ftav

Keeping it WEO

The reference forecast has as its core assumption of a relatively limited conflict that gets resolved in the second half of the year and then with energy prices that are normalizing in that second half of the year and into next year. Very clearly, with every day that passes, where we don't have a resolution, where the flow of oil and gas is more limited through the Strait of Hormuz, we're moving away from that scenario.

upstartsmedia.com

Cohere's Aidan Gomez On Sovereign AI, Turning Down Big Tech Money, And An IPO

why he sees AI as the best shot at restoring global growth and democratic resilience; and why it's so important that more nations than the world's biggest benefit.

3quarksdaily.com

War on Iran

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.

wired.com

AI Research Is Getting Harder to Separate From Geopolitics

A policy change announced by NeurIPS, the world's leading AI research conference, drew widespread backlash from Chinese researchers this week and then was quickly reversed.

3quarksdaily.com

The Uncommon Enemy

The West's Cold War propaganda focused on decrying Communist totalitarianism and championing democratic freedoms, but the United States and its closest allies were mostly concerned with preserving their largest businesses' access to capitalistic markets and resources.

noahpinion.blog

The economic consequences of the Iran war

Iran has done the one thing that everyone — except, apparently, Donald Trump and his leadership team — had always expected them to do in a major war with the U.S. They have closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20-25% of all global oil and liquefied natural gas flows.

ai-supremacy.com

The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence

For much of the past decade, the rise of artificial intelligence appeared to be governed by inputs that diffuse quickly. Advances in architectures, algorithms, training techniques, and data practices spread rapidly through academic papers, open-source code, and global talent markets. Because these inputs were highly replicable and only weakly tied to geography, it was natural to assume that AI capability would spread broadly across countries and firms. That assumption no longer matches reality.

noahpinion.blog

China is quietly looking weaker

At the time, though, with Japan at its zenith, it was easy to make Vogel-like predictions of continued domination, and it was out of vogue to be a contrarian like Emmott. The same is true of China today.

whyisthisinteresting

The Exit Permit Edition

What makes Kuwait's move so striking is that the rest of the Gulf has spent the last five years moving decisively in the opposite direction — and for reasons that have nothing to do with conscience. Qatar, under the sustained commercial pressure of World Cup scrutiny, eliminated exit permit requirements for most workers in 2020. The UAE has significantly loosened job-change restrictions, and Bahrain has done the same. These were pragmatic, strategic pivots by governments that understood something important: if you want to attract the global professional class — the fund managers, the architects, the regional directors choosing between Dubai and Singapore — you cannot run a labor system that treats people as controlled assets.

noahpinion.blog

Are we in the foothills of World War 3?

Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.

platformer.news

The shallow impact of India’s AI summit

The US government still can't think beyond "winning." The rest of the world is still thinking too small