Sixtyone

Geopolitics | Emerging Technologies

[Paul Triolo @pstAsiatech]

That assumes China must follow the same technology path as the global leaders. Huawei’s HiZQ roadmap suggests another possibility. Rather than asking whether CXMT can match SK hynix generation for generation, the question becomes whether Chinese accelerator makers can build competitive AI systems around a domestic memory ecosystem. That does not mean CXMT is qualified into Huawei accelerators today. It does suggest that the value of domestic DRAM may depend as much on how it is integrated into Chinese AI systems as on matching the latest HBM generation.

https://t.co/7ZuRKAGC9A

[联合早报 Lianhe Zaobao @zaobaosg]

中国浙江一地的人大代表，以过半的反对票数否决总投资超过10亿元（人民币，下同，1.89亿新元）的政府重大投资项目。中国媒体指出，以往中国各地人大代表较少参与政府重大投资项目决策，否决项目的情况更为罕见。 https://t.co/N8dDmnJ4TS

[Andy Mok | Author, China's Innovation Machine @andymok]

Why China and India diverged: the best answer contains an anomaly it can’t hold.

David Oks’s new essay is the finest entry yet on the question, but it never names the anomaly in its own data: after both countries liberalized, the gap widened for twenty more years. Human capital is a stock. It reproduces across generations yet does not convert into income on its own. Kerala matched China on literacy and life expectancy by 1980 and got nurses and Gulf remittances, not an industrial revolution.

What does the converting is something Western development economics has refused to name: governance is itself a general purpose technology. That is the question my new book, The Innovation Machine (Springer Nature, 2026), was written to answer.

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

美元作为世界主导储备货币的地位是美国持续巨额经常账户赤字的主要驱动力——该理论误解了国际金融市场的运作方式。Don't blame America's current account deficit on the dollar https://t.co/EOREb9dGyV

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I cannot count the number of articles over the past 20 years (including from Nobel prize winners) that I read about how China cannot innovate b/c it is not a free market economy.
But now I have to read the articles from the same people telling me how a state-directed economy innovates much more efficiently than a market economy & how we have to fight against that.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Here's an interesting thought experiment: what would the world have been like had the U.S. decided to take towards electricity the approach it's currently taking towards AI?

Imagine if, say, the United States in 1890 had declared electricity a matter of national security, classified the designs of Edison’s dynamos and Tesla’s induction motors as export-controlled, integrated its electrical companies directly into the War Department, framed the generator as a strategic weapon rather than a general-purpose technology, and spent the following century building its foreign policy around ensuring that only it, and politically-aligned nations, had access to the light bulb.

Batshit insane, right? Well that’s pretty much EXACTLY the posture it’s taking towards AI.

Had that happened, it’s painfully obvious we’d ALL have been immeasurably poorer for it, materially and morally.

And the United States first and foremost, given that for electricity - as will undoubtedly be the case for AI - the real value didn’t lie in control of the technology but in its widespread diffusion and in what you built on top of it.

Think about the U.S.’s “electricity giants”: companies like GE, Whirlpool or RCA didn’t get rich by “owning” electricity - they got rich by selling what electricity made possible into a world that was electrifying as fast as it could. The U.S.’s electrical fortune was built on the world electrifying alongside it, not against it.

Does the analogy hold for AI? Yes, surprisingly well. I like Jensen Huang’s recent description of AI (https://t.co/XcLK2iJEsS) as a "5-layer cake" made of 1) energy, 2) chips, 3) infrastructure, 4) models and lastly 5) applications.

The implication of his point is that each layer save for the last one - the application layer - will ultimately be largely commoditized, and as such that’s where the real value lies: in the millions of specific products, services, and industrial processes that get built on top of the other 4 layers.

It’s typical network building: the layers underneath eventually become utilities, and utilities are low-margin commodity businesses. It happened with electricity, it happened with phones, it happened with railroads, it happened with the internet itself. The operators of each layer got commoditized over time, while the durable, century-defining fortunes accrued at the top of the stack: GE on top of electricity, Apple on top of the mobile and telecom infrastructure, Amazon and Google on top of the internet.

There's no reason to think AI - a general-purpose technology of the same order - will turn out any different.

And in fact, we're seeing this happening in real time: take the release of DeepSeek V4 today. What is it if not a commodification of the model layer in Jensen Huang's "5-layer cake"? A frontier-grade model, given away under an MIT license, running on non-Nvidia silicon - and shipped by a lab that explicitly frames it as "AGI belongs to everyone" (https://t.co/b40MxBf4NW).

When a product that cost tens of billions of dollars to develop can be downloaded for free and run on commodity hardware, that product is, by definition, a commodity.

This means that the whole notion of an "AI race" is now absurd on the face of it: you cannot race for control of a thing that is being given away for free by someone who isn't racing.

And doubly absurd because, as we just saw, the economics of general-purpose technologies actively punish "race winners": the value accrues at the application layer, which requires the maximum possible diffusion of everything underneath it. "Winning" by hoarding the model layer is like "winning" electricity by refusing to let people have a generator - you don't capture the value, you prevent it from ever being created.

That's the topic of my latest article in which I argue that the whole "AI race" framing isn't just wrong, it's one of the most successful regulatory capture operations in history.

Shaped by a handful of US companies - like Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI - it's a perfect example of an industry convincing the public to cheer for its own enrichment by dressing it up as a civilizational struggle.

Link to the article here: https://t.co/Tw8rA2E8IF

Enjoy the read!

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

The Fragmentationist Grand Strategy: On the Intolerable Nature of Large Autonomous States - II https://t.co/4GgmBtRhUo

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

The Imperial Feedback Loop https://t.co/eq0XIKCmTj

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

China’s Farmers’ Pensions and the Politics of Waiting, by @ZichenWanghere https://t.co/WlBlpqbmBU

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

"The war to reopen the thing closed by the war"

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Terence Tao has won every award mathematics can give a human being.

Fields Medal. Breakthrough Prize. MacArthur Genius Grant.

He is widely regarded as the greatest living mathematician. Not one of. The greatest.

He just said something that should terrify every university on Earth.

Tao: “We live in a particularly unpredictable era. I think things that we’ve taken for granted for centuries may not hold anymore.”

Not years. Not decades. Centuries.

The assumptions governing who gets to contribute to knowledge have been in place longer than most nations have existed.

Tao just told you those assumptions are dissolving.

Tao: “The way we do everything, not just mathematics, will change.”

This is not a man who deals in hyperbole. He builds arguments the way he builds proofs. Piece by piece. Nothing unverified.

When he says everything, he means everything.

Tao: “In math, you previously had to basically go through years and years of education, be a math PhD before you could contribute to the frontier of math research.”

That was the contract. You give a decade of your life to an institution. You grind through coursework, committees, dissertation reviews, postdoc rotations.

Then maybe you get to touch the boundary of what’s known.

The entire system was built on that bottleneck. Time was the gate. Credentials were the key.

Tao: “Now it’s quite possible at the high school level that you could get involved in a math project and actually make a real contribution because of all these AI tools.”

A high schooler. Contributing to frontier mathematics. The same frontier that used to require a decade of institutional obedience to even approach.

He said this about math. He already told you this applies to everything.

AI didn’t just speed up the path. It removed the path entirely.

The university sold you a ten-year toll road. AI just paved around it overnight.

The toll booth operators haven’t realized yet that no one’s coming.

Tao: “In many ways, I would prefer the much more boring, quiet era where things are much the same as they were ten years ago, 20 years ago.”

This is the line that should haunt you.

The smartest mathematician on the planet would rather this wasn’t happening.

He is not selling this. He is not positioning himself for a funding round.

The acceleration is so violent that even the mind best equipped to process it would prefer it stopped.

If Tao is uncomfortable, you should be paying very close attention to your own assumptions about what’s coming.

Tao: “The things that you study, some of them may become obsolete or revolutionized, but some things will be retained.”

That word “some” is doing enormous work in that sentence.

It means the rest won’t be.

Entire fields that people spent their careers building will collapse. Not slowly. Not politely. And Tao is telling you he can’t predict which ones survive.

Tao: “You should be open to very, very different ways of doing science, some of which don’t exist yet.”

Most people will scroll past this. It’s the most important line in the entire clip.

He’s not saying learn new tools. He’s not saying adapt your workflow.

He’s saying the methods themselves haven’t been invented yet.

The frameworks don’t exist.

You cannot prepare for what hasn’t been created. You can only build the kind of mind that doesn’t break when the ground shifts beneath it.

Tao: “It’s a scary time, but also very exciting.”

He said scary first.

Every tech founder says exciting first and mentions risk as a footnote.

Tao reversed it.

When the most brilliant mind of a generation leads with fear and follows with possibility, that is not optimism.

That is a man telling you the truth about what’s coming while still choosing to walk toward it.

The people who survive the next decade won’t be the ones with the best credentials.

They’ll be the ones who stopped mourning the world that was and started building for the one that doesn’t exist yet.

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

We have to be humble about our ability to know what is in the leadership’s mind. based on my experience the last 15-20 years, Beijing does not have a timeline, and use of force will be the last resort. Sarah Beran on What to Expect from a Trump-Xi Meeting https://t.co/rF0k3bXIMA

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

🇨🇺🇨🇳 Incredible story.

A Chinese girl was filming on a street in Cuba.

An old man sitting at her window called out to her. When she approached, the man was in very poor health, but he began to talk to her and told her that he had studied in China and served in the Chinese Air Force, and showed her the documents that proved it.

The girl went to the Chinese Embassy and told them about him, and they went to see him. Afterwards, a delegation from the Chinese Air Force came and paid tribute to him.

[Tim Hirschel-Burns @TimH_B]

This paragraph could have been written about just about the entire Global South

[Evan A. Feigenbaum @EvanFeigenbaum]

A more skeptical take from my #CarnegieAsia colleague Barbara Weisel, who was, among other negotiating roles, the U.S. negotiator of TPP: https://t.co/qWfsfWFbf1

[BonkDaCarnivore @BonkDaCarnivore]

ICYMI, because you probably did, somebody placed a massive short on oil right before Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a Tweet claiming US naval forces had escorted an oil tanker through the Hormuz Strait. Oil dropped $5 a barrel over the next few minutes. The short covered.

8 minutes later, it was revealed Wright's story was a complete fabrication, and he deleted all mention of it on the internet. Oil prices shot back up $5 a barrel.

The mystery short seller made 100 million dollars in 8 minutes.

Anyhow, here's principled conservative Ron DeSantis not giving a shit about that and instead trying to tell people that oil prices are going to collapse because *checks notes* it's only up 63% in the last few trading sessions instead of 91. Because in volatility events, you should always take a victory lap on price before things setttle.

[Richie Floyd @richiejfloyd]

I wish we lived in a world where I didn't feel constantly compelled to post this video, but until then here's Tony Benn speaking on war with clarity and moral conviction that you won't see from the evil people running the world today

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

freeze a dying order in place = anti-entropic planning (aimed at system preservation)...The Bunker and the Void: An Introduction to a Silent Coup https://t.co/xTE2rgltKO

[Sixtyone @Sixtyone1944]

geopolitical player COFCO International. Game of Beans: How's a Humble Soybean Weaponized in Trade War https://t.co/Hs5tyu7s2t