Wednesday newspaper round-up: JLR, Meta, BoE staff

(Sharecast News) - The owner of carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is expected to announce that it will build an electric car battery gigafactory in the UK, backed with £500m in government funding, in what would be a major boost for the British car industry. Indian conglomerate Tata Group, which owns Jaguar Land Rover, has been locked in negotiations for months to secure state aid for the project, which would aim to produce 40 gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries a year, enough to power hundreds of thousands of electric cars. - Guardian Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is making a commercial version of its artificial intelligence model freely available, in a move that gives startups and other businesses a low-cost opportunity compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. A new version of a Meta large language model (LLM), called Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta said in a blogpost, referring to Microsoft as "our preferred partner" for the release. LLMs underpin generative AI products like the ChatGPT chatbot, although ChatGPT's owner has not open-sourced - or made widely available to others - its LLM, called GPT-4. - Guardian

One of Asia's richest families has entered the race for lucrative contracts to transport electricity from Britain's biggest offshore wind farm back to the National Grid. UK Power Networks Services, which is owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's family, is part of a consortium bidding for control of offshore wind cable networks that are worth £2bn overall. - Telegraph

The Bank of England paid out £25m in bonuses to staff over the past year despite warnings from its governor that employers should show "restraint" over wage rises amid soaring inflation. Threadneedle Street confirmed that 429 officials received annual bonuses of more than £10,000 each this year, with some receiving as much as £22,500 each. - Telegraph

Japan's SoftBank is to invest about $65 million in Tractable, a British artificial intelligence start-up, marking the first major cash injection into a European company from its flagship Vision Fund 2 in more than a year. Tractable develops AI tools that allow insurance companies to assess the state of damage to homes and cars using nothing but digital images. - The Times