China’s Huawei and Amazon in Patent Licensing Agreement 

People visit the Huawei stand at the 2024 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain February 27, 2024. (Reuters)
People visit the Huawei stand at the 2024 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain February 27, 2024. (Reuters)
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China’s Huawei and Amazon in Patent Licensing Agreement 

People visit the Huawei stand at the 2024 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain February 27, 2024. (Reuters)
People visit the Huawei stand at the 2024 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain February 27, 2024. (Reuters)

China's Huawei Technologies and US tech giant Amazon said they had signed a multi-year patent licensing deal that resolves litigation between them.

Most terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Alan Fan, head of Huawei's intellectual property rights department, said the Chinese firm had ended lawsuits brought against Amazon in Germany over patented technology related to wifi and video playback.

The United States has barred Chinese telecom companies from its market citing concerns about data, and designated Huawei and ZTE as threats, requiring US carriers to remove their equipment from US networks.

It has also prevented US firms from supplying Huawei with chips and other components, crippling its smartphone business.

Despite those tensions, the patent license deal shows "American and Chinese companies and companies from other regions are cooperating without limitations in standards and patent licensing," Fan said.

Huawei also announced it had signed a cross-licensing patent deal with domestic smartphone maker Vivo covering communication technologies including 5G. Huawei has similar patent agreements with Chinese smartphone manufacturers Xiaomi and Oppo.



Alphabet to Roll out Image Generation of People on Gemini after Pause

A large Google logo is seen at Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on August 13, 2024. (AFP)
A large Google logo is seen at Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on August 13, 2024. (AFP)
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Alphabet to Roll out Image Generation of People on Gemini after Pause

A large Google logo is seen at Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on August 13, 2024. (AFP)
A large Google logo is seen at Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on August 13, 2024. (AFP)

Alphabet's Google said on Wednesday it has updated Gemini's AI image-creation model and would roll out the generation of visuals of people in the coming days, after months-long pause of the capability.

In February, Google had paused its AI tool that creates images of people, following inaccuracies in some historical depictions generated by the model.

The issues, where the AI model returned historical images which were sometimes inaccurate, drew flak from users.

The company said it has worked to improve the product, adhere to "product principles" and simulated situations to find weaknesses.

The feature will be made available first to paid users of the Gemini AI chatbot, starting in English and later roll out the model to bring more users and languages.

Google said it has improved the Imagen 3 model to create better images of people, but it would not generate images of specific people, children or graphic content.

OpenAI's Dall-E, Microsoft's CoPilot and recently xAI's Grok are among other AI chatbots that can now generate images.

The search engine giant also said over the coming days, subscribers to Gemini Advanced, Business and Enterprise would have access to chatting with "Gems" or chatbots customized for specific purposes.

Users can write specific instructions for particular purposes and create a Gem, saving them time from rewriting prompts for repetitive use cases.