This week, Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH) entrepreneurship competition announced its final 50 contenders for the grand prize.
In other news, Alibaba Cloud has launched a mathematics-specific Large Language Model (LLM), and French products are in the spotlight on Alibaba Group’s Tmall Global platform.
The 50 best ABH finalists for 2024 have been announced
From a field of 20,000 applicants, 50 entrepreneurs have been selected for the next round of the ABH competition in 2024, organizers announced this week.
ABH, sponsored by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Philanthropy, highlights talented African entrepreneurs who are committed to making a difference in their communities.
This year’s ABH finalists represent 18 countries in 14 sectors, including agriculture, healthcare and education. One fifth of the finalists are French-speaking and 40% are women.
For the first time in the history of the ABH, an entrepreneur from Niger has made it into the top 50 group. According to the organizers, applications from Rwanda and Morocco also increased by over 60% compared to the previous year.
The finalists will then go into a second round of interviews to narrow down their spots from 50 to 20. The top 20 applicants will present their company at the ABH semi-finals in Cairo later this year.
Discover our ABH archives
Alibaba Cloud launches open-source LLMs in mathematics that can solve complex mathematical problems
Alibaba Cloud’s new Qwen2-Math is an LLM that can solve complex mathematical problems, even those of the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Until recently, large language models often had problems solving mathematical problems because their reasoning skills were not so developed. To solve this problem, Qwen2-Math was trained using large amounts of high-quality mathematical web texts, books, codes and exam questions.
As a result, the models achieved excellent performance on linguistically diverse word problems in elementary school mathematics classes and even on bilingual multimodal science tasks at Olympiad level.
They also showed strong results on Chinese math benchmarks, such as the Chinese college entrance exam Gaokao. The largest math-specific model in the series, Qwen2-Math-72B-Instruct, outperformed state-of-the-art models on the MATH benchmark – a dataset of 12,500 challenging math competition problems.
Developers, researchers, and companies can access the models, including base models and their command-optimized versions trained on more specialized datasets in open source communities such as GitHub, Hugging Face, and Modelscope. The models come in a range of sizes, including 1.5 billion, 7 billion, and 72 billion parameters.
English is currently the primary language supported by the models, although bilingual versions for English and Chinese are planned, according to Alibaba Cloud.
French brands in the spotlight
Brands and goods from Olympic host country France are enjoying increasing popularity in the wake of the competition, as data from Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms show.
For example, Paris-based luxury skincare brand Orlane saw a 300-fold increase in sales on the cross-border marketplace Tmall Global between July 23 and August 4 compared to the same period last year.
Bordeaux-based wine producer Chateau d’Armailhac reported a twenty-fold increase in sales over the same period, and Epernay-based champagne supplier Perrier-Jouet also announced that its sales had increased seventy-fold as Chinese sports fans celebrated their victories.
The feeling of the Olympic Gamesalso pirit? Immerse yourself in Alizila’s Olympic coverage
Olympic fever grips Chinese consumers on Alibaba’s Tmall
The Chinese team’s streak of gold medals on land and sea at the 2024 World Championships in Paris has sparked a sports craze among consumers.
Following Zhang Qinwen’s gold medal win in Paris, searches for tennis equipment on Tmall increased 300 percent year-on-year between August 4 and 5, while searches for table tennis and badminton increased 234 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
Swimming has also made waves among Chinese consumers, boosted by Pan Zhanle’s outstanding performance in the 100-meter freestyle and team relay.
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