts warn of the folly of wanting to go too fast with this technology. "Great language models should be used as a writing aid, not for much else," said Yann LeCun, head of AI research at Meta and an eminent expert in the field. Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind (Google), also suggests that these tools require a cautious approach: "It's good to be cautious on this front," he said. That caution is, at the moment, conspicuous by its absence.
Raquel Welch, actor, and sex symbol, dies aged 82.
Welch died Wednesday morning following a brief illness, Media Four announced in a statement.
“I just assumed it was a crazy dinosaur epic we’d be able to sweep under the carpet one day,” she told The Associated Press in 1981. “Wrong. It turned out that I was the Bo Derek of the season, the lady in the loincloth about whom everyone said ‘ My God.
Image: Germán & CoRussia says U.S. should prove it did not destroy Nord Stream
Feb 16 (Reuters) - The United States should try to prove it was not behind the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines that connected Russia to Western Europe, the Russian embassy to the United States said on Thursday.
Moscow considers the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines last September "an act of international terrorism" and will not allow it to be swept under the rug, the embassy said in a statement.
The embassy referred to a blog post by journalist Seymour Hersh citing an unidentified source as saying that U.S. Navy divers had destroyed the pipelines with explosives on the orders of President Joe Biden.
The White House has dismissed the allegations as "utterly false and complete fiction".
U.S. Department of State spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday "it is pure disinformation that the United States was behind what transpired" with Nord Stream, provoking the fresh Russian comment.
An LNG Terminal in Zeebrugge, BelgiumPutin is staring at defeat in his gas war with Europe
Mild weather this winter is set to help Europe shrug off Russia’s energy threats next year, too.
POLITICO EU by CHARLIE COOPERFEBRUARY 15, 2023 There's more bad news for Vladimir Putin. Europe is on course to get through winter with its vital gas storage facilities more than half full, according to a new European Commission assessment seen by POLITICO.
That means despite the Russian leader's efforts to make Europe freeze by cutting its gas supply, EU economies will survive the coldest months without serious harm — and they look set to start next winter in a strong position to do the same.
A few months ago, there were fears of energy shortages this winter caused by disruptions to Russian pipeline supplies.
But a combination of mild weather, increased imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), and a big drop in gas consumption mean that more than 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas is projected to remain in storage by the end of March, according to the Commission analysis.
A senior European Commission official attributed Europe’s success in securing its gas supply to a combination of planning and luck.
“A good part of the success is due to unusually mild weather conditions and to China being out of the market [due to COVID restrictions],” the official said. “But demand reduction, storage policy and infrastructure work helped significantly."
Ending the winter heating season with such healthy reserves — above 50 percent of the EU’s roughly 100bcm total storage capacity — removes any lingering fears of a gas shortage in the short term. It also eases concerns about Europe’s energy security going into next winter.
The positive figures underlie the more optimistic outlook presented by EU leaders in recent days, with Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson saying on Tuesday that Europe had “won the first battle” of the “energy war” with Russia.
EU storage facilities — also vital for winter gas supply in the U.K., where storage options are limited — ended last winter only around 20 percent full. Brussels mandated that they be replenished to 80 percent ahead of this winter, requiring a hugely expensive flurry of LNG purchases by European buyers, to replace volumes of gas lost from Russian pipelines.
The wholesale price of gas rose to record levels during storage filling season — peaking at more than €335 per megawatt hour in August — with dire knock-on effects for household bills, businesses’ energy costs and Europe’s industrial competitiveness.
Gas prices have since fallen to just above €50/Mwh amid easing concerns over supplies. The EU has a new target to fill 90 percent of gas storage again by November 2023 — an effort that will now require less buying of LNG on the international market than it might have done had reserves been more seriously depleted.
"The expected high level of storages at above 50 percent [at] the end of this winter season will be a strong starting point for 2023/24 with less than 40 percent to be filled (against the difficult starting point of around 20 percent in storage at the end of winter season in 2022," the Commission assessment says.
Analysts at the Independent Commodity Intelligence Services think tank said this week that refilling storages this year could still be “as tough a challenge as last year” but predicted that the EU now had “more than enough import capacity to meet the challenge.”
Across the EU, five new floating LNG terminals have been set up — in the Netherlands, Greece, Finland and two in Germany — providing an extra 30bcm of gas import capacity, with more due to come online this year and next.
However, the EU’s ability to refill storages to the new 90 percent target ahead of next winter will likely depend on continued reduction in gas consumption.
Brussels set member states a voluntary target of cutting gas demand by 15 percent from August last year. Gas demand actually fell by more than 20 percent between August and December, according to the latest Commission data, partly thanks to efficiency measures but also the consequence of consumers responding to much higher prices by using less energy.
The 15 percent target may need to be extended beyond its expiry date of March 31 to avoid gas demand rebounding as prices fall. EU energy ministers are set to discuss the issue at two forthcoming meetings in February and Mar
World Bank Group President David Malpass to step down
Climate activists had called for the Trump appointee to be ousted for his climate crisis stance.
Le Monde with AFP
Published on February 16, 2023
World Bank Group President David Malpass attends a news conference during the 2022 annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, on October 13, 2022, in Washington. PATRICK SEMANSKY / AP
World Bank chief David Malpass announced Wednesday, February 15, that he would step down nearly a year early, ending a tenure at the head of the development lender that was clouded by questions over his climate stance.
The veteran of Republican administrations in the United States was appointed to the role in 2019 when Donald Trump was president and previously served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for international affairs. His tenure at the World Bank saw the organization grapple with global crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an international economic slowdown.
"After a good deal of thought, I've decided to pursue new challenges," the 66-year-old was quoted as saying in a statement from the bank, having informed its board of his decision. "This is an opportunity for a smooth leadership transition as the Bank Group works to meet increasing global challenges," Malpass added.
'I'm not a scientist'
In recent months, Malpass has come up against calls for his resignation or removal. Climate activists had called for Malpass to be ousted for what they said was an inadequate approach to the climate crisis and the chorus grew louder after his appearance at a New York Times-organized conference last September.
Pressed on stage to respond to a claim by former US vice president Al Gore that he was a climate denier, Malpass declined several times to say if he believed man-made emissions were warming the planet – responding, "I'm not a scientist." He later said he had no plans to stand down and moved to clarify his position, acknowledging that climate-warming emissions were coming from man-made sources, including fossil fuels. The White House previously rebuked Malpass, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying the expectation was for the bank to be a global leader on climate crisis response.
The bank said in a statement on Wednesday that it has "responded quickly" in the face of recent global challenges, in particular mobilizing a record $440 billion to tackle climate change, the pandemic and other issues. "Under (Malpass') leadership, the Bank Group more than doubled its climate finance to developing countries, reaching a record $32 billion last year," the statement added.
In a note to staff seen by AFP, Malpass said: "Developing countries around the world are facing unprecedented crises and I'm proud that the Bank Group has continued to respond with speed, scale, innovation, and impact." Malpass' term would have originally ended in 2024.
'WorldBank lost valuable time in fighting climate change'
Environmental groups welcomed his departure. "Under David Malpass, the @WorldBank lost valuable time in fighting climate change," tweeted Friends of the Earth. "Not only did he fail to stop actions that fuel climate chaos and injustice, Malpass pushed for Wall Street-friendly policies that go against the public interest."
In a statement, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the world has benefitted from his strong support for Ukraine, his work to assist the Afghan people and his commitment to helping low-income countries achieve debt sustainability through debt reduction. She added that the United States looks forward to a swift nomination process by the World Bank's board for the organization's next president. "We will put forward a candidate to lead the World Bank and build on the Bank's longstanding work... and who will carry forward the vital work we are undertaking to evolve the multilateral development banks," she said.
The head of the World Bank is traditionally an American, while the leader of the other major international lender in Washington, the International Monetary Fund, tends to be European. Prior to assuming his role as World Bank president, Malpass repeatedly lambasted the big development lenders as wasteful and ineffective and called for reforms.
Image: NYTWho Was Pablo Neruda and Why Is His Death a Mystery?
February 15, 2023 in newsFifty years on, the true cause of death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in the wake of the country’s 1973 coup d’état, has remained in doubt across the world.
The Nobel laureate was not only one of the world’s most celebrated poets but also one of Chile’s most influential political activists. An outspoken communist, he supported Salvador Allende, Chile’s leftist president from 1970 to 1973, and worked in his administration.
Mr. Neruda’s death in a private clinic just weeks after the coup was determined to be the result of cancer, but the timing and the circumstances have long raised doubts about whether his death was something more nefarious.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reviewed the summary of findings compiled by international forensic experts who had examined Mr. Neruda’s exhumed remains and identified bacteria that can be deadly. In a one-page summary of their report, shared with The New York Times, the scientists confirmed that the bacteria was in his body when he died, but said they could not distinguish whether it was a toxic strain of the bacteria nor whether he was injected with it or instead ate contaminated food.
The findings once again leave open the question of whether Mr. Neruda was murdered.
Who was Pablo Neruda?
Mr. Neruda was a Chilean lawmaker, diplomat and Nobel laureate poet. He was regarded as one of Latin America’s greatest poets and was the leading spokesman for Chile’s leftist movement until the ascendancy of a socialist president, Mr. Allende, in 1970.
Born July 12, 1904, he grew up in Parral, a small agricultural community in southern Chile. His mother, a schoolteacher, died shortly after he was born; his father was a railway employee who did not support his literary aspirations. Despite that, Mr. Neruda started writing poetry at the age of 13.
During his lifetime, Mr. Neruda occupied several diplomatic positions in countries including Argentina, Mexico, Spain and France. To the end of his life, he was as engaged in political activism as in poetry.
Mr. Neruda died in a clinic in Santiago, Chile’s capital, at the age of 69. His death came less than two weeks after that of his friend and political ally, Mr. Allende, who died by suicide to avoid surrendering to the military after his government was toppled in September 1973.
How was he as a political figure?
During his time in Barcelona as a diplomat, Mr. Neruda’s experience of the Spanish Civil War pushed him into a more engaged political stance. “Since then,” he later wrote, “I have been convinced that it is the poet’s duty to take his stand.”
The diplomat lost his post because of his support of the Spanish Republic, which was dissolved after surrendering to the Nationalists of Gen. Francisco Franco. He also lobbied to save more than 2,000 refugees displaced by Mr. Franco’s dictatorship.
Mr. Neruda, a lifelong member of the Communist Party, served only one term in office. As a senator, he was critical of the government of President Gabriel González Videla, who ruled Chile from 1946 to 1952, which led Mr. Neruda into forced exile for four years.
He returned to his country in 1952, a left-wing literary figure, to support Mr. Allende’s campaign for the presidency, which was unsuccessful then and in another two attempts. In 1970, Mr. Neruda was named the Communist candidate for Chile’s presidency until he withdrew in favor of Mr. Allende — who was finally elected that year.
Why is he such a big deal?
Mr. Neruda is one of the Latin America’s most prominent figures of the 20th century for his poetry and his political activism — calling out U.S. meddling abroad, denouncing the Spanish Civil War and supporting Chile’s Communist Party. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.
However, Mr. Neruda was also a controversial man who neglected his daughter, who was born with hydrocephalus and died at the age of 8, in 1943. And recently, he has been reconsidered in light of a description in his memoir of sexually assaulting a maid.
What are his most notable works?
Mr. Neruda was a prolific writer who released more than 50 publications in verse and prose, ranging from romantic poems to exposés of Chilean politicians and reflections on the anguish of a Spain plagued by civil war. His fervent activism for social justice and his extensive body of poems have echoed worldwide, making him an intellectual icon of the 20th century in Latin America.
He published his first book, “Crepusculario,” or “Book of Twilight,” in 1923 at 19, and the following year he released “Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada,” (“20 Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.”) This collection established him as a major poet and, almost a century later, it is still a best-selling poetry book in the Spanish language.
His travels as a diplomat also influenced his work, as in the two volumes of poems titled “Residencia en la Tierra” (“Residence on Earth”). And his connection with communism was clear in his book “Canto General” (“General Song”), in which he tells the history of the Americas from a Hispanic perspective.
But his tendency toward communism could have delayed his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1971 for his overall work. According to the prize’s webpage, he produced “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.”
What is the controversy surrounding his death?
After Chile’s coup d’état, one of the most violent in Latin America, troops raided Mr. Neruda’s properties. The Mexican government offered to fly him and his wife, Matilde Urrutia, out of the country, but he was admitted to the Santa María clinic for prostate cancer.
On the evening of Sept. 23, 1973, the clinic reported that Mr. Neruda died of heart failure. Earlier that day, he had called his wife saying he was feeling ill after receiving some form of medication.
In 2011, Manuel Araya, Mr. Neruda’s driver at the time, publicly claimed that the doctors at the clinic poisoned him by injecting an unknown substance into his stomach, saying Mr. Neruda told him this before he died. Although witnesses, including his widow, dismissed the rumors, some challenged the claim that Mr. Neruda had died of cancer.
The accusations eventually led to an official inquiry. In 2013, a judge ordered the exhumation of the poet’s remains and for samples to be sent to forensic genetics laboratories. But international and Chilean experts ruled out poisoning in his death, according to the report released seven months later. The findings said there were no “relevant chemical agents” present that could be related to Mr. Neruda’s death and that “no forensic evidence whatsoever” pointed to a cause of death other than prostate cancer.
Yet in 2017, a group of forensic investigators announced that Mr. Neruda had not died of cancer — and that they had found traces of a potentially toxic bacteria in one of his molars. The panel handed its findings to the court and was asked to try to determine the origin of the bacteria.
In the final report given to a Chilean judge on Wednesday, those scientists said that other circumstantial evidence supported the theory of murder, including the fact that in 1981, the military dictatorship had poisoned prisoners with bacteria potentially similar to the strain found in Mr. Neruda. But they said that without further evidence, they could not determine the cause of Mr. Neruda’s death.
The post Who Was Pablo Neruda and Why Is His Death a Mystery? appeared first on New York Times.
Image: Germán & CoGlencore’s coal fudge risks satisfying no one
Reuters, by Karen Kwok
LONDON, Feb 15 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Gary Nagle has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Instead of picking a side, he seems to be trying to keep both happy. The boss of $80 billion commodity giant Glencore (GLEN.L) is minting money from coal while prices are high, but planning to keep production of the fossil fuel roughly steady until 2025. It’s a plan that risks pleasing no one, while also dirtying the company’s valuation.
Unlike rivals Anglo American (AAL.L) and Rio Tinto (RIO.AX), (RIO.L), London-listed Glencore is still mining coal. Right now, that’s an extremely lucrative business. A global energy squeeze has pushed up demand and prices. Its EBITDA from the fuel grew more than threefold in 2022, and accounted for more than half of the group’s $34.1 billion total.
That highly polluting bonanza presents a dilemma for Nagle. On the one hand, purely financially motivated investors might want him to make even more money by ramping up production. On the other, green investors like Legal & General Investment Management and HSBC Asset Management are pushing to find out more details about how Nagle reconciles his plans with the objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change, according to the Financial Times. Activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners last year argued that Glencore should spin off the coal division, following in the steps of Anglo American.
Nagle is not caving in to either side. His plan is to hang on to coal and keep annual production steady at around 110 million tonnes up to 2025. Using the prodigious cash flows from that business, he can reward shareholders while also funding investments in copper and cobalt. Over the longer term, he’ll then start shutting coal mines, with at least a dozen closures planned before 2035.
The risk is that Nagle’s compromise pleases neither the green crowd nor the others. That’s arguably reflected in an enterprise value that’s roughly 4 times forecast EBITDA for the next 12 months, based on Refinitiv data, compared with 4.5 and 5.2 for Anglo and Rio respectively. Just over three-quarters of Glencore’s investors supported Nagle’s climate strategy last year. He should brace for a lower number in 2023.