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Huawei’s buggy software hampers China’s efforts to replace Nvidia in AI

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Huawei’s buggy software hampers China’s efforts to replace Nvidia in AI

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China’s efforts to match US computing power in artificial intelligence are being hampered by bug-ridden software, with customers of leading AI chipmaker Huawei complaining about performance issues and the difficulty of switching from Nvidia products.

The Chinese technology giant has emerged as the frontrunner in the race to develop a domestic alternative to industry leader Nvidia, after Washington further tightened export controls on high-performance silicon last October.

Its Ascend series has become an increasingly popular option for Chinese AI groups to run inference, a process that applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT use to generate responses to queries.

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But multiple industry insiders, including an AI engineer at a partner company, said the chips still lagged far behind Nvidia’s for the initial training of models. They blamed stability issues, slower inter-chip connectivity and inferior software developed by Huawei called Cann.

Nvidia’s software platform Cuda is renowned as the company’s “secret sauce” for being easy for developers to use and capable of vastly accelerating data processing. Huawei is one of many companies trying to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI chips by creating alternative software.

Huawei’s own employees are among those complaining about Cann. One researcher, who declined to be named, said it made the Ascend product “difficult and unstable to use” and work on testing it was being hampered.

“When random errors occur, it is very difficult to find out where it comes from due to poor documentation. You need talented developers to read the source code to see what the issue is, which slows everything down. The coding is imperfect,” they said.

Another Chinese engineer briefed on Baidu’s use of the Huawei processors said the chips crashed frequently, complicating AI development work.

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The Huawei researcher said crashes happened because it was difficult to use the hardware. “It is easy to get bad results because people don’t know much about the hardware itself,” they said.

To tackle the problem, Huawei has been sending engineers to help customers on site with transferring training code previously written on Cuda into Cann, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Baidu, iFlytek and Tencent are among the tech companies that have received teams of engineers, these people said.

Huawei declined to comment. Baidu, iFlytek and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.

A former Baidu employee said: “Huawei excels at customer service, so of course they have engineers on site at their big customers, helping them to use their chips.”

Huawei can leverage a huge workforce to accelerate the shift. According to the company, more than 50 per cent of its 207,000 employees work in research and development, including the engineers dispatched to install technology for customers.

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“Huawei’s advantage over Nvidia is it can work closely with its customers,” said technology analyst Tilly Zhang at consultancy Gavekal. “Unlike Nvidia, it has a large team of engineers to help solve clients’ problems and get them to transition to their hardware.”

Huawei has also set up an online portal for developers to give feedback on how its software can be improved.

After US tightened export controls in October, Huawei raised the price of the Ascend 910B, its chip used for training, by 20 to 30 per cent, according to people familiar with the matter.

Huawei’s customers have also expressed concern about supply constraints for the Ascend chip, likely due to manufacturing difficulties, with Chinese companies prevented from buying state of the art chipmaking machinery from the Dutch company ASML.

Huawei has seen strong demand for its AI chips. It reported a 34 per cent increase in first-half revenues on Thursday, without providing a breakdown of sales for its different businesses.

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More than 50 foundational models have “been trained and iterated” on the Ascend chip, Huawei executive director Zhang Ping’an said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July.

iFlytek has said its large language model has been trained exclusively on Huawei chips after Huawei sent a group of engineers to its headquarters in Hefei, eastern China, last year to integrate the technology.

Video: AI power demand could stifle industry’s growth | FT Energy Source

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FAQ: As Trump inauguration moves inside, what to know on the last-minute changes

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FAQ: As Trump inauguration moves inside, what to know on the last-minute changes

President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony is moving indoors to the Capitol rotunda due to a freezing blast of artic temps expected in D.C., he announced Friday.

In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump said he ordered Monday’s inauguration to be moved inside. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inauguration Ceremonies said in a statement that they’ll honor his request.

Of course, this last-minute change is having a major impact on everything from security to the thousands of spectators who booked hotel rooms and bought tickets to inaugural events.

Why is Trump’s second inauguration being held inside?

The D.C. area will be plunged into extreme cold as a piece of the polar vortex — an area of cold air that swirls around the Earth’s poles — brushes by the region.

Following some fresh snow during the day on Sunday, this extra-frigid air will move in Sunday night into Monday morning. Inauguration Day is often cold, but Monday looks to be especially brisk. The high is expected to be roughly 20°, with a low of 6°.

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“There is an Arctic blast sweeping the Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I don’t want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way. It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of Law Enforcement, First Responders, Police K9s and even horses, and hundreds of thousands of supporters that will be outside for many hours on the 20th (In any event, if you decide to come, dress warmly!).”

What parts of the 2025 inauguration will be inside?

Trump’s swearing-in ceremony will be conducted in the rotunda, where he will also deliver his inaugural address.

“The various Dignitaries and Guests will be brought into the Capitol. This will be a very beautiful experience for all, and especially for the large TV audience!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Capital One Arena in downtown D.C. will open for people to watch the ceremony and inaugural address on live video.

Then, instead of the traditional parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the president will join supporters at Capital One Arena after his speech.

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“We will open Capital One Arena on Monday for LIVE viewing of this Historic event, and to host the Presidential Parade,” Trump posted on social media. “I will join the crowd at Capital One, after my Swearing In.”

Outdoor areas on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, which were intended for tickets guests, will now be closed to those guests Monday, Capitol police said in a statement.

What’s staying the same?

Trump said in his post that other events would stay the same, including the victory rally at Capital One Arena scheduled for Sunday at 3 p.m.

He is still expected to attend three official inaugural balls Monday night.

If people had tickets to the inauguration, will they be able to use them at Capital One Arena?

Some 240,000 people hold tickets to attend inauguration on Monday. However, Capital One arena only can hold 20,000 people.

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News4 is still waiting for information as to what’s going to happen with those ticket holders. As of late Friday afternoon, several congressional social media accounts said they didn’t yet know and that ticket holders should keep checking back.

Will the inauguration security perimeter change?

That’s not yet clear. The U.S. Secret Service tells News4 they have contingency plans for matters like this. They said they may hold a news conference later Friday night or Saturday to go over the changes.

Trump is holding a rally at Capital One Arena on Sunday afternoon, the day before inauguration. As of late Friday afternoon, there was limited fencing set up around the arena. It’s unclear if that will now change.

There may also be a contingency plan being worked on, in case protesters go to the arena after Trump is sworn into office.

Are the planned Metro station closures still happening?

As of late Friday afternoon, Metro officials couldn’t say yet if there were any plans to change the number of Metro stations to be closed or to cancel those closures now that there won’t be a parade.

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The Gallery Place station next to Capital One Arena has entrances on H and F streets NW. Up until now, there were no plans to close those entrances outside the arena.

What other changes will have to happen?

It’s not just Metro and the Trump team that have to change everything. City leaders in D.C. have a lot of things that they have to now figure out.

There are 4,000 police officers coming in from around the country to line the parade route. Those officers will still be used because they still have to help watch the District to ensure everything is safe and to secure the areas around the inaugural balls.

When was the last time the inauguration was held inside?

President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985 was held indoors due to a wind chill of -20°. It remains the coldest inauguration on record, with a high temperature of just 7°. The parade was also canceled that year, according to NBC News.

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As California Burns, ‘Octavia Tried to Tell Us’ Has New Meaning

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As California Burns, ‘Octavia Tried to Tell Us’ Has New Meaning

This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here.

In the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, many people are referencing the work of the science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler, who grew up in Pasadena, was the daughter of a housekeeper and a father who was a shoeshiner. She went on to become the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” award. Her book “Parable of the Sower,” published in 1993, paints a picture of a California ravished by the effects of climate change, income inequality, political divisiveness and centers on a young woman struggling to find faith and the community to build a new future.

The phrase “Octavia tried to tell us,” which began to gain momentum in 2020 during the pandemic, has once again resurfaced, in part because Butler studied science and history so deeply. The accuracy with which she read the shifts in America can, at times, seem eerily prophetic. One entry in “Parable of the Sower,” which is structured as a journal, dated on “February 1, 2025” begins, “We had a fire today.” It goes on to describe how the fear of fires plague Robledo, a fictional town that feels much like Altadena, a haven for the Black middle class for more than 50 years, where Butler lived in the late ’90s.

In 2000, Butler wrote a piece for Essence magazine titled, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” She wrote: “Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes.”

In one of the last interviews before she died in 2006, Butler spoke to Democracy Now!, an independent news organization, about how she’d been worried about how climate could devastate California . “I wrote the two ‘Parable’ books back in the ’90s,” she said, referring to “Parable of the Sower” and her 1998 follow-up, “Parable of the Talents.” These books, she explained, were about what happens when “we don’t trouble to correct some of the problems we are brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. And I was aware of it back in the ’80s.” She continued: “A lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow.

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Lynell George, a writer who lives in Los Angeles and the author of a book on Butler and her creative journey, has spent many years studying Butler’s archives at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. In 2022, we asked George to write about how Butler predicted the world we live in. As so many people are turning to her work during this time of tremendous loss, we wanted to share that story with our readers again.

In her piece, “The Visions of Octavia Butler,” George wrote: “In ‘Parable of the Sower,’ Earth is tipping toward climate disaster: A catastrophic drought has led to social upheaval and violent class wars. Butler, a fervent environmentalist, researched the novel by clipping articles, taking notes and monitoring rain and growth in her Southern California neighborhood. She couldn’t help but wonder, she later wrote, what ‘environmental and economic stupidities’ might lead to. She often called herself a pessimist, but threaded into the bleak landscape of her ‘Parable’ novels are strands of glimmering hope — ribbons of blue at the edges of the fictional fiery skies.”

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Donald Trump’s inauguration to be moved indoors because of ‘bitterly cold’ weather

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Donald Trump’s inauguration to be moved indoors because of ‘bitterly cold’ weather

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Parts of Donald Trump’s inauguration will be moved inside the US Capitol because of freezing weather that is forecast for Washington on Monday.

It will be the first time since 1985 — when a severe cold snap hit Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration — that a swearing-in ceremony has been moved indoors.

The president-elect announced the revised plans in a Truth Social post on Friday, saying he had ordered the inauguration address, as well as prayers and speeches, to be delivered inside the Capitol Rotunda as Reagan had done four decades ago.

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“There is an Arctic blast sweeping the Country. I don’t want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way,” Trump wrote.

“It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of Law Enforcement, First Responders, Police K9s and even horses, and hundreds of thousands of supporters that will be outside for many hours on the 20th.”

The National Weather Service said an “enhanced winter storm threat” was in place for Sunday afternoon and evening, and predicted about 2-4 inches of snow would fall, with a “reasonable worst case” scenario of 4-8 inches.

“Bitterly cold wind chills” were expected Monday to Wednesday, the NWS said on Friday, as it forecast temperatures to be “well below freezing” during this period.

The agency is forecasting a high of about -5C at 11am local time on Monday, when the swearing-in ceremony is due to begin, with a wind-chill of -13C that it warned could result in hypothermia or frostbite without appropriate attire.

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Trump said the Capital One Arena — with a capacity of 20,000 — will be opened on Monday for a live viewing of the ceremony, and that he would visit the venue, located about 2km from the Capitol, following his swearing-in.

Other events, including a victory rally at the arena are scheduled for Sunday and inaugural balls set for Monday night, will continue as scheduled, the president-elect said.

Trump encouraged supporters who choose to come to “dress warmly!”

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