Today's #DailyPlanet is a primer on China's AI trajectory. I will cover this theme in greater detail the week after next.

Today's #DailyPlanet is a quick primer on China's renewable energy revolution. I will cover this theme in greater detail next week.

On strategic interdependence and US-China relations in today’s #DailyPlanet. Contrast that with Weaponized Interdependence…

sign of the Times

The metaphor of a "race" between the USA and China in artificial intelligence is misleading, for they are two ships navigating uncharted waters toward an uncertain destination. while engaged in a contest that reflect their unique strengths. #DailyPlanet dailyplanet.leaflet.pub/3m7lacgv2as22

Quite the pleasant surprise to be featured in the AAA. Thanks!

How can I disagree - of course you should drop everything else you're doing and subscribe this very instant!

Can't believe today's #DailyPlanet is the 100th such! Many thanks to @leaflet.pub for making it easy to create a publication & continuing to add features that make Leaflet a delight. PS: Issue 100 is on a fantastic essay by Kaiser Kuo. dailyplanet.leaflet.pub/3m7i4n2eof22b

The 100th #DailyPlanet is on a remarkable essay by Kaiser Kuo on China's rise and how it's prompting a "Great Reckoning."

With AI, the financial and technical bubbles are easy to see: hyperscaler capex + the faith that more compute = AGI. The cultural bubble is subtler: it's the sense that AI is about to rewire our shared life - how we imagine, create, argue, govern, and even who "we" includes. #WeeklyPlanet

And to round out this series on the AI Bubble, I am going to share one of my own pieces from a few years ago, from when I was speculating about the Interverse. #DailyPlanet

Culture has always been global, for stories, religions and music has traveled the globe for millennia. However, print culture dramatically accelerated the spread of culture, and novels, radio and movies brought distant people into our lives. How might AI expand our cultural circle? #DailyPlanet

I have talked about prediction and production as two AI strategies: if ubiquitous prediction is the better known path, what does ubiquitous production look like? People have been thinking about this for a while, just not in the context of AI. It's time to read Mark Weiser again. #DailyPlanet

Prediction's rise as a theory of everything isn't restricted to culture alone; it's also the most widely accepted theory of how minds work. Hohwy's book on the Predictive Mind isn't layperson friendly so I am posting a link to a Quanta article on predictive processing instead.

I liked this piece on "prediction" becoming the core idea animating our culture - it's from Andreesen-Horowitz, so there's definitely a commercial interest behind the take, but it's an intriguing take. #DailyPlanet

I am into the last week of covering the AI Bubble, starting with an article by Shalizi and Farrell on AI as the latest Shoggoth - a successor to bureaucracies, corporations and markets, i.e., institutions that aggregate and compress human knowledge and control our lives by doing so. #DailyPlanet

AI has captured our imagination. Skeptics counter that expectations outrun evidence. Neither fully explains why the hyperscalers are pouring extraordinary sums into data centers. To see the pattern clearly, it helps to place AGI inside the longer arc of cognitive capitalism. #WeeklyPlanet

I want to end this week's deliberations on AGI with a gesture towards next week's discussion of AI's impact on our general culture. #DailyPlanet

I think about Jevons' paradox & AGI. Once intelligence becomes a commodity, all current knowledge worker categories (think: doctor, lawyer, accountant, analyst, scientist) become available on tap. What will that world look like? #DailyPlanet

EscarGOAT

What's the difference between AGI and AI? The answer, of course, is G. haha, but behind this stupid joke is a point about do the "general" in AGI. Whether we reach AGI tomorrow or it takes us decades, we should never underestimate Sutton's bitter lesson. #DailyPlanet

AGI pilling seems like a Valley thing. Sitting in Boston, I don't hear as much about AGI nearby in comparison to Bay Area Substack. Not to lean too hard on anecdotal evidence, but it sure feels like AGI fervor decreases linearly with distance from Palo Alto. #DailyPlanet

@leaflet.pub I would absolutely love it if I can schedule posts; otherwise, I have to remind myself to publish the post several days after writing the post and leaving it as a draft - a much needed feature!

AGI may arrive tomorrow or in the next century, but it's amazing to see progress on a case by case basis. Frontier Math is a well known obstacle course on which solid progress is being made, but it's not just in abstract disciplines such as math or programming. #DailyPlanet

I have no way of knowing whether AGI is two days away, two decades away or two centuries away. If that wasn't bad enough, I find AGI doomerism and singularity speak uninteresting. Maybe it's because I find AGI uninteresting. But I am going to write about it this week in the #DailyPlanet

AI isn't emerging into an empty field; it's arriving at the end of a long arc of economic transformation - the era of cognitive capitalism, where value comes from the organization of knowledge, communication, and attention rather than the fabrication of physical goods. More in today's #WeeklyPlanet

For day 6 of this week's #DailyPlanet, a history lesson: AI mania has sparked both excitement and concern, drawing parallels to 1929 culminating in the Great Depression.

Vertical integration works for high-tech production, part 2: what works for Google in AI (and Apple for Phones) has also worked for BYD when it comes to EVs in today's #DailyPlanet

Really looking forward to this discussion on Open-Source organized by @gabriel-export.bsky.social and @kpaxle.bsky.social with @ronentk.me, @erlend.sh and Regis Chapman and me being the talking heads.

Once you're committed to spending trillions like the hyperscalers are, it makes sense to think of efficiencies that reduce your spend. One obvious solution: own the entire stack from chips to models to data centers to distribution. Google is doing that quite well, and Gemini 3 is proof. #DailyPlanet

If cognitive capitalism became the engine of American prosperity after deindustrialization and the neoliberal turn, McKenzie Wark helps us see why this shift wasn’t merely a change in industrial organization — it was a transformation in the deep logic of value creation. #DailyPlanet

First of two #DailyPlanets on Cognitive Capitalism. We can't make sense of the massive investment in data centers by the Hyperscalers without: 1. The millenarian belief that AGI is imminent and inevitable. 2. The Hyperscalers' understanding of the sources of their own economic success.

1/3 @leaflet.pub has been experimenting with how it can become a better destination for scientists. I have some - strong! - opinions on the topic, and a new publication for sharing those opinions. Let me present Hyperproblems to the world: hyperproblems.com/3m5tkmhnof224

We are now into the second week of the AI bubble. Yesterday's Weekly Planet mentioned three potential bubbles: the Financial Bubble, the Technical Bubble and the Cultural Bubble. This week the #DailyPlanet will cover the financial bubble, starting with the insane evaluations of the Magnificent Seven

When Sam Altman admits we're in an AI bubble while seeking a trillion dollars for data centers & Geoff Hinton meets the Pope to discuss whether AI threatens human dignity, we've wandered far from normal market speculation. There are at least three potential AI bubbles. More in today's #WeeklyPlanet

And to round out this weeks coverage of the AI Bubble, a thoughtful defense of the non-bubblic character of AI by Peter Wildeford. #DailyPlanet

The AI Bubble is also fueling the fossil fuel bubble. The energy needs of hyperscalers is ramping up so quickly that the demand for gas turbines is shooting up in response. More in today's #DailyPlanet

AGI/ASI fever hasn't spread through Chinese AI communities in the way it has done so within Silicon Valley. Afra Wang's piece on the China Tech Canon walks us through the way Chinese AI entrepreneurs think about the singularity - or the lack of it. #DailyPlanet

The hype around AI is partly due to predictions about the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Is it around the corner? Is it just a matter of pouring more money into existing tech and building out more data centers? Gary Marcus doesn't think so. More in today's #DailyPlanet

Bubbles burst when supply for the previously hot commodity runs ahead of demand, whether those be tulips or internet bandwidth or derivatives based on subprime loans. We are not there yet when it comes to AI. More in today’s #DailyPlanet.

Is it a Bubble? Even Sam Altman says so, while following it up with promises to invest a trillion dollars in data centers. But fears of a financial bubble severely underestimate what's going on with AI. More on the AI Bubble in this series of posts in the #DailyPlanet starting today.

I am back to metabolic sovereignty in the #WeeklyPlanet after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty. TLDR; the Anthropocene is: - An exercise in metabolic sovereignty for all humans - Human-wide metabolic sovereignty has unfortunately justified an sharply unequal metabolic pyramid.

I am going to end this series on Metabolic Sovereignty not with an essay on Energy or Information, but on the greatest disruption to global metabolism ever: the COVID pandemic. #DailyPlanet

One of the great hopes of climate action is that of an "energy transition," where we replace fossil fuel sources with renewable sources and we don't emit carbon into the atmosphere anymore. Not so quickly says Tooze about Fressoz in today's #DailyPlanet

Today’s #DailyPlanet is on Xi Jinping’s contribution to China’s increasing influence as the world’s Electrostate

Can someone please explain to me why Dick Cheney is being mourned by the liberal intelligentsia, such as it is? Just because he discovered an antipathy for Trump late in the game? There are very few people who have caused more harm than Dick Cheney; and yet, now he is a hero?

In today's #DailyPlanet, I discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential theses on "The Climate of History."

Energy intensity matters - and industrial modernity unlocked high-intensity fuels, including fossil fuels. All the ills of the anthropocene are downstream from this unlocking, but it's also true that modern health and prosperity depend on concentrated energy. More in today's #DailyPlanet

Back to metabolic sovereignty this week after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty. #DailyPlanet

Today's #WeeklyPlanet sums up my emerging understanding of compute sovereignty, i.e., a nation’s ability to maintain autonomous control over the computing infrastructure – data centers, cloud platforms, and semiconductor chips – that underpins modern AI.