0x815

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5201835

The UK House of Commons unanimously voted to reject China’s “distortion of the international law around Taiwan” to undermine its participation in international organizations, including the UN.

It is the fifth legislative body to condemn Beijing's interpretation of UN Resolution 2758, following Australia, Canada, The Netherlands and the EU.

The House said that UN Resolution 2758 passed on Oct. 25, 1971 — which states that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the only legitimate government of China — does not mention Taiwan and therefore does not establish PRC sovereignty over Taiwan or define its political status.

The chamber urged the UK government to clarify its position that nothing in international law forbids Taiwan’s participation in international organizations such as the UN.

[...]

The UK continues to be a "staunch advocate for Taiwan’s meaningful international participation" in bodies including the UN and the World Health Assembly, UK Foreign Office Minister for the Indo-Pacific Catherine West said yesterday.

The UK government should condemn any attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to “rewrite history,” as this behavior does not benefit Taiwanese, the interests of the UK or the wider international community, West added.

[...]

[Labour Party lawmaker Blair] McDougall said that “diplomatic technicalities on an issue as fraught as the status of Taiwan could have far-reaching consequences for the entire world,” citing the importance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, shipping routes and geopolitical position.

The economic toll of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be felt in every household in the UK, he added.

McDougall also stressed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine serves as a stark reminder to “form policy on a crisis before the crisis emerges,” he said.

The UK House of Commons unanimously voted to reject China’s “distortion of the international law around Taiwan” to undermine its participation in international organizations, including the UN.

It is the fifth legislative body to condemn Beijing's interpretation of UN Resolution 2758, following Australia, Canada, The Netherlands and the EU.

The House said that UN Resolution 2758 passed on Oct. 25, 1971 — which states that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the only legitimate government of China — does not mention Taiwan and therefore does not establish PRC sovereignty over Taiwan or define its political status.

The chamber urged the UK government to clarify its position that nothing in international law forbids Taiwan’s participation in international organizations such as the UN.

[...]

The UK continues to be a "staunch advocate for Taiwan’s meaningful international participation" in bodies including the UN and the World Health Assembly, UK Foreign Office Minister for the Indo-Pacific Catherine West said yesterday.

The UK government should condemn any attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to “rewrite history,” as this behavior does not benefit Taiwanese, the interests of the UK or the wider international community, West added.

[...]

[Labour Party lawmaker Blair] McDougall said that “diplomatic technicalities on an issue as fraught as the status of Taiwan could have far-reaching consequences for the entire world,” citing the importance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, shipping routes and geopolitical position.

The economic toll of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be felt in every household in the UK, he added.

McDougall also stressed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine serves as a stark reminder to “form policy on a crisis before the crisis emerges,” he said.

With the full-scale invasion’s third winter arriving, city streets are once again buzzing and roaring to the sound of generators small and large. The street lamps may be off, but shops and restaurants are brightly lit.

Diesel fumes hang heavy in the chill winter air.

In tower blocks, where power cuts put lifts out of action and prevent hot water from reaching the upper floors, residents already used to keeping power banks and flashlights to hand are starting to innovate.

Some have invested in batteries and inverters for their homes, which kick in as soon as the power goes off.

In a twenty-five storey block in Kyiv’s Pozniaky neighbourhood, home to around 700 people, residents have clubbed together to install a larger system in the basement, powerful enough to keep a single lift operating and pump hot water to the upper floors.

For Nataliya Andriyko, who lives on the 19th floor with her husband and pets, it’s a blessing.

“It’s a bizarre feeling,” she tells me as we sit in a kitchen lit by a single battery-operated lamp.

Germany is developing an app to help people locate the nearest bunker in the event of attack. Sweden is distributing a 32-page pamphlet titled If Crisis or War Comes. Half a million Finns have already downloaded an emergency preparedness guide.

If the prospect of a broader conflict in Europe seems remote for many, some countries at least are taking it seriously – and, in the term used by Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, taking steps to get populations kriegsfähig: war-capable.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has dramatically raised security tensions across the Baltic region, prompting Finland and Sweden to abandon decades of nonalignment and join Nato. Military capability, however, is not all: citizens have to be braced too.

Archived link

While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz can be praised for sending air defense systems to Ukraine, he ruined his own reputation by deciding not to send Taurus missiles, said former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba (2020-2024) in a wide-ranging interview with ETV's "Esimene stuudio."

Main points:

• Russia is trying to scare countries into not helping Ukraine;
• Nuclear deterrence strategies have been scrapped;
• Russia cannot win the war alone;
• Ukraine cannot be held hostage by countries' domestic politics;
• Russia has friends who will die for them, Ukraine does not have friends who will provide enough weapons;
• Countries publicly rejecting Macron's plan [to send Western non-combat troops to Ukraine] was an embarrassment;
• Putin does not need reasons to escalate;
• Trump will realize Putin is the problem, not Ukraine;
• History will judge German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The ruling Georgian Dream party said on Thursday that the country would suspend talks on European Union accession until 2028, while also refusing budgetary grants from Brussels, effectively halting its application to join the bloc for the next four years.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the capital, Tblisi, in the evening, while the country's outgoing president accused the government of declaring "war" on its own people with the move.

[...]

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze's government and the EU have been at odds for months for a number of reasons, but this intensified in the wake of disputed elections in late October.

The opposition in Georgia alleges fraud and interference in the vote and is boycotting the new parliament. The EU has called for independent investigations.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5196555

Archived link

In response to rising geopolitical risks, foreign companies are reducing their dependence on China by strengthening economic ties with allied countries and returning production to their domestic markets, writes Chi Hung Kwan, Consulting Fellow at Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), and Senior Fellow at the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research.

[...]

The 'inward direct investment' as reported in the 'Balance of Payments of China' by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange indicate a significant acceleration in the withdrawal of foreign companies from China. These statistics reveal a sharp decline in net inward direct investment, with the scale of foreign company withdrawal, including business downsizing, now exceeding new investment. In the most recent second quarter of 2024, the net flow was $-14.8 billion, marking the second negative figure recorded since the first in the third quarter of 2023.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

As an example of electronics companies moving away from China, Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases. In particular, the company has accelerated the construction of factories in India and Vietnam in response to the intensifying U.S.-China conflict since 2018 and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases.

[...]

South Korea's Samsung Electronics is also withdrawing from China [...] In 2019, it closed its last smartphone factory in China and moved production to Vietnam and India. Following that, PC production also withdrew from China in 2020.

[Japan's] Nintendo transferred part of the production of its flagship game console, the Nintendo Switch, to Vietnam in 2019 [...] Sony also closed its smartphone factory in Beijing in 2019 as part of a restructuring of its global production structure, concentrating production at a factory in Thailand.

[...]

Furthermore, content regulation and internet censorship in China is becoming stricter. The censorship system known as the "Great Firewall" restricts access to many overseas services, posing a major barrier to foreign platform companies doing business in China.

Among information technology companies, the withdrawal of platform companies has been especially significant, encompassing many of the industry's leading global players.

[In addition to platform companies like Airbnb and Amazon,] IBM, a comprehensive IT services company, announced that it will close its research and development division in China in August 2024. This will affect more than 1,000 employees. IBM plans to transfer its research and development functions to other overseas locations and will increase staff in places like India.

[...]

[In the car industry], Suzuki decided to dissolve two joint ventures, Changhe Suzuki and Chongqing Changan Suzuki, in 2018 and withdraw from the Chinese market.

[...] Hyundai Motor sold its Beijing No. 1 Plant in 2021 and its Chongqing Plant to a Chongqing city government-affiliated company in December 2023. The company also plans to sell its Cangzhou plant in Hebei Province soon.

[...] Honda announced in July 2024 that it will close its plant in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province in October and suspend production at its plant in Wuhan, Hubei Province in November. As a result, production capacity in China will be reduced by about 20% from the current annual level of 1.49 million units.

[...] Mitsubishi Motors announced in October 2023 that it would transfer its shares to its joint venture partner Guangzhou Automobile Group and withdraw from the Chinese market. Sales in China peaked at 179,000 units in 2018, falling to 33,000 units in 2022.

[...]

Nippon Steel announced in July 2024 that it will withdraw from its joint venture with China's Baoshan Iron & Steel, which supplies automotive steel sheets to Japanese manufacturers. The decision marks a significant shift in their half-century cooperation, which includes Nippon Steel's assistance in building the Baoshan Steelworks.

[...]

[As] consumption [in China's retail market] has been sluggish due to slowing economic growth and the collapse of the housing bubble [...] many foreign retail companies have decided to withdraw from the Chinese market or downsize their operations.

[...] In June 2019, Carrefour sold 80% of its Chinese business to China's Suning.com Group.

[...] Britain's Tesco sold all its shares in its Chinese joint venture to China Resources Enterprise, marking its complete withdrawal from the Chinese market.

[...] South Korea's Lotte Department Store in 2022, the company [sold its] last store in China [after operating in the country since 2008], in Chengdu, was sold. Meanwhile, Lotte Department Store has shifted the focus of its overseas expansion to Indonesia and Vietnam.

[...] Japan's Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings is also significantly scaling back its China operations. The company first entered China in 1993, [...] However, in 2022, it closed two stores in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in April 2024 it closed two stores in Tianjin, and in June of the same year it closed its Shanghai Meilongzhen Isetan store. Currently, the company’s only store in China is located in the Isetan Renhan shopping mall in Tianjin.

[...]

Many countries have introduced policies to promote onshoring and friend-shoring to enhance their economic security. Good examples include the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act (enacted in August 2022), which encourages companies from friendly countries to invest in semiconductors in the U.S.; Japan's Economic Security Promotion Act (enacted in May 2022), which strengthens the supply chain of critical materials and promotes technological cooperation with friendly countries; and the European Semiconductor Act (enacted in July 2023), which aims to strengthen the semiconductor ecosystem.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5196555

Archived link

In response to rising geopolitical risks, foreign companies are reducing their dependence on China by strengthening economic ties with allied countries and returning production to their domestic markets, writes Chi Hung Kwan, Consulting Fellow at Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), and Senior Fellow at the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research.

[...]

The 'inward direct investment' as reported in the 'Balance of Payments of China' by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange indicate a significant acceleration in the withdrawal of foreign companies from China. These statistics reveal a sharp decline in net inward direct investment, with the scale of foreign company withdrawal, including business downsizing, now exceeding new investment. In the most recent second quarter of 2024, the net flow was $-14.8 billion, marking the second negative figure recorded since the first in the third quarter of 2023.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

As an example of electronics companies moving away from China, Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases. In particular, the company has accelerated the construction of factories in India and Vietnam in response to the intensifying U.S.-China conflict since 2018 and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases.

[...]

South Korea's Samsung Electronics is also withdrawing from China [...] In 2019, it closed its last smartphone factory in China and moved production to Vietnam and India. Following that, PC production also withdrew from China in 2020.

[Japan's] Nintendo transferred part of the production of its flagship game console, the Nintendo Switch, to Vietnam in 2019 [...] Sony also closed its smartphone factory in Beijing in 2019 as part of a restructuring of its global production structure, concentrating production at a factory in Thailand.

[...]

Furthermore, content regulation and internet censorship in China is becoming stricter. The censorship system known as the "Great Firewall" restricts access to many overseas services, posing a major barrier to foreign platform companies doing business in China.

Among information technology companies, the withdrawal of platform companies has been especially significant, encompassing many of the industry's leading global players.

[In addition to platform companies like Airbnb and Amazon,] IBM, a comprehensive IT services company, announced that it will close its research and development division in China in August 2024. This will affect more than 1,000 employees. IBM plans to transfer its research and development functions to other overseas locations and will increase staff in places like India.

[...]

[In the car industry], Suzuki decided to dissolve two joint ventures, Changhe Suzuki and Chongqing Changan Suzuki, in 2018 and withdraw from the Chinese market.

[...] Hyundai Motor sold its Beijing No. 1 Plant in 2021 and its Chongqing Plant to a Chongqing city government-affiliated company in December 2023. The company also plans to sell its Cangzhou plant in Hebei Province soon.

[...] Honda announced in July 2024 that it will close its plant in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province in October and suspend production at its plant in Wuhan, Hubei Province in November. As a result, production capacity in China will be reduced by about 20% from the current annual level of 1.49 million units.

[...] Mitsubishi Motors announced in October 2023 that it would transfer its shares to its joint venture partner Guangzhou Automobile Group and withdraw from the Chinese market. Sales in China peaked at 179,000 units in 2018, falling to 33,000 units in 2022.

[...]

Nippon Steel announced in July 2024 that it will withdraw from its joint venture with China's Baoshan Iron & Steel, which supplies automotive steel sheets to Japanese manufacturers. The decision marks a significant shift in their half-century cooperation, which includes Nippon Steel's assistance in building the Baoshan Steelworks.

[...]

[As] consumption [in China's retail market] has been sluggish due to slowing economic growth and the collapse of the housing bubble [...] many foreign retail companies have decided to withdraw from the Chinese market or downsize their operations.

[...] In June 2019, Carrefour sold 80% of its Chinese business to China's Suning.com Group.

[...] Britain's Tesco sold all its shares in its Chinese joint venture to China Resources Enterprise, marking its complete withdrawal from the Chinese market.

[...] South Korea's Lotte Department Store in 2022, the company [sold its] last store in China [after operating in the country since 2008], in Chengdu, was sold. Meanwhile, Lotte Department Store has shifted the focus of its overseas expansion to Indonesia and Vietnam.

[...] Japan's Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings is also significantly scaling back its China operations. The company first entered China in 1993, [...] However, in 2022, it closed two stores in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in April 2024 it closed two stores in Tianjin, and in June of the same year it closed its Shanghai Meilongzhen Isetan store. Currently, the company’s only store in China is located in the Isetan Renhan shopping mall in Tianjin.

[...]

Many countries have introduced policies to promote onshoring and friend-shoring to enhance their economic security. Good examples include the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act (enacted in August 2022), which encourages companies from friendly countries to invest in semiconductors in the U.S.; Japan's Economic Security Promotion Act (enacted in May 2022), which strengthens the supply chain of critical materials and promotes technological cooperation with friendly countries; and the European Semiconductor Act (enacted in July 2023), which aims to strengthen the semiconductor ecosystem.

Archived link

It includes several Russians from the Forbes Billionaires List, such as:

• aluminum magnate and Rusal founder Oleg Deripaska;
• Igor Kesaev, owner of the Mercury Group and Megapolis Group (Russia’s leading tobacco distributor), shareholder of the Degtyarev weapons plant;
• Mikhail Gutseriev, main shareholder of the Safmar Group;
• Alexey Kuzmichev, one of the founders of Alfa Group;
• Alexander Ponomarenko, construction tycoon, former chairman of the board of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport;
• Vadim Moshkovich, longtime chairman of agro-industrial firm Rusagro and former Russian MP;
• Sergey Lomakin, co-founder of Russian discount retail chain Fix Price, owner of Cypriot football club Pafos FC.

[...]

According to the independent Russian media outlet Agentstvo, the list includes four former owners or top managers of Probusinessbank and the Life Group: Alexander Zheleznyak, Yaroslav Alekseev, Alexander Lomov, and Eduard Panteleev.

An investigation by The Insider released in October exposed Leontiev and Zheleznyak as key figures in a money laundering scheme that funneled hundreds of billions of dollars offshore on behalf of Russian officials. It was previously reported that the Life Group had assets in Cyprus, while Alekseev and Sergey Leontiev had obtained Cypriot citizenship.

Passports issued to the investors’ family members have also been revoked. The exact number is listed in parentheses in the images below.

[...]

The grounds on which each decision was made were not indicated. Politis cited the Cyprus Council of Ministers as providing three main reasons for the withdrawal of citizenships: Submission of false or misleading information, criminal records of the applicants, and failure to meet the program’s terms and conditions.

According to [Cypriotic media outlet] Politis, twenty investors that received “golden passports” are facing charges in their home countries for crimes including corruption, collusion, tax evasion, embezzlement, fraud, money laundering, involvement in criminal organizations, and illegal gambling operations.

[...]

Archived link

In response to rising geopolitical risks, foreign companies are reducing their dependence on China by strengthening economic ties with allied countries and returning production to their domestic markets, writes Chi Hung Kwan, Consulting Fellow at Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), and Senior Fellow at the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research.

[...]

The 'inward direct investment' as reported in the 'Balance of Payments of China' by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange indicate a significant acceleration in the withdrawal of foreign companies from China. These statistics reveal a sharp decline in net inward direct investment, with the scale of foreign company withdrawal, including business downsizing, now exceeding new investment. In the most recent second quarter of 2024, the net flow was $-14.8 billion, marking the second negative figure recorded since the first in the third quarter of 2023.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

As an example of electronics companies moving away from China, Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases. In particular, the company has accelerated the construction of factories in India and Vietnam in response to the intensifying U.S.-China conflict since 2018 and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.

[...]

Furthermore, as a key player in the international division of labor for electronic device production, China's factory closures and production halts during the large-scale lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the global supply chain. This prompted many companies to recognize the need to diversify their risk management options and to implement "China + 1" strategies.

[...]

Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxconn), Apple's largest contract manufacturing partner, is working to reduce its dependence on China and diversify its production bases.

[...]

South Korea's Samsung Electronics is also withdrawing from China [...] In 2019, it closed its last smartphone factory in China and moved production to Vietnam and India. Following that, PC production also withdrew from China in 2020.

[Japan's] Nintendo transferred part of the production of its flagship game console, the Nintendo Switch, to Vietnam in 2019 [...] Sony also closed its smartphone factory in Beijing in 2019 as part of a restructuring of its global production structure, concentrating production at a factory in Thailand.

[...]

Furthermore, content regulation and internet censorship in China is becoming stricter. The censorship system known as the "Great Firewall" restricts access to many overseas services, posing a major barrier to foreign platform companies doing business in China.

Among information technology companies, the withdrawal of platform companies has been especially significant, encompassing many of the industry's leading global players.

[In addition to platform companies like Airbnb and Amazon,] IBM, a comprehensive IT services company, announced that it will close its research and development division in China in August 2024. This will affect more than 1,000 employees. IBM plans to transfer its research and development functions to other overseas locations and will increase staff in places like India.

[...]

[In the car industry], Suzuki decided to dissolve two joint ventures, Changhe Suzuki and Chongqing Changan Suzuki, in 2018 and withdraw from the Chinese market.

[...] Hyundai Motor sold its Beijing No. 1 Plant in 2021 and its Chongqing Plant to a Chongqing city government-affiliated company in December 2023. The company also plans to sell its Cangzhou plant in Hebei Province soon.

[...] Honda announced in July 2024 that it will close its plant in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province in October and suspend production at its plant in Wuhan, Hubei Province in November. As a result, production capacity in China will be reduced by about 20% from the current annual level of 1.49 million units.

[...] Mitsubishi Motors announced in October 2023 that it would transfer its shares to its joint venture partner Guangzhou Automobile Group and withdraw from the Chinese market. Sales in China peaked at 179,000 units in 2018, falling to 33,000 units in 2022.

[...]

Nippon Steel announced in July 2024 that it will withdraw from its joint venture with China's Baoshan Iron & Steel, which supplies automotive steel sheets to Japanese manufacturers. The decision marks a significant shift in their half-century cooperation, which includes Nippon Steel's assistance in building the Baoshan Steelworks.

[...]

[As] consumption [in China's retail market] has been sluggish due to slowing economic growth and the collapse of the housing bubble [...] many foreign retail companies have decided to withdraw from the Chinese market or downsize their operations.

[...] In June 2019, Carrefour sold 80% of its Chinese business to China's Suning.com Group.

[...] Britain's Tesco sold all its shares in its Chinese joint venture to China Resources Enterprise, marking its complete withdrawal from the Chinese market.

[...] South Korea's Lotte Department Store in 2022, the company [sold its] last store in China [after operating in the country since 2008], in Chengdu, was sold. Meanwhile, Lotte Department Store has shifted the focus of its overseas expansion to Indonesia and Vietnam.

[...] Japan's Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings is also significantly scaling back its China operations. The company first entered China in 1993, [...] However, in 2022, it closed two stores in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in April 2024 it closed two stores in Tianjin, and in June of the same year it closed its Shanghai Meilongzhen Isetan store. Currently, the company’s only store in China is located in the Isetan Renhan shopping mall in Tianjin.

[...]

Many countries have introduced policies to promote onshoring and friend-shoring to enhance their economic security. Good examples include the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act (enacted in August 2022), which encourages companies from friendly countries to invest in semiconductors in the U.S.; Japan's Economic Security Promotion Act (enacted in May 2022), which strengthens the supply chain of critical materials and promotes technological cooperation with friendly countries; and the European Semiconductor Act (enacted in July 2023), which aims to strengthen the semiconductor ecosystem.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5167597

The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

[...]

The path to using Teuken-7B

Interested developers from academia or industry can download Teuken-7B free of charge from Hugging Face and work with it in their own development environment. The model has already been optimized for chat through “instruction tuning”. Instruction tuning is used to adapt large language models so that the model correctly understands instructions from users, which is important when using the models in practice – for example in a chat application.

Teuken-7B is freely available in two versions: one for research-only purposes and an “Apache 2.0” licensed version that can be used by companies for both research and commercial purposes and integrated into their own AI applications. The performance of the two models is roughly comparable, but some of the datasets used for instruction tuning preclude commercial use and were therefore not used in the Apache 2.0 version.

Download options and model cards can be found at the following link: https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X

The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

[...]

The path to using Teuken-7B

Interested developers from academia or industry can download Teuken-7B free of charge from Hugging Face and work with it in their own development environment. The model has already been optimized for chat through “instruction tuning”. Instruction tuning is used to adapt large language models so that the model correctly understands instructions from users, which is important when using the models in practice – for example in a chat application.

Teuken-7B is freely available in two versions: one for research-only purposes and an “Apache 2.0” licensed version that can be used by companies for both research and commercial purposes and integrated into their own AI applications. The performance of the two models is roughly comparable, but some of the datasets used for instruction tuning preclude commercial use and were therefore not used in the Apache 2.0 version.

Download options and model cards can be found at the following link: https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X