DeepSeek

Tuesday

Rachel Tyrell

The race to superintelligence

This summer, two of the leading contenders in the great AI race have suddenly, alarmingly, declared that the endgame is in sight and that they’re now spending vast amounts of time and money to try to ensure that their own AIs beat the others. What does winning mean? It means that their models (you know them perhaps as GPT, Claude and Gemini) reach first AGI (human-level intelligence), then superintelligence. No one quite knows what superintelligence will do (we’re not smart enough) but it’s clear that whoever owns the winning model will wield unimaginable power. They’ll dominate the world. A new Alexander the Great. The first to show his hand was Sam Altman, the chief executive and founder of OpenAI, a company he once shared with his former friend Elon Musk.

superintelligence

Thursday

Ian Williams

Is the Trump administration ready to stop Chinese espionage?

For Republican voters sick of “deep-state” shenanigans, Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, seems an ideal appointment. He and his new deputy, the former police officer turned podcaster Dan Bongino, look and sound like exactly the right men to disrupt a bureau that has at times in the past eight years acted as an investigative arm of the Democratic party in its attempts to thwart Donald Trump through the legal system. Patel is considered so pleasingly anti-establishment that his ties to a Chinese e-commerce business have been largely overlooked. He has holdings worth up to $5 million in a fast-fashion company called Shein, founded in China but headquartered in Singapore, and he intends to keep his stock. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se.

espionage

Friday

The Spectator

Plane crash tragedy exposes other close calls

Amid the tragedy of a deadly plane and helicopter crash at Washington, DC’s Ronald Reagan National Airport that has shaken the entire country, it’s becoming increasingly clear how many close calls have been avoided over the years — and that changes may be coming to the status quo.While it’s been almost two decades since the last major commercial airline crash in America, reports are beginning to emerge about how many near misses have happened, especially in DC’s busy airspace.Just days before an army helicopter collided with the plane coming in from Wichita, Kansas, several other planes had already aborted landings at Reagan due to helicopters in the way.