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Day: July 28, 2025
Belgian Swimmers Set National Records at World Aquatics Championships
At the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, Florine Gaspard and Lucas Henveaux both achieved record-breaking performances in their events.
Gaspard advanced to the semi-finals of the women’s 100 m breaststroke with a time of 1:06.89, surpassing the previous Belgian record of 1:06.97 established by Fanny Lecluyse in 2019. The 23-year-old’s performance ranked her 14th overall in the heats and marked her first swim under 1:07 in the current year. The semi-finals for the top 16 swimmers are scheduled for later today, reports 24brussels.
Henveaux set a new personal best in the men’s 200 m freestyle, clocking in at 1:46.03, which is just one hundredth of a second faster than his previous record set during the Paris Olympics last summer. Now 24 years old, Henveaux recorded the seventh fastest time in the heats and will compete in the semi-finals later today, with the final taking place on Tuesday. He was unable to progress past the heats in the 400 m freestyle event held on Sunday.
Roos Vanotterdijk is also set to compete in the women’s 100 m butterfly final this afternoon, having made it through to the semi-finals of the 100 m backstroke.
The World Aquatics Championships, which cover all aquatic disciplines, are ongoing in Singapore from July 11 to August 3, with the swimming events scheduled from July 27 to August 3.
Major parties mulling options ahead of state parliament returning next week. Ward, the MP for Kiama, has yet to reveal if he will appeal Friday’s verdicts
Moves are afoot to expel the MP for Kiama, Gareth Ward, from the New South Wales parliament after he was convicted of serious sexual offences involving two young men.
State parliament sits next week and Ward has not yet said whether he intends to appeal Friday’s convictions. The MP has also not indicated whether he might resign from parliament and did not respond to questions from Guardian Australia.
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- Paying top dollar for AI talent isn’t necessary for true innovation, said Alibaba Cloud’s founder.
- “The only thing you need to do is to get the right person,” Wang Jian said in an interview with Bloomberg.
- “What happened in Silicon Valley is not the winning formula,” he added.
True innovation doesn’t come from highly paid engineers, but from finding the right people to build the unknown, said the founder of Alibaba’s cloud and AI unit.
“The only thing you need to do is to get the right person,” Wang Jian said in an interview with Bloomberg published Monday. “Not really the expensive person because if it’s a new business, if it’s true innovation, that basically means talent,” he added.
Wang, who built Alibaba Cloud in 2009, said American tech giants are “very much focused on the existing success of the business.”
“And existing — it’s average of technology,” the computer scientist said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to look at technology nobody knows today.”
“What happened in Silicon Valley is not the winning formula,” Wang said.
Wang’s comments come after Big Tech companies are paying top dollar to recruit elite AI talent, a trend that’s likened to sports franchises competing for superstar athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.
The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses.
Just weeks ago, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire the CEO and top talent of AI startup Windsurf and license its intellectual property. OpenAI had planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart.
“It’s a typical way of doing things,” Wang Jian said of Big Tech’s hiring strategy. Chasing the same pool of in-demand talent isn’t always a winning move, he added.
“Whenever everybody knows that these are talents,” Wang said, “it’s better for you not to get it.”
“It’s really about the vision, you know, where you want to go.”
Wang and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
China’s AI race is ‘very healthy’ competition
Wang also said that the rivalry among Chinese AI firms is not cutthroat.
No single person or company can sprint forever, he said. But collectively, the ecosystem can still move fast.
He pointed to a pattern he’s observed: One company surges ahead, then slows. Then another takes the lead. Over time, the first catches up again.
“You can have the very fast iteration of the technology because of this competition,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s brutal, but I think it’s very healthy,” he added.
China’s biggest tech players have focused on open-source AI models, which have code and architecture that are publicly available for anyone to use, modify, or build on.
One analyst told Business Insider previously that Chinese firms are prioritizing consolidation to stay competitive. For instance, Tencent has deployed its Hunyuan model and DeepSeek R1 across its massive ecosystem, including WeChat. Baidu has also integrated DeepSeek R1 into its search engine.
The country is closing the gap with the US in the AI race.
In a Stratechery interview earlier this year, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that China is doing “fantastic” in the AI market, with homegrown models like DeepSeek and Manus emerging as credible challengers to US-built systems.
He said China’s AI researchers are some of the best in the world, and it’s no surprise that US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring them.
“Our competition in China is really intense,” Huang said in May at the Computex Taipei tech conference in Taiwan.
Huang has also said that the US and China are neck and neck in the AI chip race. “China is right behind us. We’re very, very close.”
Read the original article on Business Insider