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NATO Sends 200 Soldiers in Farah Province

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394597-afgnato700NATO deploys some 200 soldiers, mainly Italians to Afghanistan’s western Farah province to train and advise the local forces, official confirmed.

"At the request of the Farah provincial governor, Gen. John Nicholson (top US commander in Afghanistan) has authorized approximately 200 coalition members to support Afghan National Defense and Security Forces," NATO said in a statement.

"They will conduct their train, advice, assist mission for approximately one week on location."

This comes as two days ago the United States announced to deploy 300 Marines to southern Helmand province.

The U.S. and NATO formally concluded their combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, but thousands of troops remain in the country, where they train and assist Afghan forces and carry out counter terrorism operations.

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Talks are necessary to resolve problems between Iran and Afghanistan: Araghchi

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Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said that talks are necessary to resolve the problems between his country and neighboring Afghanistan.

He said that the fight against terrorist groups, drugs, resolving the issue of migrants, water rights, border security, trade growth and economic issues require Kabul and Tehran to pursue diplomacy and resolve issues through dialogue.

The diplomat said that during his visit to Kabul, IEA officials emphasized Afghanistan's commitment to ensuring Iran’s water rights in accordance with the 1973 treaty.

Araghchi also said that Kabul and Tehran have agreed to work on a joint plan for the dignified return of Afghan migrants from Iran.

Araghchi visited Kabul on Sunday and met with senior officials of the Islamic Emirate, including the prime minister and acting ministers of foreign affairs and defense, to discuss strengthening bilateral relations.

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IEA assures govt employees that they will get paid this month

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The Islamic Emirate said Thursday that US President Donald Trump’s cuts to aid will not affect salaries of Afghan government workers.

This comes in the wake of rumors that government employees would not be paid for the solar month of Dalwa due to Trump’s severe cuts to aid.

Since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s return to power in August 2021, the salaries of all government employees have been covered by the domestic budget, unlike in the past when donor money helped fund salaries.

In a post on X, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman for the Islamic Emirate, said that all 1.04 million government employees in Afghanistan will receive their salaries this month, as per usual.

He said the Ministry of Finance has assured the IEA that salaries will be paid.

“The country’s budget has a domestic foundation, it has nothing to do with the arrival or non-arrival of foreign aid,” he emphasized.

Mujahid’s statement comes after rumors began circulating that the IEA has suspended payment of salaries to government employees following Washington’s foreign aid freeze.

Trump’s move will however impact a wide range of humanitarian agencies and NGOs in the country.

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Alibaba releases AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek

The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.

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Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3, Reuters reported.

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.

"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models.

The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States, read the report.

But DeepSeek's success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.

This echoed DeepSeek's claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on several performance benchmarks.

The predecessor of DeepSeek's V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.

The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens - or units of data processed by the AI model - led to Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.

Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China's first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country's most valuable internet company Tencent.

Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup "did not care" about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.

OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.

Liang said in his July interview that he believed China's largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek's lean operation and loose management style, Reuters reported.

"Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants' capabilities have their limits," he said.

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