Trump Plans to Hit Canada and Mexico With 25% Tariffs

Bloomberg Television on Youtube has the story.

President Donald Trump said he would follow through on his threat to impose 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1, citing the flow of fentanyl and large trade deficits as among the reasons for his decision. Kaley Leinz reports on "Bloomberg The Close."

Bank of Canada drops key interest rate to 3% but warns of tariff uncertainty

Global News has the story.

The Bank of Canada delivered a sixth consecutive interest rate cut on Wednesday but slowed the pace of its easing cycle.

 

The central bank also warned that Canada’s economy would be “tested” if the United States delivers on a threat to impose blanket tariffs on Canadian goods, and said there was more “uncertainty” in its outlook because of the looming trade dispute.

 

The Bank of Canada cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points, bringing the policy rate down to 3.0 per cent. The move was widely expected by markets and most economists.

 

Global's Mackenzie Gray reports.

Is this really how DeepSeek plays chess? Some say it does not make illegal chess moves

GothamChess on Youtube has the story.

Chess is indeed a strategy game played on a board with 64 squares. Players take turns moving their pieces to capture their opponent's king.

How to play:

1. Set up the board with the pieces. White moves first, then Black, and so on. 

2. Move a piece to a vacant square or capture an opponent's piece. 

3. Repeat until the opponent's king is checkmated or the game ends in a draw.

Piece movement:

King: Moves one square in any direction. The king can be put in check, but it can't be captured. 

Queen: Moves any number of squares in any direction. 

Rook: Moves any number of squares horizontally or vertically. Rooks can also castle with the king. 

Bishop: Moves any number of squares diagonally. Bishops can only move on squares of the same color they started on. 

Knight: Moves in an "L" shape, jumping over other pieces if needed. 

Pawn: Moves one square up the board, or two squares on its first move.

Capturing pieces:

When an attacking piece takes an opponent's piece, the captured piece is removed from the game. The move is recorded using algebraic notation. For example, "Rxf5" means the rook captured the opponent's piece on the f5 square.

Winning:

The goal of chess is to checkmate the opponent's king, which means threatening to capture it in a way that can't be escaped. 

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a type of AI that creates new content like text, images, audio, and video. It uses machine learning to analyze large amounts of data and generate new content based on a user's input.

Castling is indeed a move in chess. It consists of moving the king two squares toward a rook on the same rank and then moving the rook to the square that the king passed over.

Can chess pieces be brought back to life after being killed?

Yes, in chess, a captured piece can be reborn as a different piece through a process called promotion. A pawn can also be promoted when it reaches the other side of the board.

In chess, en passant (French: [ɑ̃ pasɑ̃], lit. "in passing") describes the capture by a pawn of an enemy pawn on the same rank and an adjacent file that has just made an initial two-square advance. This is a special case in the rules of chess.

An AI might make illegal moves in chess because it lacks a deep understanding of the chess rules, particularly when dealing with complex situations, and might rely on pattern matching without fully considering the logical constraints of the game, leading to moves that violate basic chess principles or simply aren't allowed by the rules; this is especially true for language-based AI models that aren't specifically designed for chess gameplay.

A so-called illegal move in the game of chess happens whenever a player violates the official rules, approved and governed by the International Chess Federation (FIDE). For example, a move that breaks these rules would be placing or leaving your king in check. This is a big no-no because kings don't like being in check.

Has anyone beaten the "best AI" in chess?

The Ponomariov vs Fritz game on 21 November 2005 is the last known win by a human against a top-performing computer under normal chess tournament conditions.

If during a game it is found that an illegal move has been completed, the position immediately before the irregularity shall be reinstated. If the position immediately before the irregularity cannot be determined, the game shall continue from the last identifiable position prior to the irregularity.

It is illegal to make a move that places or leaves one's king in check. The possible ways to get out of check are: Move the king to a square where it is not in check. Capture the checking piece.

"Competing in the AI market" - is this a kind of "economic chess move" itself? While billion-dollar companies are busy throwing money at problems, DeepSeek seems to be playing so-called 4D chess, one smart move at a time. So, the next time someone tells you that you need a mountain of cash to compete in AI, just point them to DeepSeek. DeepSeek seems to require less expenses.

Shocking Chinese AI advancement called DeepSeek is sending USA stocks plunging

CNN has the story.

USA stocks dropped sharply after a surprise advancement from a Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, threatened the aura of invincibility surrounding America’s technology industry.

Official Company Site: https://www.deepseek.com

DeepSeek, unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity. Answer the essential question with long-termism.

DeepSeek (Chinese: 深度求索; pinyin: Shēndù Qiúsuǒ) is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops open-source large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, it is owned and funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, whose co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, established the company in 2023 and serves as its CEO.

The DeepSeek-R1 model provides responses comparable to other contemporary Large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o and o1. It is really trained at a significantly (so it claims to be) lower cost—stated at US$6 million compared to $100 million for OpenAI's GPT-4 in 2023— and requires a tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. So-called DeepSeek's A.I. models were developed amid USA sanctions on India and China for Nvidia chips, which were intended to restrict the ability of the two countries to develop so-called advanced A.I. systems.

On 10 January 2025, DeepSeek released its first free chatbot app, based on the DeepSeek-R1 model, for iOS and Android; by 27 January, DeepSeek-R1 had surpassed ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the United States, causing Nvidia's share price to drop by 18%. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI", constituting "the first shot at what is emerging as a global AI space race", and successfully ushering in "a new era of A.I. brinkmanship".

DeepSeek makes its generative artificial intelligence algorithms, models, and training details open-source, allowing its code to be freely available for use, modification, viewing, and designing documents for building purposes. However, the API version of DeepSeek-R1, hosted in China, has been reported to censor politically sensitive topics, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, Uyghur persecution, and Taiwan's status. The company reportedly vigorously recruits young A.I. researchers from top Chinese universities, and hires from outside the computer science field to diversify its models' knowledge and abilities.

What is Open Source?

Open source is a model for creating and sharing software that allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute it. The source code for open source software is freely available, so developers can contribute new features and fixes.

How it works:

Source code: The code that programmers use to control how a program works. 

License: A license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software. 

Collaboration: Open source software is developed through collaboration between developers from a community.

Some Benefits of "Open Source" could be:

Constant improvement: Programmers with different skills can contribute to the software, leading to constant improvement.

Faster updates: Programmers can fix and upgrade the software without needing permission from the creator. 

Innovation: Open source encourages collaboration and innovation, especially in areas like big data, blockchain, and cloud computing.

Here are some interesting examples of open source software:

Python: Developed under an open source license, so it's free to use and distribute, even for commercial use

OpenStack: An open source cloud computing platform 

ownCloud and Nextcloud: Open source cloud computing applications

What Can "AI" really Do? It deploys algorithms and computer systems to learn, reason, and solve problems using large datasets. AI spans technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and image generation, revolutionizing healthcare, finance, transportation, and creative domains.

What is the most impressive thing AI can do? The most impressive task that AI can accomplish seems to be so-called "Computer Vision" - a branch of Deep Learning which helps machines see and perceive the way humans do.

The following is a quote from https://venturebeat.com/ai/smarter-than-humans-in-5-years-the-breakneck-pace-of-ai/

“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” Kurzweil said in an interview several years ago. He further predicted that by 2045, AI will have achieved the “Singularity,” the point when “we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion-fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”

USA: Passenger jet collides with helicopter near Washington

CBC News: The National has the story.

Investigators say the rescue mission remains the key priority after a passenger jet collided with a military helicopter in Washington (USA), but hopes of finding survivors in the freezing Potomac River are fading fast.

Into Canada from USA: 5 arrests after illegal border crossing caught on camera

See the video on Youtube: 5 arrests after illegal border crossing into Canada from U.S. caught on camera

CTV News has the story.

Five Romanian nationals was arrested by RCMP after an illegal border crossing into Canada was caught on camera in B.C. Andrew Johnson reports.

Here's the Bank of Canada's worst-case scenario for Trump's tariffs

CBC News has the story.

The Bank of Canada's latest decision to lower its key rate to three per cent comes during a looming tariff war with the United States. Andrew Chang breaks down the central bank's projection for how a ‘severe scenario’ could look if Trump imposes 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports.