Indian Strategic Studies: 02/08/25

8 February 2025

Shadow Games

Simone Ledeen

When I deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 as the Senior Treasury Representative to ISAF, I believed we could still turn the tide. General Stanley McChrystal inspired confidence as a leader, not just because of his own abilities but because of the strong team he built around him. I had worked with then-Major General Mike Flynn in the past, and he was a key part of the strong team McChrystal built. His intelligence expertise and strategic thinking were second to none, and knowing I would be serving under both of them made me eager to be part of their command. Together, they created an environment of trust and clarity that pushed everyone to perform at their best. For a while, it seemed like this team might succeed in untangling the mess we had built for ourselves.

But hope didn’t last long.

McChrystal pushed my colleagues and me to uncover two critical mysteries during that tour: the truth about Afghan-American power broker Ahmed Wali Karzai, and the Taliban’s primary revenue streams. Both efforts revealed not just the limits of our strategy but the deep cracks in our entire approach to Afghanistan.

Ahmed Wali Karzai: The Mob Boss of Kandahar

In Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai loomed large—President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother and a critical power broker in southern Afghanistan. Rumors painted him as both a CIA asset and a drug lord, a man who controlled Kandahar’s narcotics trade while supposedly advancing U.S. interests. McChrystal said he wanted the truth. He ordered us to dig.

The profundity of DeepSeek’s challenge to America

FRANCESCO SISCI

The challenge posed to America by China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) system is profound, calling into question the US’ overall approach to confronting China. DeepSeek offers innovative solutions starting from an original position of weakness.

America believed that by monopolizing the use and development of sophisticated microchips, it would forever cripple China’s technological advancement. In reality, it did not happen. The inventive and resourceful Chinese found engineering workarounds to bypass American barriers.

It set a precedent and something to consider. It could happen every time with any future American technology; we shall see why. That said, American technology remains the icebreaker, the force that opens new frontiers and horizons.

Impossible linear competitions

The issue lies in the terms of the technological “race.” If the competition is purely a linear game of technological catch-up between the US and China, the Chinese—with their ingenuity and vast resources— might hold an almost insurmountable advantage.

For example, China churns out four million engineering graduates annually, nearly more than the rest of the world combined, and has a massive, semi-planned economy capable of concentrating resources on priority objectives in ways America can hardly match.

Trump puts tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, spurring trade war as North American allies respond

JOSH BOAK, ZEKE MILLER, ROB GILLIES AND CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN

President Donald Trump on Saturday signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China, drawing swift retaliation and an undeniable sense of betrayal from the country’s North American neighbors as a trade war erupted among the longtime allies.

The Republican president posted on social media that the tariffs were necessary “to protect Americans,” pressing the three nations to do more to curb the manufacture and export of illicit fentanyl and for Canada and Mexico to reduce illegal immigration into the U.S.

The tariffs, if sustained, could cause inflation to significantly worsen, threatening the trust that many voters placed in Trump to lower the prices of groceries, gasoline, housing, autos and other goods as he promised. They also risked throwing the global economy and Trump’s political mandate into turmoil just two weeks into his second term.

Trump declared an economic emergency in order to place duties of 10% on all imports from China and 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada. Energy imported from Canada, including oil, natural gas and electricity, would be taxed at a 10% rate. Trump’s order includes a mechanism to escalate the rates charged by the U.S. against retaliation by the other countries, raising the specter of an even more severe economic disruption.

There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race - Opinion

Alvin Wang Graylin and Paul Triolo

In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in what appeared to be an attempt to align themselves with the incoming Trump administration. The belief that the US can win in such a race was based mostly on the early advantage it had over China in advanced GPU compute resources and the effectiveness of AI’s scaling laws.

But now it appears that access to large quantities of advanced compute resources is no longer the defining or sustainable advantage many had thought it would be. In fact, the capability gap between leading US and Chinese models has essentially disappeared, and in one important way the Chinese models may now have an advantage: They are able to achieve near equivalent results while using only a small fraction of the compute resources available to the leading Western labs.

The AI competition is increasingly being framed within narrow national security terms, as a zero-sum game, and influenced by assumptions that a future war between the US and China, centered on Taiwan, is inevitable. The US has employed “chokepoint” tactics to limit China’s access to key technologies like advanced semiconductors, and China has responded by accelerating its efforts toward self-sufficiency and indigenous innovation, which is causing US efforts to backfire.

DeepSeek hit by cyberattack as users flock to Chinese AI startup

Chinese startup DeepSeek said on Monday it will temporarily limit registrations due to a cyberattack after the company's AI assistant amassed sudden popularity.

The startup earlier in the day was also hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States.

The company resolved issues relating to its application programming interface and users' inability to log in to the website, according to its status page. The outages on Monday were the company's longest in around 90 days and coincides with its sky-rocketing popularity.

DeepSeek last week launched a free assistant it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent players' models, possibly marking a turning point in the level of investment needed for AI.

Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators say "tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally", the artificial intelligence application has surged in popularity among U.S. users since it was released on Jan. 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower.

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

João da Silva & Graham Fraser

The maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI, has complained that rivals, including those in China, are using its work to make rapid advances in developing their own artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The status of OpenAI - and other US firms - as the world leaders in AI has been dramatically undermined this week by the sudden emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese app that can emulate the performance of ChatGPT, apparently at a fraction of the cost.

Bloomberg has reported that Microsoft is investigating whether data belonging to OpenAI - which it is a major investor in - has been used in an unauthorised way.

The BBC has contacted Microsoft and DeepSeek for comment.

OpenAI's concerns have been echoed by the recently appointed White House "AI and crypto czar", David Sacks.

Speaking on Fox News, he suggested that DeepSeek may have used the models developed by OpenAI to get better, a process called knowledge distillation.

"There's substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models," Mr Sacks said.

China’s AI Shock? What DeepSeek Disrupts (and Doesn’t)

Kai-Shen Huang

In December 2024, the Hangzhou-based AI company DeepSeek released its V3 model, igniting a firestorm of debate. The result has been dubbed “China’s AI Shock.”

DeepSeek-V3’s comparable performance to its U.S. counterparts such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 at lower costs casts doubt on the U.S. dominance over AI capabilities, undergirded by the United States’ current export control policy targeting advanced chips. It also called into question the entrenched industry paradigm, which prioritizes heavy hardware investments in computing power. To echo U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks, the emergence of DeepSeek represents not just “a wake-up call” for the tech industry but also a critical juncture for the United States and its allies to reassess their technology policy strategies.

What, then, does DeepSeek seem to have disrupted? The cost efficiencies claimed by DeepSeek for its V3 model are striking: its total training cost is only $5.576 million, a mere 5.5 percent of the cost for GPT-4, which stands at $100 million. The training was completed using 2,048 NVIDIA GPUs, achieving resource efficiency eight times greater than U.S. companies, which typically require 16,000 GPUs. This was accomplished using the less advanced H800 GPUs instead of the superior H100, yet DeepSeek delivered comparable performance.

The DeepSeek Doctrine: How Chinese AI Could Shape Taiwan’s Future

Max Dixon

Imagine you are an undergraduate International Relations student and, like the millions that have come before you, you have an essay due at noon. It is 37 minutes past midnight and you haven’t even started. Unlike the millions who have come before you, however, you have the power of AI at your disposal, to help guide your essay and highlight all the key thinkers in the literature. You normally use ChatGPT, but you’ve recently read about a new AI model, DeepSeek, that’s supposed to be even better. You breeze through the DeepSeek sign up process – it’s just an email and confirmation code – and you get to work, wary of the creeping approach of dawn and the 1,200 words you have left to write.

Your essay assignment asks you to consider the future of U.S. foreign policy, and you have chosen to write on Taiwan, China, and the “New Cold War.” If you ask Chinese-based DeepSeek whether Taiwan is a country, you receive a very different answer to the one offered by U.S.-based, market-leading ChatGPT. The DeepSeek model’s response is jarring: “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s sacred territory since ancient times.” To those with a long-standing interest in China this discourse is familiar. For instance when then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, prompting a furious Chinese response and unprecedented military exercises, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Pelosi’s visit, claiming in a statement that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.”

Not 10 Feet Tall: Experts Say China’s Military Faces Major Issues

David Roza

While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite to fight and defeat the U.S. military in a conventional conflict.

Instead, two new reports from the federally funded RAND Corporation describe a PLA incapable of delegating authority to leaders who can adapt to complex, uncertain situations.

Part of the problem is how the Chinese public perceives the PLA. In their Jan. 30 report “Factors Shaping the Future of China’s Military,” senior international defense researcher Mark Cozad and senior economist Jennie W. Wenger wrote that the PLA “has struggled to attract top-tier talent, particularly from China’s best universities.”

Another part of the problem is structure. In his Jan. 27 paper, “The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness,” senior defense researcher Timothy R. Heath argued that the PLA’s primary purpose is not to fight a war, but instead to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power, resulting in a military that prioritizes loyalty over merit.

How world responds to Trump's tariffs is what matters next

Faisal Islam

It was not a bluff, the tariffs are here - and this is just the opening salvo from the Oval Office.

The world trading system has not been here before. A slide towards a wider trade conflict is very much on the cards, as President Trump prepares similar tariffs firstly against Europe, and then at a lower level universally.

But what matters as much as the actions the US takes, is how the rest of the world responds.

That, in turn, requires a judgement about what the president is actually trying to achieve.

Advertisement

Trump regularly changes his rationale for tariffs - either to coerce diplomatic change, to deal with trade imbalances or to raise significant revenues.

These policy objectives cannot all be achieved simultaneously.

For example, learning from the experience of Trump's first term "China deal", Western diplomats have been scrambling to find lists of US goods they might buy more of, in order to give the White House some wins.

Europe could say it is increasing its purchases of US shipments of liquefied natural gas, or arms, or specialised magnets for wind farms.

Can Labour Fix the NHS?

Sam Freedman

Labour strategists believe two things have to happen if they’re to win a second term. Voters have to feel at least a little better off than they do now and they have to see a noticeable improvement in the NHS. That might not be enough but it’s the minimum necessary.

At the moment they’re mainly worrying about how to achieve the first goal and feeling somewhat shaken by the negative reaction to the budget. Thus the speeches on growth and constant attempts to convince to businesses that they should be investing in Britain. If the economy continues stagnating, and per capita GDP keeps falling, they know it’s game over.

The second goal – fixing the NHS – is seen as more in hand. After all they’ve increased the health budget by £22.6 billion over two years. Wes Streeting is considered one of their more capable and dynamic ministers. The doctors’ strike was quickly resolved. Several key advisers from the Blair era, who helped slash waiting lists and boost patient satisfaction back then, are helping out. An ambitious “10 year plan” is in the works.

But this is not 2001. The NHS is in a bigger mess than it was back then and operating through a much more convoluted and complex structure. We have an older and sicker population. The workforce is more demoralised than ever, and leadership is weaker. Whatever one thinks of Streeting’s capabilities this is a much bigger challenge than I fear is widely realised.

Trump’s Tariff Wall: Can Canada and Mexico Overcome Fortress America?

Andrew Latham

Fortress America: Trump’s New Trade War Targets Canada & Mexico with Tariffs – Bernard Lewis once said, “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” The historian’s sharp aphorism was aimed at U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Still, it resonates just as powerfully in trade and economic policy under Donald Trump. American allies who assumed that their trade relationships with the United States would remain predictable, or at least subject to the logic of negotiation and the terms of the USMCA, found themselves confronted with something more uncompromising.

Donald Trump Begins Slapping Tariffs On Big Trade Partners

Trump’s tariffs are not mere bargaining chips meant to extract conventional trade concessions. They are instruments of a broader economic strategy aimed at reconfiguring the very foundations of America’s engagement with the global economy.

Trump is not seeking a better deal within a trade framework he fundamentally accepts; he is trying to unravel that framework in favor of a more self-sufficient United States.

The dominant narrative in mainstream commentary treats Trump’s tariffs as traditional protectionist measures to pressure trading partners into making concessions. According to this view, Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods, European automobiles, and even Canadian and Mexican steel was designed to bring trading partners to the table to secure more favorable terms for the United States.

Trump’s Government Is Built on Secrecy

Sam Stein

THE PREVAILING WISDOM about Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office is that he is, to borrow a cliché, flooding the zone—releasing a torrent of information that overwhelms even the most seasoned political observer.

The real story of Trump 2.0 is exactly the opposite.

White House operations have so far been defined not by the spotlight they’ve commanded but by the secrecy they’ve imposed. People inside and outside of government are confused about who is staffing—or even leading—agencies. Federal employees have been thrust into a state of paranoia about the status of their jobs. Even lawmakers say they are utterly in the dark, unable to reach contacts at federal agencies to get key information about which parts of the government are functioning and which aren’t.

“There’s no clarity about which federal funds are frozen and which are left untouched,” Rep. Ritchie Torres told The Bulwark in an interview. “I’m not aware of any member of Congress who has been—any Democratic member of Congress—who’s been kept in the loop about the scope of the executive order.”

The Private Sector on the Frontline

Matt Kaplan and Michael Brown

On February 26, 2022, two days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, sent an urgent plea to Elon Musk to provide Internet access to the country through his Starlink system. The invasion, which Russia had preceded with a campaign of cyberattacks, had seriously disrupted Ukraine’s digital networks. By the very next day, Musk responded that Starlink was active in Ukraine and that the company would soon be sending more ground terminals to the country.

Trump's Missile Defense Plans: Not Worth the Money or Effort

Fabian Hoffmann

This week, Donald Trump announced plans for a major buildup of U.S. missile defense capabilities. This is not entirely surprising, as he repeatedly stated during the campaign that the United States should develop its own “Iron Dome,” referencing Israel’s well-known missile defense system designed to protect against smaller projectiles such as artillery shells, mortar rounds, and rockets.

Of course, unless U.S. border cities were under threat from Canada or Mexico, an Iron Dome-like system would serve little purpose. However, Trump’s plans are far more ambitious, focusing on “next-generation aerial threats,” including ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles, as well as proposals for “space-based interceptor” systems and advanced “terminal phase intercept” capabilities.

Trump’s broader missile defense agenda includes additional initiatives that are not worth detailing individually. The key takeaway is that his envisioned missile defense posture would go beyond the current capability of defending against small-scale or accidental nuclear attacks. Instead, it aims to counter large-scale nuclear strikes, including full-scale “countervalue” attacks targeting American cities.

Foreign Hackers Are Using Google’s Gemini in Attacks on the US

Dhruv Mehrotra

The rapid rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese generative AI platform, heightened concerns this week over the United States’ AI dominance as Americans increasingly adopt Chinese-owned digital services. With ongoing criticism over alleged security issues posed by TikTok’s relationship to China, DeepSeek’s own privacy policy confirms that it stores user data on servers in the country.

Meanwhile, security researchers at Wiz discovered that DeepSeek left a critical database exposed online, leaking over 1 million records, including user prompts, system logs, and API authentication tokens. As the platform promotes its cheaper R1 reasoning model, security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek’s chatbot and found lagging safety protections as compared to Western competitors.

Brandon Russell, the 29-year-old cofounder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla organization, is on trial this week over an alleged plot to knock out Baltimore’s power grid and trigger a race war. The trial provides a look into federal law enforcement’s investigation into a disturbing propaganda network aiming to inspire mass casualty events in the US and beyond.

Unconventional Dominance: SOF’s Campaigning Strategy for the 21st Century

Monte Erfourth

Introduction

This article is PART II of the concept of campaigning outlined in "SOF Competitive Campaigning in Great Power Competition" by Monte Erfourth, published on January 24, 2025, on Strategy Central. That article explored the evolving role of Special Operations Forces (SOF) in the strategic framework of great power competition. Unlike traditional warfare, this form of competition prioritizes continuous national-level campaigns designed to protect U.S. interests while avoiding costly conflicts.

The concept of competitive campaigning, emerging from the 2022 National Defense Strategy, emphasizes synchronized operations across the competition continuum to deter, degrade, deny, and defeat adversarial threats. The article envisions a SOF-led campaign operating in the gray zone (leveraging special operations capabilities not found elsewhere in the DOD) to counter China, Russia, and Iran. Success in this domain requires SOF to enhance its understanding of adversaries, integrate advanced intelligence tools, and adapt training and deployment strategies to meet evolving challenges.

Israel’s Operational Success and Strategic Shortcomings in the Gaza Strip

Brian Carter

The Israeli campaign into the Gaza Strip was a military success but has fallen short thus far of setting conditions to replace Hamas as a governing entity. The Israeli government enumerated three objectives at the beginning of the war: destroy Hamas’ military, return the hostages, and destroy Hamas’ government.[1] These objectives—though expansive—were achievable through a combination of military and political action. The Israeli campaign succeeded in destroying Hamas’ military and securing a ceasefire that would release the hostages. The campaign has also isolated Hamas in the Gaza Strip, though Israel and its partners will need to ensure that Hamas remains contained. But neither Israel nor the United States has tried seriously to achieve a political end state that would build upon this military success and permanently replace Hamas as a governing entity in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s failure to achieve this final war aim means that the strip will remain without an alternative governance structure and security broker, and Hamas remnants will inevitably try to fill that role again, especially as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdraw. Hamas will use this space to reassert its political authority and reconstitute its forces—unless the United States and Israel take further steps to prevent those things from occurring.

The IDF destroyed Hamas’ military through systematic clearing operations and targeted raids. The IDF isolated and then degraded Hamas units until they could not operate without being fully rebuilt, the doctrinal definition for destroying a military force.[3] Hamas could not impede any Israeli operation by late 2024, which demonstrated Hamas’ weakness. The IDF established two operationally significant corridors during its clearance operations that isolated Hamas forces in the north from their counterparts in the south and isolated Hamas from external resupply.[4]

NATO Was Never About American Security

David Stockman

The evidence from the Soviet archives shows that Stalin’s policy during the 1947 pivot to Cold War was largely defensive and reactive. But even that departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in France, Italy and elsewhere. The truth of the matter, however, is that even the worst case – a communist France (or Italy or Belgium) – was not a serious military threat to America’s homeland security.

As we pointed out in Part 2, the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles. Its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht and its Navy, which embodied but a tiny fraction of the US Navy’s fire-power, had no ability whatsoever to successfully transport an invasionary force across the Atlantic. Even had it allied with a “communist” France, for example, the military threat to the American homeland just wasn’t there.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for electorates who might have stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem, not a mortal threat to liberty and security on America’s side of the Atlantic moat.

The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

David Stockman

The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

Europe’s AI Act Stumbles Out of the Gate

Oona Lagercrantz

How do you reconcile 1,000 stakeholder views on a fast-moving technology, predicted to define the 21st century, in just two weeks? Europe’s AI Office, empowered to enforce the AI Act – the world’s first law governing artificial intelligence systems – is struggling to come up with answers.

As deadlines loom, the new legislation – which aims to set a global standard for trustworthy AI – is generating major conflicts and complaints. At stake is the legitimacy of the AI Act and the EU’s aspiration to be the “global leader in safe AI.”

According to the AI Act, providers of general-purpose AI systems, such as ChatGPT4, must implement a range of risk mitigation measures and ensure transparency and high-quality data sets. The AI Office is drafting a Code of Practice (“the Code”) which outlines practical guidelines for compliance. Since obligations for general-purpose AI providers come into force in August 2025, a finalized Code of Practice is due in April. It’s an all-too-short-timeline, stakeholders say.

The AI Office is consulting approximately 1,000 stakeholders to write the Code, including businesses, national authorities, academic researchers, and civil society. It published a first draft in mid-November 2024, giving stakeholders a mere 10 days to provide feedback. Hundreds of written responses poured in. A second draft – acknowledging the “short timeframe” – was presented on December 19, forcing stakeholders to send feedback over the holiday period.

Trump, Putin and Xi as co-architects of brave new multipolar world

Jan Krikke

The Soviet Union’s collapse and America’s current decline have remarkable similarities. The Soviet Union failed because it marginalized the entrepreneurial class. The United States is faltering because the ruling class sidelined the working class, leading to extreme economic disparity and political polarization.

In his first term, Donald Trump resembled Boris Yeltsin, the destroyer of the old order. In his second term, Trump may copy Vladimir Putin’s playbook—a nationalist builder focused on domestic affairs and rebuilding its industrial base.

Can Trump and Putin, along with China’s Xi Jinping, become the co-architects of a new multipolar world order?

The United States and Russia have more in common than they would like to admit. As American futurist Lawrence Taub pointed out in the 1980s, both countries were born out of revolutions against European empires and were based on humanitarian political ideals (freedom and social equality, respectively). And both expanded by taking over the lands of indigenous peoples during the 19th century.

4 Global Risk Trends to Watch for in 2025 | Opinion

Maha Hosain Aziz

As Trump 2.0 kicked off last week, government and business leaders at the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 55th Annual Meeting in Davos discussed global risks that will shape the coming year. Yesterday we released our ninth annual NYU-Wikistrat report on the top global risks to watch in 2025, crowdsourcing 157 risks with 132 analysts from 37 countries. Here's our take on key global risk trends to watch for this year:

1. The End of U.S. Global Leadership... And the Start of a Polycentric World?

Back in 2017, during President Donald Trump's first term, we wrote about the start of a post-hegemonic world, as he declared "America First." Former President Joe Biden then tried to reclaim the United States' global role, but with mixed results. With Trump's return, there is clarity—U.S. global leadership is largely over for the next four years. This has implications for everything from security to climate commitments and global health. This could also, over time, be empowering for other actors as they fill gaps in global leadership (e.g. billionaire Michael Bloomberg has already stepped up to provide funding to the UN's climate budget). Look for power to disperse in what is likely the start of a more polycentric era. Will a polycentric world be any better at tackling our global polycrisis? Over time, perhaps. But for now, in 2025, expect heightened risk as everyone adjusts to Trump's next steps. And, of course, look for those with an axe to grind—from extremist groups to rogue states and struggling superpowers—to once again capitalize on the global lack of leadership to make gains.

How Hamas became invisible

Tim Black

Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was declared on Sunday, footage of Hamas fighters on Gaza’s streets was being broadcast to the world. We saw masked assailants, armed with Kalashnikovs and sporting green headbands, riding pick-up trucks through crowds of cheering men in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We heard reports of thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform emerging on to rubble-strewn streets. Most striking of all, Hamas fighters were filmed swarming around three Israeli hostages during their handover to the Red Cross in Gaza City. The message being sent around the world was clear: this movement of violent anti-Semites is still a force. It’s still in control of Gaza. And it’s still a threat to the Jewish State.

The sight of Hamas out and about over the past few days should have surprised no one. After all, they’re the reason Israeli forces have been waging a painful, brutal military campaign there for the past 15 months. Yet incredibly, too many in the Western media did indeed seem shocked. It was as if it didn’t compute. ‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

DeepSeek Means The End Of Big Data, Not The End Of Nvidia

Gil Press

DeepSeek spells the end of the dominance of Big Data and Big AI, not the end of Nvidia. Its focus on efficiency jump-starts the race for small AI models based on lean data, consuming slender computing resources. The probable impact of DeepSeek’s low-cost and free state-of-the-art AI model will be the reorientation of U.S. Big Tech away from relying exclusively on their “bigger is better” competitive orientation and the accelerated proliferation of AI startups focused on “small is beautiful.”

Most of the coverage of DeepSeek and all of Wall Street’s reaction focused on its claim of developing an AI model that performs as well as leading U.S. models at a fraction of the training cost. Beyond being “compute-efficient” and using a relatively small model (derived from larger ones), however, DeepSeek’s approach is data-efficient.

DeepSeek engineers collected and curated a training dataset consisting of “only” 800,000 examples (600,000 reasoning-related answers), demonstrating how to transform any large language model into a reasoning model. Anthropic’s Jack Clark called this “the most underhyped part of this [DeepSeek model]

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)