This week, entrepreneurship competition Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH) unveiled its final 50 contenders for the top prize.
In other news, Alibaba Cloud launched a math-specific large language model (LLM), and French products are in the spotlight on Alibaba Group’s Tmall Global platform.
Top 50 ABH Finalists for 2024 Revealed
Fifty entrepreneurs have been selected from a field of 20,000 applicants to advance to the next round of the 2024 ABH competition, organizers announced this week.
ABH, sponsored by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Philanthropy, shines a spotlight on talented African entrepreneurs working to make a difference in their communities.
This year’s ABH finalists represent 18 countries across 14 sectors including agriculture, healthcare and education. A fifth of the finalists are francophone and 40% are women.
For the first time in the history of ABH, an entrepreneur from Niger has made into the Top 50 group. Applications from Rwanda and Morocco also grew by over 60% year-on-year, according to organizers.
From here, the finalists will embark on a second round of interviews to winnow their ranks from 50 to 20. The top 20 contenders will pitch their business during the ABH semi-finale event in Cairo later this year.
Alibaba Cloud Launches Open-Source Math LLMs that Can Solve Complex Math Problems
Alibaba Cloud’s new Qwen2-Math is an LLM capable of solving complex mathematical problems, even those from the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Until recently, large language models often struggle with solving mathematical problems due to less robust reasoning skills. To overcome this, Qwen2-Math was trained on large-scale, high-quality mathematical web texts, books, codes, and exam questions.
As a result, the models achieved strong performance in linguistically diverse grade school math word problems and even Olympiad-level bilingual multimodal scientific problems.
They also demonstrated strong results in Chinese mathematical benchmarks, such as the Chinese college entrance exam known as 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 competition mathematics problems.
Developers, researchers and enterprises can access the models, including base models and their instruction-tuned versions trained on more specialized datasets on open-source communities including GitHub, Hugging Face and Modelscope. The models come in a variety of sizes, including 1.5 billion, 7 billion, and 72 billion parameters.
English is the primary language supported by the models at this time, though bilingual versions supporting English and Chinese are in the pipeline, according to Alibaba Cloud.
French Brands in Spotlight
Brands and goods from the Olympic host country of France are seeing an uptick in popularity as the competition unfolds, data from Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms show.
For instance, Paris-based luxury skincare brand Orlane saw its sales grow 300-fold on cross-border marketplace Tmall Global between July 23 and Aug. 4 compared with the same period a year earlier.
Bordeaux-region winemaker Chateau d’Armailhac reported a 200-fold rise in its sales over this same timeframe, and champagne purveyor Perrier-Jouet in Epernay also announced that its sales had seen a 70-times increase as Chinese sports fans celebrate their wins in style.
Feeling the Olympic spirit as well? Dive into Alizila’s Olympic reporting
Olympic Fever Hits Chinese Consumers on Alibaba’s Tmall
Team China’s string of gold-medal successes on land and water at Paris 2024 has sparked a sports craze among consumers.
Zhang Qinwen’s gold medal victory in Paris prompted searches for tennis-related equipment to jump 300% year-on-year between Aug. 4 and 5 on Tmall, while table tennis and badminton-related queries rose 234% and 98%, respectively.
Swimming has been making waves as well among Chinese consumers, buoyed by the golden performance of Pan Zhanle in the 100m freestyle and team relay.
