Gold to NYC, exiting the Vampire Castle, DeepSeek DeepSeek DeepSeek
It appears PEPFAR is safe for now, but its future is uncertain...
US banking giant JPMorgan plans to deliver $4bn of gold bullion weighing more than 937 tons to New York this month, before an anticipated escalation of Donald Trump’s trade-rebalancing tariff moves planned for Saturday.
The US bank, the world’s biggest bullion dealer, said it would deliver the hefty raw material, weighed as 30m troy ounces of gold, or 1.875m lbs, against contracts that will expire in February.
Psychedelic Alpha's drug development tracker has been refreshed for 2025. Six Phase 3 programs are underway!
From the Vatican: Note on the Relationship Between
Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
... the present Note addresses the anthropological and ethical challenges raised by AI – issues that are particularly significant, as one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it. For instance, unlike many other human creations, AI can be trained on the results of human creativity and then generate new “artifacts” with a level of speed and skill that often rivals or surpasses what humans can do, such as producing text or images indistinguishable from human compositions. This raises critical concerns about AI’s potential role in the growing crisis of truth in the public forum. Moreover, this technology is designed to learn and make certain choices autonomously, adapting to new situations and providing solutions not foreseen by its programmers, and thus, it raises fundamental questions about ethical responsibility and human safety, with broader implications for society as a whole. This new situation has prompted many people to reflect on what it means to be human and the role of humanity in the world.
Taking all this into account, there is broad consensus that AI marks a new and significant phase in humanity’s engagement with technology, placing it at the heart of what Pope Francis has described as an “epochal change.”
1,156 questions censored by DeepSeek.
Dario of Anthropic on what DeepSeek means for AI progress. Also calls for the US to achieve AI supremacy via automating AI research (his emphasis):
... because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage. Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.
More Chinese takes on DeepSeek.
To be honest, the race to build larger and larger data centers had already started to look like the race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1960s to build and test larger and larger bombs: They got as far as 50 megatons before realizing it was all rather pointless...
The "AGI race" between companies and between nations is somewhat similar, except worse: Even the CEOs who are engaging in the race have stated that whoever wins has a significant probability of causing human extinction in the process, because we have no idea how to control systems more intelligent than ourselves.
Will scaling reasoning models unlock superhuman reasoning? A collection of takes from AI researchers.
Wired profile of Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan (a), who apparently oversees $1.5T(!) of assets and wants to turn the UAE into an AI superpower.
Preparing Effective Altruism for an AI-transformed world:
Importantly, this isn't an argument that everyone should work on AI safety. It's an argument that all cause areas need to integrate the implications of transformative AI into their theory of change and strategic frameworks.
A progress studies OG: "Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind is a work by the French philosopher and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet, written in 1794 while in hiding during the French Revolution and published posthumously in 1795."
"The Black Star Line (1919−1922) was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, the organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and other members of the UNIA. The shipping line was created to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy."
The four color theorem "states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color..."
It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. Initially, this proof was not accepted by all mathematicians because the computer-assisted proof was infeasible for a human to check by hand.
The proof has gained wide acceptance since then, although some doubts remain.
If current trends continue, by 2035 66% of teen births will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Senator Wyden inquires into DOGE personnel seeking access to the US Treasury payments system.
Exiting the Vampire Castle (by Mark Fisher, RIP):
The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.
The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism.