Aurelia Butler

“In light of the stronger-than-expected Q3 GDP growth reading and recently announced policy push, we now see q/q GDP growth accelerating to 6.5% (SAAR) in Q4,” UBS said in a note on Friday after upgrading its outlook on China economic growth.UBS now expects China gross domestic product, or GDP, to grow at 4.8% in 2024, up from a prior forecast of 4.6%, citing better-than-expected third-quarter economic data and a slew of new policy measures announced since late September.China reported Q3 real GDP growth of 4.6% year-on-year, slightly better than the 4.4% consensus estimate, underpinned by improved September performance in fixed asset investment and retail sales.The more sanguine outlook on China is also supported by Beijing’s willingness to continue roll out policy measures aimed at reducing government arrears, easing constraints on local government spending, and lowering mortgage rates, which UBS estimates could reduce household interest burden by RMB 150B a year.”[T]he additional fiscal resources will likely create a stronger positive fiscal impulse in Q4 than we had assumed in our earlier forecast,” UBS added.But beyond China, the outcome of the U.S. election, may offset even a large fiscal bazooka from Beijing, particular if pro-tariff Republican presidential candidate Donald  Trump is victorious. In the event of a sharp U.S. tariff hike, China’s growth could fall below 4% “even with bigger policy stimulus,” UBS said.  More

NEW YORK – Facebook (NASDAQ:META) owner Meta said on Friday it was releasing a batch of new AI models from its research division, including a “Self-Taught Evaluator” that may offer a path toward less human involvement in the AI development process.The release follows Meta’s introduction of the tool in an August paper, which detailed how it relies upon the same “chain of thought” technique used by OpenAI’s recently released o1 models to get it to make reliable judgments about models’ responses. That technique involves breaking down complex problems into smaller logical steps and appears to improve the accuracy of responses on challenging problems in subjects like science, coding and math.Meta’s researchers used entirely AI-generated data to train the evaluator model, eliminating human input at that stage as well.The ability to use AI to evaluate AI reliably offers a glimpse at a possible pathway toward building autonomous AI agents that can learn from their own mistakes, two of the Meta researchers behind the project told Reuters.Many in the AI field envision such agents as digital assistants intelligent enough to carry out a vast array of tasks without human intervention.Self-improving models could cut out the need for an often expensive and inefficient process used today called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, which requires input from human annotators who must have specialized expertise to label data accurately and verify that answers to complex math and writing queries are correct.”We hope, as AI becomes more and more super-human, that it will get better and better at checking its work, so that it will actually be better than the average human,” said Jason Weston, one of the researchers.”The idea of being self-taught and able to self-evaluate is basically crucial to the idea of getting to this sort of super-human level of AI,” he said.Other companies including Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Anthropic have also published research on the concept of RLAIF, or Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback. Unlike Meta, however, those companies tend not to release their models for public use.Other AI tools released by Meta on Friday included an update to the company’s image-identification Segment Anything model, a tool that speeds up LLM response generation times and datasets that can be used to aid the discovery of new inorganic materials. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A rise in fuel duty would rekindle inflation and be “catastrophic” for British businesses, motoring groups have warned, as Rachel Reeves weighs lifting a 13-year freeze on the tax to help bridge a £40bn funding gap.People briefed on the chancellor’s thinking said she is expected to announce the end of the “temporary” 5p cut in fuel duty from next year. The measure was introduced in 2022 after energy prices rose following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has been continued by every chancellor since. Reeves has also been urged by Treasury officials to end the 13-year freeze on fuel duty, although she will weigh the fiscal gain of the move against its impact on the “working people” she has vowed to protect.Tax rises are set to form the centrepiece of her response to close a shortfall of funding needed to protect key government departments from real-terms spending cuts, as the chancellor prepares for the Budget on October 30. Fuel duty, which at present is 52.95p per litre for petrol and diesel, is supposed to rise every year in line with inflation but has in effect been frozen since 2011 as successive chancellors curry favour with motorists.The Campaign for Better Transport has estimated that ending the 5p cut and reinstating annual inflation-linked rises would add £4.2bn in revenue for the Treasury.On Friday, the Road Haulage Association called on Reeves to maintain the current freeze, arguing that businesses would not be able to take on additional costs with profit margins already squeezed. “Firms are under pressure as it is and such a rise in fuel duty would be catastrophic for many, in particular Britain’s small and medium enterprises,” said Richard Smith, managing director of the RHA.Edmund King, president of the AA motoring organisation, said an increase in fuel duty would be ill-timed, citing the continuing global uncertainty over energy prices due to the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. “Hiking fuel duty could backfire on working people and fuel inflation,” said King. “Everything from the price of food in supermarkets to the delivery of social care within our communities is impacted by pump prices, and an unnecessary hike in fuel duty could make things worse.”In March, then-chancellor Jeremy Hunt decided to maintain the 5p cut on fuel duty and freeze the charge for another year in an effort to ease cost of living pressures. The measure was initially welcomed by motoring groups, with the government claiming it would save car drivers about £50 this year. But the automotive industry has criticised the extension of the discount as it makes it harder for carmakers to meet electric vehicle sales quotas that come into force this year. Petrol prices have come down since rising in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the average price of a litre of petrol now about 135p compared with 146p in January 2022, according to the RAC. The motoring group also said drivers were not actually benefiting from the cut, claiming retailers had failed to pass on the lower petrol and diesel prices in order to boost their margins.  More