Trade wars would be 'catastrophic' for global growth, WTO chief says

The World Trade Organization (WTO) director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has warned that any trade wars prompted by US President Donald Trump's tariff threats would have catastrophic consequences for global growth.

Speaking at the world economic forum in Davos, Okonjo-Iweala urged States to refrain from retaliation.

She compared the situation to the period between the two world wars when countries adopted trade restrictions in response to a us tariff act in 1930.

Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian Finance Minister, started her second term as head of the WTO this year at a time when Trump's tariff threats have raised the specter of trade wars.

Reference Sources

1. usnews - Trade Wars Would Be 'Catastrophic' for Global Growth, WTO Chief Says
2. cna - Trade wars would be 'catastrophic' for global growth, WTO chief says
3. cna - Trade wars sparked by Trump tariffs would be 'catastrophic', WTO chief says
4. bussinesstimes - Trade wars sparked by Trump tariffs would be ‘catastrophic’: WTO chief - The Business Times

Chinese start-ups like DeepSeek are challenging global AI giants

Chinese startup Deepseek has released an "Earth-Shattering model" on Christmas day, followed by a powerful reasoning-focused ai model, Deepseek O1, which competes with OpenAI's recently-released O1 model.

Deepseek is not a One-Off.

Since the middle of last year, Chinese Tech companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance, Moonshot and 01AI have been steadily narrowing the gap with US peers, matching their capabilities and surpassing them in cost efficiency.

China's achievements in efficiency are no accident.

Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, described the AI race between the US and China as an "AI War," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs than people may think, especially considering US export controls.

Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach a trillion dollars, on par with estimates that the Generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Earlier this week, Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in US AI infrastructure.

The project, Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Reference Sources

1. cnbc - Scale AI CEO says China has quickly caught the U.S. with the DeepSeek open-source model
2. ft - Chinese start-ups like DeepSeek are challenging global AI giants

ChatGPT down as thousands report issues worldwide

(Source: Shutterstock)

ChatGPT, the world's best-known artificial intelligence (AI) tool, appeared to be temporarily down on Thursday morning as thousands of users around the world reported issues.

Downdetector, an outage tracking Website, showed thousands of users reporting a ChatGPT outage early Thursday morning.

OpenAI shared on its status page that ChatGPT was experiencing "increased errors" and a "partial outage" on Thursday morning. users who tried to access the AI model were unable to access its usual chat interface, instead reaching a "bad gateway" error page.

Gateway errors are often the result of server communication issues, where a user's computer is unable to receive a valid response from the server a website or program is housed on.

Reference Sources

1. eurodayfr - Is ChatGPT down? OpenAI says fix implemented after partial outage
2. bbc - ChatGPT down as thousands report issues worldwide
3. eurodayfr - how to take advantage of AI despite the outage
4. eurodayfr - Users worldwide unable to access popular AI chatbot
5. newyorkpost - ChatGPT goes down as OpenAI scrambles to fix bug

The CommonWealth English daily news digest is a service curated by CommonWealth English team with the help of AI tools.

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