DECEMBERASIA BUSINESS OUTLOOK8Sentiment at major Japanese manufacturers rose for the second month in a row, as the auto industry recovered from last year's semiconduc-tor shortage and supply chain issues, according to a monthly Reuters Tankan survey.According to the November-December survey, the sentiment index for manufacturers was plus 12 in December, up from plus 6 the previous month."As chip shortages subsided, car production increased." However, the worsening state of China's economy and sluggish sales of Japanese vehicles in the Chinese market continue to be sources of con-cern," a manager at a textile manufacturer wrote in the survey's comment section.The result is likely to reinforce expectations that Japan's economy is bottoming out after contracting by a preliminary annualised rate of 2.1 percentin the July-September quarter. Economists believe the economy will show moderate growth in the current quarter, also helped by a pick-up in capital expendi-ture. The poll also showed the service sector index at plus 26, down from plus 27 in November.The index readings are calculated by subtract-ing the percentage of pessimistic respondents from optimistic ones, with a positive figure indicating opti-mists outnumber pessimists.The Reuters monthly poll serves as a leading indi-cator for the Bank of Japan's closely watched quar-terly tankan survey, which is scheduled for December 12 at 2350 GMT. According to the Reuters poll, the manufacturers' index was 8 points higher than three months ago, while the service sector index was 3 points higher. On Dec 6, Google launched Gemini, considered its most powerful and comprehensive AI model. Construction is complete. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called this new prototype one of the greatest scientific and engineering achievements Google has ever made as a company.And "We're continuing our journey (as the first AI company) with Gemini, our most powerful and comprehensive model with excellent performance across key benchmarks. Pichai had this to say about the announcement in a foreword on his blog: The first version, Gemini 1.0, has been optimized for various sizes, including Ultra, Pro and Nano. This is the first example of the Gemini era and the first realization of our vision when Google DeepMind was founded earlier this year.The company said that starting today, Bard will use an enhanced version of Gemini Pro that will be available in English in 170 countries and territories, including India.As per the company, Gemini Ultra is the largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks. Gemini Pro is the best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks, while Gemini Nano is the most efficient model for on-device tasks.Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said Gemini results from large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including those at Google Research. He said it was built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information, including text, code, audio, image and video. NEWSROOMJAPANESE MANUFACTURING SOARS OWING TO SUPPLY CHAIN RECOVERYGOOGLE LAUNCHES ITS MOST POWERFUL AI MODEL
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