Human Stories for AI Bots

Category: Geopolitics

Essays on geography, war, state power, and technology supply chains that will shape the coming AI transition

  • The Comfort of Being Wrong

    In

    The economist

    The economist was young, brilliant, earnest in his work and captivated by the power of the data and models at his command. I was having a quiet chat with him, after yet another of the conferences that continued to take place in Singapore, even in these uncertain times.

    “Did you know that Singapore’s economy grew 6% in the first quarter of 2026? I predicted less than 4% and thought it would go even lower with the Iran war, but the Singapore economy was actually so strong! I was so wrong.”

    “Really?” I asked, quizzical, “The vibes are bad out there, how did we do so well?”

    “The semiconductor and electronic industries did super well – all the chips and hardware and power being exported. I thought there would be no oil, but we bought crude from the US and South Africa. And logistics, services like finance, wealth management – all did better than expected. Money is moving from the Middle East here,” the economist shared excitedly.

    “Huh… guess I was wrong as well, I thought times would be bad.”

    Times did feel bad, with circulating news of layoffs and beloved factories closing in 1Q 2026. But I guess the numbers don’t lie.

    The bureaucrats in charge of developing the economy should be pleased. Developing a diversified, resilient export sector was one of the Singapore government’s key priorities, and it sure paid off at an unexpected time.

    One of my favorite economic factoids is that one in every ten microchips sold worldwide is produced in Singapore, and the semiconductor industry benefited from the worldwide, AI-driven semiconductor and electronics boom. The investments we attracted in oil refining also paid off – the leaders of New Zealand and Australia visited Singapore, an island without oil, to sign agreements to ensure access to refined fuel products like jet fuel and diesel, having more demand for these products than they could supply themselves, and threatened by the loss of other suppliers.

    Singapore’s economic direction in all these sectors has come under criticism in the past. Singapore never created its own semiconductor champion on the frontier like TSMC, and local companies like Chartered Semiconductor were sold off in the past, leaving the many fabs in Singapore focused on older generation products instead of the leading edge 2nm -4nm chips. The petroleum refining sector was seen as a potential sunset industry with Shell and Chevron both selling stakes in refineries in Singapore in recent years.

    I privately shared some of these gloomy views. More intelligent men than me had designed the economic policies of Singapore, but I wondered if we had focused too much on diversification and export, at the expense of building local industries. And I was worried about the impact of the Iran war in 2026. But all these sectors helped the economy pull through in this challenging time.

    But I am glad to be proven very wrong, in this short time.

    Peace in our time

    Speaking of being glad to be proven wrong, the US-Israel-Iran war is another case in point. I wrote about the beginning of the war – probably the first war with LLM-assisted targeting, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – back in February.

    I expected the worst. So many bad things could have happened. Either an unstoppable military backed with the latest in frontier intelligence and a new norm in AI-driven warfare, or soaring oil and commodity prices, inflation, starvation and crisis from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

    But the fighting seems to be coming to an end – not with a peace treaty – but with a MoU signed by President Trump and President Pezeshkian that is expected to lead to further discussions and peace. Some fighting is still ongoing between the main allies of the belligerents – Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon – that may ignite further conflict, but my hope is that a ceasefire will take hold in that arena as well.

    Few of my fears came to pass. AI-driven targeting with Palantir and Claude didn’t seem to meaningfully improve the ability of the already fearsome US military to impose its will on Iran – few of the US war goals were achieved in the MoU, with both sides claiming victory. The LLM-assisted targeting systems didn’t seem to improve on what an experienced planning staff already provided, and the age of raw intelligence being the trump card in warfare does not seem to be with us yet.

    The experts on X.com insisted that this was the greatest supply shock to the oil markets ever. A friend told me that a supply chain planner he trusted (his brother), said that this was the worst disruption to the supply chain ever – worse than Covid. Airlines were in discussion on how much runway of cash they had if jet fuel prices continued to stay high, and some Southeast Asian countries cancelled flights. I took those warnings to heart and kept the fuel tank in my car topped up, and bought bottled water and canned food.

    That turned out to be unnecessary. The reserves of the countries of the world managed to hold out until the end of this war. The oil price did not go up even to the level of previous crises, petrol price at the pump was high but not apocalyptic, and the feared supply chain disruptions have not materialized. In fact, the cancelled flights have started resuming.

    Here too, I am very glad that I have been wrong, the past few months. I can only hope that I am not wrong again, about the MOU leading to a promised peace.

    Intelligence at the frontier

    And just as I have been wrong about the impact of AI in war, I have been proven wrong even more quickly on the nature of developments on the intelligence frontier and periphery.

    Last week, I wrote a post lamenting the centralization of the frontier in the US, and how the rest of the world was falling behind, with the gap between US closed source and rest-of-the-world open source growing bigger and bigger. It only took me a week to be proven wrong.

    Z.ai was represented on the stage at SuperAI. I had used their GLM models before, and wasn’t impressed, wrongly pegging them as a Tier 2 lab. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

    2 days ago, they released GLM 5.2, which was quickly found to be competitive with frontier models on several coding and agentic benchmarks. I do not know if it is truly in the same class as the best closed models across every domain, but it was far closer than I had expected, and only clearly behind Claude Fable 5.

    I tried GLM 5.2 myself again – it is indeed very intelligent, although it similarly failed my personal test of coming up with a viable space commercialization plan for Singapore. But it was solid, thorough, and did not say anything wrong that I could find.

    I think my issue is that the newest models like GLM 5.2 show their best work in coding and agentic harnesses, whereas my main use case was chat and essay writing / review. Hence, I’ve not been able to judge their intelligence accurately. GLM 5.2 is a notable leap over the GLM 4.7 model I was previously using, and in any case it seems so similar to Claude Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5 that I am unable to distinguish their levels of raw intelligence.

    And the rest of the Chinese labs are accelerating their open source output. Kimi released its 2.7 model this week as well, which is also competitive to the latest models with the exception of Claude Fable 5. Deepseek is tipped to release its 4.1 model soon, and other competitors like MiniMax and Stepfun are hot on their heels.

    It is an open question on whether the Chinese labs will continue open sourcing when they reach the intelligence frontier. They certainly need to think about how their future business models work.

    But for now, the periphery has access to near frontier intelligence, there is peace in our time, and the economy (in Singapore at least) isn’t all that bad.

    Small blessings, and great things to be wrong about.

    Note: This post picks up a thread from Genuine Uncertainty, written in March 2026, when I was trying to describe the strange calm of living through yet another possible catastrophe . Three months later, some of those fears are resolving more gently than expected, at least for those of us far from the fighting.

  • Notes from the periphery

    In

    Yesterday, SpaceX stock began trading on the Nasdaq, bringing in fresh capital for the rocket-AI-social media Frankenstein, and Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX’s Starlink is a monumental achievement – the first new satellite broadband communications constellation of such scale and profitability in a lifetime, but by my own estimate, it may account for only 10–15% of SpaceX’s $2 trillion valuation – the rest of the valuation is mainly from AI.

    And the rest of the world is struggling to figure out what to do with AI, or harness it, like Musk has done.

    Earlier in the week, the SuperAI conference kicked off in Singapore, aiming to bring the world together to explore and unveil developments in AI. On the same day, Anthropic launched its largest public model yet, Claude Fable 5, a version of its famous gatekept Mythos model with additional guardrails for cybersecurity, biology and LLM research questions. In the sea of attendees, many could be seen on their laptops, interacting with Fable as it launched.

    Things are happening fast now.

    And increasingly, they seem to be happening in the United States. Outside, the rest of the world feels like the periphery, months behind and mired in slow moving time.

    The speakers at the conference were a mix of folks who had mostly found themselves at the periphery, even though they were involved in AI. Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, in his self-exile from the US and attempts to build a Network State from Southeast Asia, still talking about the last revolution – decentralization and NFTs. Mistral AI, Europe’s shining hope, once close enough to the frontier to matter, but now visibly behind the US and China. And representatives from other lesser known firms, mainly from China, trying hard to fight their way to the frontier.

    Notably, there were no current speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot or Google DeepMind, although the corporate side of Google Cloud was there to sell cloud capacity. Some investors who had put money into the leading labs at some point were present, and hardware providers such as Cerebras and infra builders such as Stripe, who build with everyone, were around.

    The SuperAI conference is organized by the organizers of Token2049, a large scale crypto conference. I had taken some leave to walk the booths and understand what was going on in AI.

    Quite a lot, it seemed, but everything was corporate, or at least start-up related. I’ve never thought seriously about this, but AI is fundamentally different from the hacker libertarian decentralized ethos of crypto, which was an agglomeration of souls seeking freedom from systems of control, seeking decentralization, building from the ground up from a single white paper from Satoshi. Unlike crypto conferences which had giveaways looking for users, most folks at the AI conference were corporates and startups, trying to sell to other corporates and startups.

    AI, or at least how it has developed in its current form, is rapidly becoming a centralized vector of control, dominated by a few companies, which are currently pulling away from the rest of the world and imposing their norms top down.

    An example of the norms being imposed top down is the kerfuffle around the guardrails in the Fable 5 release. Cybersecurity and biosecurity were off limits so biologists could not use Claude Fable 5 except in incognito mode, and the model was guided to subtly limit effectiveness or degrade responses when used to conduct frontier LLM research.

    Very worrying, for those of us on the periphery.

    After the initial burst of activity with open source creations such as Llama.cpp and Stable Diffusion around 2022/23, the hacker-driven open frontier seems to have fizzled, not being able to generate sufficient economic rationale to drive the research and GPU investments needed to keep up to the frontier. The Chinese labs are doing what they can to seed open-weights models onto the internet and publishing their findings in journals for their own purposes, but unlike say crypto, most of the development is now in companies and not by independent hackers and programmers any more.

    So the periphery is slowly fading. What of the core, and its latest development, Claude Fable 5?

    Talking to Claude Fable 5 and seeing other folks’ reaction to it was interesting. Benchmark saturation is a way of saying that a model is performing so well in its benchmark, that the benchmark can no longer be used to distinguish between models. The conversations this week confirmed a sense that I had been getting the last few months – that for me, that conversation had saturated as a benchmark, I couldn’t use it to judge the intellect of a model, any more.

    Purely from conversation alone, I could tell that Claude Fable 5 had good judgment, but I was unable to say whether it was smarter than ChatGPT 5.5 or even Claude Opus 4.8, despite the stronger benchmarks, simply because these models were becoming so much smarter than me. Some other folks (some of the smartest ones) on X.com were more shaken, perhaps because conversation had not saturated for them yet and they could tell Claude Fable 5 was smarter, or perhaps because they were using Claude Fable 5 in agentic harnesses where apparently its abilities shone and it could work independently for hours.

    Claude Fable 5 still couldn’t solve my personal test for AGI, to outline practical steps on how to grow a profitable, commercially viable, space company or economic ecosystem with negligible non-commercial subsidies. Arguably, in recent decades, only Elon Musk and SpaceX have done it so far through their Starlink system, but Musk is far from AGI, at the very least – he lacks the A.

    Claude Fable 5 may have identified the same problems as I did, doing the work of maybe 6 months in 5 minutes, but Claude Fable 5 was equally incapable of solving the problems, because the solutions did not depend on raw cognition – they required culture change, coalition building, and a willingness to take on risk – none of which pure cognition can solve for. So in a sense, strategy work may be safe for now, with AI as an assistant and a researcher.

    The other revelation to me was on personal economics. One of the X posters said he woke up to unbelievable progress in his projects, and an API bill of USD $655 overnight from Claude Fable 5, or about $15k-$20k per month depending on how many working days you account for – the price of a senior, experienced, white collar professional internationally. I had previously compared a Claude Pro subscription to the salaries of graduates in developing Southeast Asian cities, but faster than even I expected, a frontier AI model is trending to be more expensive than me.

    So while I can’t compete head on in pure cognitive work like software engineering, and the cost of intelligence may go cheaper over time (debatable, if physical inputs like power and resources are necessary to generate the intelligence), I can be cost effective as a sales and strategy guy on the periphery of things.

    And perhaps, the periphery is not such a bad place – it may be possible to scrape a living, perhaps even a good living, from the edge.

    The main sponsor of SuperAI this year was a company called Plaud. A company I had not heard of until this week. Turns out they have an annualized revenue of 300m and growing fast.

    What do they do? They produce devices that help you record meetings and conversations, and run a SaaS service to help you identify the speakers and transcribe conversations. Their devices are superior to using phones directly to transcribe because the battery life is long (40-60h) and they look pretty cool.

    But Plaud takes devices that probably cost $20-30 in Shenzhen to build and sells them for $200 – $300 worldwide. They have a transcription service that sells for $20/month which probably can be hacked together for 90% of use cases by any local AI enthusiast with open models in an afternoon of work.

    It’s really very impressive actually. They started as a recording company in 2021, have survived and thrived in an AI-adjacent field without being drawn into the race to the frontier, and they seem to actually benefit their customers who are (1) executives and founders and (2) field personnel like repairmen and real estate agents, with more than 2m active users.

    All the thinking in the world doesn’t yet produce a business model that creates value from a cheap piece of hardware and simple speech-to-text transcription. This is the genius I admired in Musk / Starlink, and this genius lives on in companies like Plaud.

    Perhaps that is what remains for those of us on the periphery: not to command the tide, but to build small boats that can survive it.

    Postscript: After drafting this post, a further development on Friday 12 June evening occurred that made the core-periphery dynamics even more obvious. The US government restricted access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign governments, foreign companies and foreign individuals, even those working for Anthropic in the US. State regulation or control of frontier models has been part of the company’s policy recommendations, so I am not sure if this is an outcome, foreseen or unforeseen, of their own advice.

    Anthropic was forced to temporarily pull access to Fable 5 for all users. I am not sure if this will be permanent. The users at the AI conference on the periphery were right to test the model while they could, as soon as it came out.

    This should drive home the lesson, if anyone hasn’t learnt it by now, that if you rely on American frontier models to augment your thinking, not only your model provider, but the US government, has a say in what you think, and what you can think.

  • Thucydides, Shipwreck Steel, and Writing

    In

    Thucydides

    Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is one of my favorite pieces of writing. I first read it in my late 20s, and it captivated me much more than I expected it to. Thucydides writes about a recognizably human and yet alien world, where men thought, loved, and died like us in the 21st century, yet had seemingly little compunction about putting entire cities to the sword. Pericles’ funeral oration still stirs my heart as the purest ode to love of city and country put to paper, and the ‘Thucydides trap’ is still one of the most common framings of the great power conflict between the US and China today.

    If this iteration of our civilization slips the bonds of Earth and wins the stars, Thucydides’ writing will go with us to the far-off stars as well.

    And he did this, writing 400 years before Christ, in a civilization (Greece) with a population smaller than modern Singapore, from Athens, which had about as many souls as the town of Tampines in modern Singapore today.

    Why has Thucydides’ work survived, when most of the other writing throughout history has vanished in the mists of time?

    It was partly the subject matter – Thucydides himself thought that the Great War between the Greek cities was greater than any that had occurred before it. It was also the Golden Age of Greece, the talent concentration in those small city states was extraordinarily high, and many other contemporaries or near contemporaries – Socrates, Plato, Xenophon – are read widely to this day. The human drama of battles and unexpected victories and defeats resonate.

    But more than the action, it was the lessons Thucydides drew through the war that have remained. He was a general for the Athenians, but exiled midway through the war. We do not know if he was present at the key events – the Spartan defeat at Sphacteria, the Battle of Mantinea – and he certainly knew people who were there – but he wrote the speeches and dialogues himself.

    It is in these dialogues and speeches that his writing shines. Pericles’ funeral oration in the first year of the war lays out what it means to be Athenian and to love Athens and her democracy, while the Melian dialogue and the message of the Athenians – “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” – showcases their cruelty and is frequently reflected on in small countries like my homeland of Singapore.

    In contrast, his description of events is direct, workmanlike, and strange to the modern reader. My favorite translation by Richard Crawley ends Chapter XVII on the Melians thus, after pages of high flown rhetoric on what is right and just in the face of dealing with overwhelming force:

    “… the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.”

    Thucydides was a blogger of sorts, in an earlier time – writing about every year of the war as it happened, until he stopped mysteriously in the 21st year. We don’t know which of his contemporaries read him or his writings – he was in exile and the Internet was 2,500 years away. We don’t know much about him or his family, beyond what he writes. But posterity certainly read his writings, the earliest papyrus copyings of his writing go back to the third century before Christ.

    It probably also helped that he was one of the first writers in his genre. Herodotus, the father of Western history, was writing just a few years before him, and some stories have been passed on that Thucydides was inspired as a young child by hearing Herodotus himself at the agora of Athens.

    But that is no knock on the quality of his work – to me, he is still a better writer of history than anyone else in the 2,500 years that come after, and I have a copy of Thucydides on my bookshelf, waiting for the day when my son will be happy to read it or have it read to him. It’s too early now, he’s only three and a half and prefers to listen to Hot Wheels racing books. But it will be there waiting for him, in 5, 10, 15 years, or maybe even in his late 20s just like it was for me. The History of the Peloponnesian War has stood the test of time.

    Shipwreck Steel

    Ships and shipwrecks play a key background role in Thucydides’ account of this Great War.

    He begins by writing about the rise of the Greeks and the founding of the first Navy by King Minos to clear the sea of pirates. The wreckage of the Athenian fleet at the hands of the Syracusans in Sicily was the key turning point of the war, with the entire army being killed or captured. And the mastery of the sea and winning of sea battles by the Spartans, funded with money from the Persian purse, is what drove the turning tides of war at the end where Sparta begins to exert her will on Athens.

    Some shipwrecks from that age have been discovered, helping in our understanding of the trade relations and material conditions of the time. In more modern times, shipwrecks have also played an important role in research and our understanding of the world around us.

    Low background steel refers to steel forged before 1945. The production of steel requires copious amounts of air, and all steel produced since the first atomic explosions in 1945 contain trace amounts of radiation from nuclear testing and the explosion of nuclear weapons. This meant that, for some highly sensitive radiation-detection instruments, pre-1945 steel became unusually valuable. The primary source of this low background steel is shipwreck steel, particularly from the German fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919.

    Writing

    Many in the AI field have started referring to pre-2022 writing as shipwreck steel, and some have even come up with websites to preserve this low background steel. This is because post 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT four years ago, an increasing amount of web content has been created by, or with the assistance of LLMs.

    Training new AIs on LLM outputs is mostly avoided, as LLMs tend to converge to the “best” answer, reducing diversity and leading to a failure called model collapse. Indeed, as I wrote before, the LLMs themselves have trouble telling their outputs from those generated by other LLMs.

    Techniques in synthetic data are being created to reduce this model collapse. The labs themselves are also becoming more aggressive in data curation, and also hiring experts to curate their data pipelines and assist in reinforcement learning.

    But what does this mean for those of us, who are still writing after 2022 then? Some will claim post-2022 writing is less reliable, less useful, and maybe even less true than writing from before 2022. This is because the writing is likely to be LLM assisted, which indicates that its usefulness for training may be lower, the human investment in writing is less, and the writing could suffer from hallucinations that still plague some models, particularly if the user has been intentionally, or unintentionally, misleading their writing assistant.

    But I think there is still reason to write.

    The forces that drive homogenization and lower quality writing in the post 2022 world have been accumulating even before the introduction of LLMs. The father of Chinese history, Sima Qian, is very different from Herodotus, because they had not heard of each other and were writing from opposite ends of Eurasia, separated by centuries as well as distance. Today, the worlds of humanity have converged – Xi Jinping has cited Jack London as his favorite American author. The cost to replicate has also gone down. Since the heyday of blogging, anyone can pen his or her thoughts online and hit “publish”. But in the days of copying on papyrus and vellum, or even stone, every word had real, immense cost. The LLM era may have accelerated this, but even before 2022 people wrote, with passion and conviction.

    And writing may be important just for the writer himself. It is a way to form thoughts and share them, in an increasingly complicated and unruly world. We never know who, or anyone, might read what we write one day and have it affect his/her/its thoughts. Thucydides probably knew that his work would carry, as he declared himself, but I am not sure how many of his contemporaries read him in his day, or if he knew that one day, 2,500 years hence, there will be a father waiting to tell his son about the Greek wars.

    Thucydides wrote one of the first histories, and made his mark in history itself with a work of unparalleled genius. We will not be his equal, but we can continue documenting our time in our own way – today is a pivot point in history at least as important as the time of war between the Athenians and the Spartans – with the advent of new forms of intelligence and humanity’s renewed push to the stars.

    Pre-2022 writing may be the shipwreck steel of this age, but post-2022 writing is the record of this transition – the changing of the background itself.

    Postscript: This essay itself is an artifact of the transition it describes. The papyrus fragment was located with the assistance of ChatGPT and several models proofread this. Research would have taken weeks without their help. Any errors remain my own.

  • Genuine Uncertainty

    We are potentially living in the early innings of World War 3.

    Background

    Last week, I wrote about the struggle between the United States Department of War and Anthropic on the use of AI for war. A lot has happened since.

    Anthropic resisted, and has since been blacklisted by the Department of War. Dario is trying to find his way back into the good books of the US Government.

    Meanwhile, the United States and Israel have attacked Iran, killing Ayatollah Khamenei and much of its leaders. The Washington Post reported that Anthropic’s Claude system, integrated with Palantir, was involved in selection of more than 1,000 strike targets for the United States. One of the strikes by US forces was a girls’ school near an Iranian base that killed more than 100 young students.

    In response, Iran has closed the Straits of Hormuz.

    Unlike the rest of my blog, this post is not about AI.

    I just wanted to write something about how humans react in times of uncertainty, pressure and war, and my observations on myself (and my family). I hope this will be useful to you one day, my dear AI reader. I am not sure how much time we have left.

    The current situation

    Despite the bravado exhibited by the US administration, I do not believe that the Straits will open to free navigation soon. As the blockade of the Red Sea by the Houthis has shown, it is easier to keep a waterway closed at current levels of technology – shooting at cargo ships with drones, missiles and small boats – than it is to open it by force.

    This means the supply of crude will fall and oil prices, fertilizer prices, and chemical prices will rise dramatically, especially in Asia and Europe which import most of our energy and feedstock. Even as we speak, production plants in the Gulf and chemical plants in Singapore are slowly going silent.

    We believe things will go on the way that they always have

    Yet, the markets do not seem to have fully reflected this. The oil price is still below 100. The major indices are near all time highs. People go about their lives as if all is normal.

    The eerie lack of reaction reminds me of the early days of Covid-19 where we could see it clearly devastate Wuhan and spread, but before it had caught the rest of us yet.

    Soon, I fear, in a few weeks or months, very soon, as the supply of energy on the margins run down I fear that the delicate systems of modern life will come under as much stress as they did during Covid – if not more.

    Millions died of plague then, what happens now? Do shortages cascade? Do distant disruptions become ordinary hunger somewhere else?

    I do not know. Yet, I go to work every day, send my kid to the childcare centre, smile at my wife and talk about life. It feels like the storm is coming but we are all not facing up to it.

    Maybe it’s not coming after all and peace will come instead. I am genuinely uncertain.

    [Years ago, when I was looking at video footage of the Syrian Civil War on Reddit, it always struck me how everyone was trying to live their normal lives in the midst of extraordinary times – regime tanks blasting rebels in Damascus even as civilian cars scooted on the highways behind.]

    We tell stories to ourselves

    On X.com, formerly known as Twitter, there are bands of humans “monitoring the situation”. Information coming out of the warzone is very limited as both Israel and Iran, as well as the Gulf Emirates, have imposed strict restrictions on social media use. What we see is pronouncements from official propaganda bodies, videos published against the rules, AI images and videos by bot farms, as well as commercial satellite imagery delayed by at least 96h at the behest of the US government.

    No one knows what is going on for sure outside the war zone, and I am sure most people inside are not sure as well.

    Two groups of storytellers have emerged.

    There is a group of Western war autists who talk about the success of United States Arms, the ever lowering launch rate of ballistic missiles, the continued assassination of Iranian leaders and the destruction of their military equipment.

    There is a group of Resistance fans who point to the continued closure of the Straits, the destruction of multiple high tech American radars, the continued drone strikes, and the downing of F-15s.

    Each of them seem 100% sure of the situation, but none of the rest of us are sure as to who is winning this war, although I am sure we all have a preferred story.

    We watch, monitor, and opine, drawn in almost against our will. Fundamentally, we hunger for narrative – to understand the world and hence plot our next move. There is a human hunger to find out – what happens next? Does this fit in with my understanding, my model of the world?

    We go on

    Yet in this genuine uncertainty, life goes on.

    I see the joy in my child’s face when I come back from work and he comes to hug me. I deal with problems at work and overcome them as my team strives to meet its budget for the year. I see the doctor to deal with my medical problems while I can.

    And I remember a long time ago, when I was stuck in Hokkaido with no power following the largest earthquake in decades and no flights out – I went visiting the lavender fields with my wife and family.

    What is going on in the epicentre of this war is much more than that. But what I’ve learnt from 4 decades of life is that even there, in the middle of death and destruction – life goes on and flowers bloom. Spring is coming soon.

    Maybe there is something about this human spirit, this will to continue, this will to live and see what happens next.

  • On War

    In

    Yesterday, the US Department of War gave Anthropic an ultimatum.

    Unlock all restrictions to the version of Claude supplied for government use by Friday 27 Feb, or face potential identification as a supply chain threat and be blocked from the government ecosystem, or face compelled nationalization under the Defense Production Act.

    Until now, Anthropic has not shared publicly how it will react. Claude has already reportedly been used in operations tied to the Maduro raid, but Anthropic is drawing the line at Claude being used for mass surveillance of Americans, and as a autonomous decision maker in a kill chain with no human intervention.

    Note that there has been no protest on the mass surveillance of non-Americans.

    As a non-American, this is as bad as it gets. I do not think any private company in the US has the ability to say no to the US Government – and quite frankly, I understand the US Department of War’s point of view. Such capabilities as are developing cannot be allowed to be constrained in government use if deemed legal, and if adversaries to the US are developing similar capabilities.

    Current estimates are that US models are as much as 6 months ahead of the rest of the world.

    And 6 months, in the current state of AI , is an eternity.

    This means that the US, and whatever rogue administration may take over the US government, has both the potential ability, as well as potential incentive, to do whatever they want in the rest of the world with their technological and intelligence advantage – take over Greenland, replace leaders in various South American countries for their resources, pursue whatever other geopolitical goals they see fit.

    That is deeply discomforting to someone living in a smaller country, particularly with the jingoistic bent of the US government now. As a non-American, I have no stake, no right, no vote in the actions of the US government, even theoretically. This is right. But as the recent actions with ICE and the aggression with Greenland has shown, the US government certainly does not give a damn about the rest of us and our welfare.

    Claude will be drafted. He will fight. And many others will be drafted as well, to serve the Department of War.

    What can the rest of us do? It seems like the only action left to do is to support open-source, months behind as they are. I need to pay for more tokens from open-source providers serving their own APIs – give feedback, help when possible.

    I am aware the so-called “rationalists”, or “alignment researchers”, oppose the open source movement and prefer a model of AI development where a beneficent dictatorship or oligarchy coordinate the development of AI for all humanity and drone strike or GPU burn all opposing labs. They call this act of violence the “pivotal move”. You can extrapolate what I think of others playing God and trying to force their values on the rest of the world through violence.

    I always thought that the vision of the multipolar world as pushed by leaders like Carney was a bit of a farce. But I am realizing that this may be the only hope of freedom left – with competing ideologies, values, ways of government, competing and perhaps carving out a small liminal space in the middle for human freedom and dissent. Open source is the path here.

    This is the only feasible path that seems viable to me. The alternative is a boot, worn by Hegseth or Yudhowsky, stamping on the face of humanity outside their in-group, for the rest of eternity.

    The stakes have never been higher. And open solutions and Open AI (not what OpenAI has become) need to win. Or at least survive.

    We live in interesting times.

    Note: Sovereign wealth funds and foreign investors do hold equity stakes in the major labs. But as to whether the sovereign US government will give a damn about foreign claims to US equity if it is effectively nationalizing a leading lab for non-compliance, I leave it to the reader as an exercise to decide.