Against the backdrop of rising labor costs, the UK retail industry is rapidly moving towards an era of automation. From electronic shelf labels to self-checkout machines, many new technologies are gradually transforming the familiar supermarket shopping experience. With the national minimum wage increase and higher employer national insurance contributions, retailers are significantly increasing their investments in automation technology, hoping to address the rising labor costs by improving production efficiency. Recent holiday trading updates show that investment in automation has become a focal point for major retailers. A survey indicates that nearly one-third of retail financial leaders...

Recently, the DeepSeek team in China has launched its latest open-source large model R1, which has gained widespread attention. The performance of the R1 model is exceptionally outstanding, surpassing OpenAI's o1 model in multiple tests, especially excelling in assessments related to mathematics and programming. In the latest AIME2024 test in the United States, R1 scored 79.8, outperforming o1's score of 79.2. In the MATH-500 test, R1 achieved a score of 97.3, again leading over o1.

In today's rapid development of Large Language Models (LLM), the training and inference costs of models have increasingly become a focus of research and application. Recently, the Tencent Hunyuan team released an important study that delves into the 'Scaling Laws' of low-bit floating point quantization training, which refers to the principles governing the scale of floating point quantization training. The core of this research lies in exploring how to significantly reduce computational and storage costs without sacrificing performance by lowering the precision of the model.

According to Intelligent Eruption, embodied intelligent agent operating system developer Yunjinwei recently announced the completion of an angel round financing of several million yuan, led by iFlytek. This round of financing will be used for core technology product development and market ecosystem construction. Founded in June 2021, Yunjinwei focuses on the development of embodied intelligent agent operating systems. The company was founded by Dr. Wang Wenyu, former general manager of the hardware division of Yitu Technology, and co-founder Dr. Zhou Chang was formerly responsible for visual large model development at Alibaba's DAMO Academy for the Urban Brain. The team has received support from Ningbo's Yaojiang Talent Plan and Yongjiang Talent Engineering Plan.

As the potential of artificial intelligence in healthcare draws increasing attention, Brazilian startup Carecode is emerging in this trend. Carecode focuses on leveraging AI agents to handle various tasks before and after medical appointments, aiming to lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes. CEO Thomaz Srougi stated in an interview that the importance of not only face-to-face meetings with doctors cannot be overlooked, but also the stages before and after appointments are crucial. His medical background stems from a decade of industry experience, during which he founded.

The recently launched o3AI model by OpenAI is considered its most powerful artificial intelligence product, but the running costs are staggering, with a single task costing over $1000. According to TechCrunch reports, this new model uses a technique called 'test-time computation' when handling complex problems, meaning it spends more time thinking and exploring multiple possibilities before arriving at an answer. As a result, OpenAI engineers hope that o3 can generate higher quality responses under complex prompts.

During a continuous 12-day live event, OpenAI released the O1 model API to developers on the 9th day and announced significant upgrades to the real-time API, supporting WebRTC technology. Starting from the release date, OpenAI will provide access to the O1 API for developers at usage level 5. Compared to the previous preview version, this updated O1 model API achieves a 60% reduction in thinking costs and adds advanced visual processing capabilities. Meanwhile, GPT-4o has improved in audio processing.

The competition in TV software is shifting towards advertising. TV manufacturers are increasingly keen on leveraging TV operating systems (OS) for ad placements and user tracking, leading to bold new strategies such as advertising technology companies launching TV OS and displaying ads on TV screensavers. TCL, as a TV manufacturer, is set to premiere a series of shorts on its free streaming service. This marks the company's new attempt at monetizing TV users and film production, relying on generative AI and targeted advertising.

In product teams, the backlog of screen recordings and screenshots often goes unnoticed, with video creation being both time-consuming and costly. However, two former Microsoft employees saw an opportunity in this market and decided to launch an AI tool called Lica, which easily transforms screenshots and recordings into engaging tutorials and product videos. This startup was founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, both ex-Microsoft employees.

Recently, the AI research company Epoch AI released an interactive simulator designed to simulate the computational power required to train large language models. Through this simulator, researchers found that while a 2012 outdated graphics card (like the GTX580) could be used to train GPT-4, the cost would be ten times that of modern hardware today. Epoch AI's research indicates that the number of floating-point operations (FLOP) required to train GPT-4 is between 1e25 and 1e26.