"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
- Morpheus to Neo
Father’s Day: A Time for Reflection
Today is Father’s Day. After attending church service and in my routine reflection, I find myself once again asking a difficult question: Are we cursed, or are we the cause?
I grew up in a Nigeria that was more united and peaceful. In my primary, secondary school and university days, students related freely without divisions of religion, ethnicity, or region. We simply saw ourselves as Nigerians.
After university, I entered business in an environment where partnerships were built on trust and competence, not tribe or religion. I also lived in Nigeria, where the naira commanded respect, and Nigerians enjoyed dignity abroad, with easier global mobility and much respect for our passports.
I lived in Nigeria, where I travelled across the country—from Onitsha to Lagos, Maiduguri, and Calabar—without fear. Roads connected people, and life was more secure. Nigeria’s Armed Forces and the Police were also widely respected for their role in global peacekeeping and international stability.
Beyond security and unity, there was also a stronger sense of public trust in institutions, with greater confidence in elections, a clearer culture of accountability in governance, more stable universities that served as centres of intellectual excellence and national pride, a more functional and accessible healthcare system, and relatively better-performing basic infrastructure such as electricity, roads, and public utilities, which—though imperfect—were far less chaotic than what we experience today.
Today, as a father reflecting on Nigeria, I am pained that much of this has changed. Insecurity has grown, national unity has weakened, and many citizens no longer feel safe. Opportunities have also diminished for the younger generation compared to what we once had.
It is also worrisome that Nigeria’s influence in global affairs appears reduced, as seen in recent international gatherings such as the just-concluded G7 meeting, where African countries like Egypt and Kenya were invited, while Nigeria was absent. Whether symbolic or not, it reflects a decline in standing we cannot ignore.
As fathers, we must not only lament. We must not bequeath this reality to our children. We owe them a better Nigeria built on security, opportunity, fairness, and national pride.
A key part of achieving this is active civic participation. We must obtain our Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), vote responsibly, and remain committed to protecting the integrity of our votes. Change will not come from complaints alone but from citizens who choose and defend accountable leadership.
With responsibility, unity, and determination, we can together build the new Nigeria that is POssible. -PO
From first principles:
Human sex is binary (male/female) for reproduction. Everything else is variation or mismatch.
LGBTQ+ celebrates these as identities and expands them into policy, language, medicine & culture, but the package is nonsense and society shouldn't normalize it.
Clustering and classification can be two synonymous english words, till you are asked to distinguish between unsupervised learning and supervised learning tasks in Machine Learning.
Definition of Machine Learning
"A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."
- Tom Mitchell, 1997
"Whatever the reason, you have decided to learn machine learning and implement it in your projects. Great Idea!"
- @aureliengeron (Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow - 3rd edition)
Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models. This has been one of those moments that, once seen, will be hard to unsee, and it is significantly accelerating many businesses’ and nation states’ efforts to ensure reliable access to AI that no one else can terminate.
Anthropic first released Claude Fable 5, a version of its Mythos model with additional guardrails, including some restrictions that seem well justified on safety grounds (such as limitations on applying it to hacking, bioweapons, and so forth). However, it also restricted developers’ ability to use it to build competing LLM technology. This move was concerning, given that the whole AI community, including Anthropic, has benefitted tremendously from open research — indeed, the AI revolution was kicked off by my former team (Google Brain) freely publishing the Transformers paper!
Imagine if Microsoft’s terms of use barred anyone from using their tools to build competitive software, or if Google barred using it to search for information to work on competing search engines. Anthropic’s argument that it was unsafe for others to be able to make advances in AI also rang hollow. Initially, Anthropic silently degraded Fable 5’s performance for users detected to be working on LLM research through invisible interventions that weakened the model’s outputs without notifying the user. After significant backlash, it walked back this decision and decided to be transparent when it did this, but it still refuses to use its latest capabilities to help AI researchers.
This move represents a raw demonstration of power by Anthropic. It has used “safety” arguments to hinder potential competitors. Platforms succeed when they are viewed as stable, reliable partners that one can build on. The sudden rule changes by Anthropic (including a mandatory 30 day data retention policy for Fable usage) have made developers wonder about the stability of building on any one proprietary LLM provider, not just Anthropic.
The U.S. Government then shortly followed with an even greater demonstration of power. It used the Commerce Department’s authority to regulate technologies that may be national security threats to restrict exports of Mythos and Fable, requiring a license for use by any foreign national, whether inside or outside of the U.S., including employees of Anthropic. This led Anthropic to disable access to Fable to all users worldwide.
Sam Altman pointed out, referring to Anthropic, “It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.’” But when one engages in this type of fear-based marketing, it increases the odds that the U.S. Government will agree with you and slap export controls on the bomb you say you have built.
To be clear, I don't think Anthropic has built anything like a bomb, and I don't think export controls on Fable are appropriate.
However, following the U.S. Government making this move, many nations, including U.S. allies, saw how the U.S. can suddenly yank their access to AI models. In many capitals around the world, this has spurred discussions on AI sovereignty and how others can ensure uninterrupted access to this critical technology.
For decades, many nations were comfortable having many parts of their supply chain rely on the U.S., China, and other major producers. Once a nation issues a threat, or takes action, to limit other nations’ access, other nations will rationally try to secure alternatives. For decades, semiconductor manufacturing in China made slow progress; once the U.S. moved to limit China’s access, China’s efforts kicked into high gear. Similarly, once China threatened U.S. access to rare earth minerals, U.S. efforts to secure alternatives accelerated. Now that it has become crystal clear that private U.S. companies and the U.S. government can limit, in short order, other nations’ access to frontier AI models, the incentive of others to invest more in alternatives like open source grows significantly. Of course, training frontier models is not easy, so it remains to be seen how successful they are, but we have crossed the rubicon.
Satya Nadella wrote an essay about the importance of building a healthy ecosystem on top of frontier AI technology. I heartily agree with him, and hope this week’s events will ultimately prove to be constructive steps toward this.
I hope we can build a more free, more open world, where research is freely shared, and laws and societal norms shape a level playing field that allows everyone to make progress. A silver lining of the events of these past two weeks is now that everyone better realizes key points of instability of the current system, we can all work to create a more stable foundation.
[Original text: The Batch newsletter]