China Briefing 20 March 2025: Miliband in China; ‘Two new’ promoted; ‘Two sessions’ ended

Carbon Neutral Regulation in AI Training
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing. China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here. Key developments Miliband in China CLIMATE TRIP: Ed Miliband, the UK’s secretary of state for energy security and net-zero, made a three-day visit to Beijing over 15-17 March, […]
by
AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, but with this transformation comes significant responsibility. As these systems increasingly drive critical business decisions, companies face mounting risks related to bias, transparency, and compliance. The consequences of unchecked AI can be severe, from legal penalties to reputational damage — but no company is doomed. This guide examines key bias […]
by
Joseph Mossel is the CEO of Ibex Medical Analytics. His career in the tech industry spans more than 20 years, starting off in software development and product management followed with leadership positions in startups, large multinational corporations and non-profits. Joseph has led products from inception all the way to maturity as multi-million-dollar businesses. He holds […]
by
The Swedish firm behind a novel polymer-graphene composite material, which promises to overcome many of the disadvantages of traditional hydrogen storage methods, has entered a strategic collaboration with UK climate tech startup Levidian, to co-develop new graphene-based polymer solutions for the hydrogen sector and other industries. Graphmatech’s flagship technology, Aros Graphene®, enables efficient graphene integration […]
by
The O2 network’s move to switch off 3G next month could see £13 million worth of e-waste generated, according to business waste collection firm BusinessWaste.co.uk. The 3G switch-off on O2’s network is expected to affect approximately 4.3 million people across the UK.1 It could generate an enormous 70,516 kilograms of e-waste, said WEEE specialists with […]
Climate change was responsible for just over one-third of the simultaneous soya bean crop failures across Argentina, Brazil and the US in 2012, according to a new attribution study. The research, published in Communications Earth & Environment, analyses the impact of hot and dry extreme weather that hit the three countries in 2012. Although soya […]
by
The Internet has always been a space for free expression, collaboration, and the open exchange of ideas. However, with persistent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), AI-powered web crawlers have started transforming the digital world. These bots, deployed by major AI companies, crawl the Web, collecting vast amounts of data, from articles and images to videos […]
by
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, a new organization has emerged to address one of the most profound and complex questions of our time: Can machines become sentient? The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines (PRISM) officially launched on March 17, 2025 as the world’s first non-profit organization dedicated to investigating […]
by
As director of the MIT BioMicro Center (BMC), Stuart Levine ’97 wholeheartedly embraces the variety of challenges he tackles each day. One of over 50 core facilities providing shared resources across the Institute, the BMC supplies integrated high-throughput genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis, bioinformatics support, and data management to researchers across MIT. “Every day […]
by
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced a series of groundbreaking advancements in AI computing capabilities at the company’s GTC March 2025 keynote, describing what he called a “$1 trillion computing inflection point.” The keynote revealed the production readiness of the Blackwell GPU architecture, a multi-year roadmap for future architectures, major breakthroughs in AI networking, new enterprise […]
by
Don’t be too scared of the AI bears. They are wondering aloud if the big boom in AI investment already came and went, if a lot of market excitement and spending on massive AI training systems powered by multitudes of high-performance GPUs has played itself out, and if expectations for the AI era should be […]
by
Dr Alberto-Giovanni Busetto is a Swiss-Italian AI Executive & Innovator and the Chief AI Officer of HealthAI. He is a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils and previously held pioneering roles as the inaugural Global Head of Data Science & AI at Merck Healthcare and the first Group SVP Head of Data […]
by
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in generating human-like text, translating languages, and answering complex queries. However, despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs primarily operate by predicting the next word or token based on preceding words. This approach limits their ability for deeper understanding, logical reasoning, and maintaining long-term coherence in […]
by
The ability for machine learning systems to recognize the events that occur inside a video is crucial to the future of AI-based video generation – not least because video datasets require accurate captions in order to produce models that adhere to a user’s request, and that do not excessively hallucinate. An example of a captioning […]
At a recent Columbia Law School colloquium, jointly sponsored by the Sabin Center and the Millstein Center, participants posed a foundational question: How do corporate law standards of fiduciary duty relate to what scientists call the “climate emergency”?[1] Unfortunately, under what I will call the Maximization Model of fiduciary duty in the United States and […]
Local governments face the difficult task of preparing communities and infrastructure for a warmer world – all while urbanisation accelerates and extreme weather becomes more frequent and intense. But officials responsible for implementing heat resilience actions face significant challenges, in large part because many of the required solutions take time to implement. For example, trees […]
by
Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson […]
The leader of the opposition Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, has shattered the political consensus on climate change in a speech attacking the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target. In a speech launching a “policy renewal programme” to shape the Conservatives’ approach to key issues, Badenoch disowned the target passed into law by her own party in […]