An Invisible Wall.

Hallucinations.

‘Fairytale of New York’ is the most-played Christmas song in the UK in the 21st century. Hozier sang it on ‘Saturday Night Live’ last weekend. He did it justice. Have a listen.

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1. Chinese startups show signs of catching up with America’s leading artificial-intelligence models more quickly than many in the industry had expected, despite the restrictions China faces in buying advanced chips. DeepSeek, a startup funded by one of China’s most successful hedge-fund managers, released a preview version of its latest large language model in November. It said the program’s abilities compared favorably with OpenAI’s reasoning model called o1, which came out in preview form in September. Other Chinese companies have made similar claims in recent weeks. Moonshot AI, a startup backed by Chinese internet giants Alibaba and Tencent, said it developed a model specializing in math with capabilities close to o1, while Alibaba said one of its own experimental research models outperformed the preview version of the U.S. model on math. (This article echoes a report in The Wire China, which was posted three weeks ago. Sources: wsj.com, thewirechina.com)

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2. Chinese authorities have agreed to issue 3 trillion yuan ($411 billion) worth of special treasury bonds next year, two sources said, which would be the highest on record, as Beijing ramps up fiscal stimulus to revive a faltering economy. The plan for 2025 sovereign debt issuance would be a sharp increase from this year's 1 trillion yuan and comes as Beijing moves to soften the blow from an expected increase in U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports when Donald Trump takes office in January. The proceeds will be targeted at boosting consumption via subsidy programmes, equipment upgrades by businesses and funding investments in innovation-driven advanced sectors, among other initiatives, said the sources. The sources, who have knowledge of the discussions, declined to be identified due to sensitivity of the matter. (Source: reuters.com)