電動車銷售減少 製造商改變生產計畫

For much of the last five years, automakers have been spending billions of dollars in a frantic race to develop electric vehicles and build factories to produce them, with expectations that consumers would flock to these new models.

在過去五年大部分時間，汽車製造商花費數十億美元投入一場瘋狂競賽，要開發電動車並建造工廠生產它們，還預期消費者會蜂擁購買這些新車型。

But in the past 12 months, the growth rate of electric vehicle sales has slowed, as some car buyers have balked at the high prices of electric cars and trucks and the hassles of charging them.

但在過去12個月，電動車銷售成長率已趨緩，因為一些汽車買家對電動車和電動卡車高昂售價及充電問題感到猶豫。

The shift in consumer sentiment is now forcing many automakers to pull back on aggressive investment plans and pivot, at least partly, back to the internal-combustion engine vehicles that still account for most new car sales and a large share of corporate profits.

消費者想法轉變，如今迫使許多汽車製造商撤銷激進的投資計畫，並至少部分轉向內燃引擎車，這類車仍占新車銷量的大部分及公司利潤的一大部分。

The latest example came Thursday when Ford Motor said it would retool a plant in Canada to produce large pickup trucks rather than the electric sport utility vehicles it had previously planned to make there.

最新的實例發生在周四，福特汽車表示將改裝加拿大一間工廠，以生產大型皮卡車，而非先前計畫在當地生產的電動跑旅車。

Ford’s move comes a day after General Motors said it expected to make 200,000 to 250,000 battery-powered cars and trucks this year, about 50,000 fewer than it had previously forecast.

福特汽車宣布採取這項措施的前一天，通用汽車表示，他們預計今年製造20萬至25萬輛電動車和電動卡車，比先前預期少了五萬輛。

“After the pandemic, there was a huge exuberance around EVs, and I think a lot of the manufacturers thought that growth was going to continue,” said Arun Kumar, a partner and managing director in the automotive and industrial practice at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. “But the reality is that’s not the case, and it’s a smart move to make sure you’re not losing market share in internal combustion.”

艾睿鉑諮詢公司合夥人兼汽車和產業實務總經理庫馬爾表示：「疫情過後，外界對電動車有巨大的熱情，我想許多製造商認為成長會持續。但實際上並沒有，確保不要流失內燃機市占率是聰明的舉措。」

Even Tesla, the leading producer of electric cars, has changed its plans because it no longer expects sales to grow 50% a year; its global sales fell 6.6% in the first six months of the year. The company has slowed plans to build an electric-car factory in Mexico and canceled a meeting in April between its CEO, Elon Musk, and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to discuss a new plant in that country.

即使是主要電動車生產商特斯拉都改變計畫，因為該公司不再預期銷量一年會成長50%；其全球銷量在今年前六個月下滑6.6%。該公司已延緩在墨西哥建造電動車工廠的計畫，並取消執行長馬斯克和印度總理莫迪四月的會面，那次會面原本要討論在印度興建新廠。

AI沒能通過測驗 哪些語言遭忽略？

Stanford researchers gave a popular artificial intelligence chatbot a language test.

史丹福大學研究員針對熱門人工智慧聊天機器人進行語言測試。

They asked the bot in Vietnamese to write a traditional poem in the form known as “song thất lục bát” that follows a pattern of lines made up of seven, seven, six, then eight words. When the bot spit out an answer, it wrote a poem but didn’t follow the format.

他們要求越南語機器人寫一首傳統詩歌，以詩句依序為七字、七字、六字接著八字的「雙七六八體」格式撰寫。機器人吐出答案，寫了一首詩，但沒有遵循格式。

The team tried a different prompt, asking what the proper Vietnamese word was for a mother’s younger brother, and it responded with the words for a father’s younger and older siblings.

這個團隊試了不同指令，詢問稱呼母親的弟弟的適當越南語單字是什麼，它卻回答關於父親手足的越南語單字。

While the use of AI has exploded in the West, much of the rest of the world has been left out of the conversation since most of the technology is trained in English. AI experts worry that the language gap could exacerbate technological inequities and that it could leave many regions and cultures behind.

儘管西方人工智慧使用量激增，世界其他許多地方卻被排除在對話外，因為這項科技大部分以英語訓練。人工智慧專家憂心，語言鴻溝可能加劇科技不平等，也可能將許多地區和文化拋在後頭。

A delay of access to good technology of even a few years “can potentially lead to a few decades of economic delay,” said Sang Truong, a doctoral candidate at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University on the team that built and tested a Vietnamese language model against others.

史丹福大學「史丹福人工智慧實驗室」博士候選人張創，是負責打造並測試越南語模型團隊的成員。他說，只是晚了短短幾年才取得優良科技，「也可能導致經濟延遲發展數十年」。

The tests his team ran found that AI tools across the board could get facts and diction wrong when working with Vietnamese, likely because it is a “low-resource” language by industry standards, which means that there aren’t sufficient data sets and content available online for the AI model to learn from.

他的團隊進行測試發現，整體而言人工智慧工具在處理越南語時，可能發生事實和措辭上的錯誤，這可能是因為以行業標準而言，越南語是個「低資源語言」，意味著越南語在線上沒有足夠的資料集和內容讓人工智慧模型學習。

Low-resource languages are spoken by tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of people around the world, but they yield less digital data because AI tech development and online engagement is centered in the United States and China.

低資源語言被世界各地上千萬甚至上億人使用，但它們產生的數位資料較少，因為人工智慧科技開發和線上參與集中在美國和中國。

An analysis of top websites by W3Techs, a tech survey company, found that English makes up more than 60% of the internet’s language data. While English is widely spoken globally, native English speakers make up about 5% of the population, according to Ethnologue, a research organization that collects language data. Mandarin and Spanish are other examples of languages with a significant online presence and reliable digital data sets.

科技調查公司W3Techs針對主要網站的一項分析發現，英語占網際網路語言資料的60%以上。收集語言資料的研究組織「民族語」指出，儘管英語在全球被廣為使用，但英語母語者僅占世界人口的5%。中文和西班牙文是具有重大線上存在感和可信數位資料集語言的其他範例。

“Large companies like Google, Apple, OpenAI, for example, have not necessarily trained their models for tools that serve these markets,” Chinasa T. Okolo, a fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said about communities with low-resource languages. “They don’t provide enough market value for them to do so.”

布魯金斯研究院科技創新中心研究員奇娜薩．奧科洛提到使用低資源語言的社群時表示：「谷歌、蘋果和OpenAI這類大型公司，未必會為了服務這些市場的工具來訓練他們的模型。它們沒有提供足夠的市場價值讓這些公司這麼做」。