 Desperately seeking something The news that DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, had released a cutting-edge AI that used a fraction of the hardware of ChatGPT and other large language models was met with some very strange reactions, argues the tech writer James O’Malley. “For some reason,” he says, “many people seemed to lose their minds.” A large number of commentators argued it meant Western AI companies had wasted money on computing power, data centers, and all the other infrastructure, when they could have just designed more efficient models. It seems unlikely that the arrival of more efficient AIs means that available computing power “will go to waste,” he says. “More likely… we’ll see Jevons’ paradox kick in — the observation that often when the cost of resources falls, overall demand increases.” Cheaper AI will make many new uses of the technology more economical. Similarly, the falling price of computer chips didn’t mean people spent less on them: Instead, “today my lightbulbs have semiconductors inside them, and I occasionally have to install firmware updates [for] my doorbell.” The most probable outcome is that more efficient models will see the computing power used to make AIs even smarter. Peace at what cost? Before he became US president for the second time, Donald Trump promised he would bring peace to Ukraine. His accession has focused minds on the probability of a peace deal. One major question around any such deal, writes the war scholar Lawrence Freedman, will be how Ukraine’s security will be guaranteed. Kyiv has more reason than most to be skeptical of any such guarantee: In 1994, it gave up its old Soviet nuclear arsenal in return for an undertaking from the US, UK, and Russia that its “independence, sovereignty,” and existing borders be respected — but when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the others “did little other than complain.” What more reliable measures can countries take to stop Russia from reneging on any deal? One possibility would be security guarantees along the lines of NATO’s mutual defense pact. Another would be a multinational peacekeeping force, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has hinted, or a “tripwire” in the form of a thin line of NATO troops which Russia would be forced to attack in any invasion, thus bringing the US’ allies into the fight. Whatever the model, it will likely involve European forces, Freedman writes, since Trump “has no intention of sending any additional US forces to Europe.” Praise and blame Joe Biden received lots of praise when he stepped down as Democratic nominee for the US presidency, and rightly so, says the politics writer Matt Yglesias: “Voluntarily relinquishing a claim to power is a big ask.” But, he says, it is time for Democrats to stop saying that — apart from that one noble act — Biden did a good job promoting the party’s interests. “Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat,” says Yglesias. “And he failed, catastrophically.” Trump not only won but “returned more powerful than before.” For Yglesias, that is Biden’s fault: The former president and his inner circle deceived the public about his fitness, “not convincingly enough to persuade most Americans, but convincingly enough to persuade most Democrats.” They selected a vice president “they didn’t have confidence in as a party leader and whom they did not set up to succeed.” In the lame-duck period he pardoned his own family members and otherwise abused power, retroactively backing up conservative claims about corruption. Democrats must “admit what everyone knows: Biden fucked up, badly,” and in order to win again, the party should repudiate his legacy. |
