In last week’s Capital Letter, I wrote about the drama at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and creator of ChatGPT which has the eventual goal of designing an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking us all.
Read MoreOn Friday November 17, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired. OpenAI is the artificial intelligence company formed to engineer an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking the old dullard. Ambitious!
Read MoreThe industrial revolution is not yet canceled, but it has become “problematic.” When delegates arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for Conference of the Parties 26, the 2021 edition of the U.N.’s climate jamboree, Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed them with a speech in which, after some by-the-numbers apocalypticism (crops withering, locusts swarming, wildfires, cyclones, Miami underwater), he turned his attention to the industrial revolution: “It was here in Glasgow, 250 years ago, that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam, that was produced by burning coal. . . . We’ve brought you to the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick.”
Read MoreAfter Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so…
Read MoreIncreasing criticism of ESG (an often incoherent investment “discipline” under which actual or portfolio companies are scored in part by how they score against various environmental, social, and governance measures) and the pushback against it in certain (red) states are worrying those in the ESG ecosystem who have done so well politically and economically (or both) out of it. Newspapers such as the Financial Times complain about elected politicians meddling in topics such as ESG, even though ESG is nothing if not political. Billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have issued warnings that those who oppose ESG just don’t understand capitalism, as has (more or less) Al Gore, climate change “prophet” and profiteer.
Read MorePoland is, as it was in 1920, on the West’s front line, even if this time the conflict — cyberattacks apart — is across its border and it has NATO at its side. Back then, Western assistance consisted mainly of some French matériel, a large detachment of French officers, and a smaller collection of Brits. Led by Józef Piłsudski, the father of a reborn Poland, Polish forces launched a counter-attack against the Bolshevik army that was nearing Warsaw. The result, named after the river running through the city, was the “Miracle on the Vistula.” The invaders were routed, Poland was saved, and the Red Army was stopped from spreading Lenin’s revolution to a dangerously fissile Germany.
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America’s support for Ukraine has removed any remaining doubts that the Cold War’s two leading adversaries are embarked on a new version of that contest. And Beijing is now in a very different position. After China’s break with the USSR in the early 1960s, the relationship between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing evolved into an intricate triangular dance in which the distance between the three vertices was always shifting.
Forty years on, the nature of that dance has changed, and not to America’s advantage. Thanks to its growing economic, technological, and military power, China has now emerged as America’s most formidable challenger…
Read MoreWith the pushback against ESG (an investment “discipline” under which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance benchmarks) gathering momentum, its proponents have finally had to mount a credible defense of a once seemingly irresistible concept that, up to now, has had no need of one.
That’s not proving easy…
Read MoreAlthough the “rules” that governed the Cold War were never so clearcut as many now imagine, they were a model of clarity compared with how America’s relations with China are currently run. The frank acknowledgment that the U.S. and the USSR were enemies made that contest easier to “manage”— and so, thanks to determination, luck, and the courage of one Soviet lieutenant-colonel, here we still are.
Our relationship with China, by contrast, is an updated version of pre-1914 great power rivalry that has evolved into something that may be more dangerous, not least because our tangled economic relationship makes it hard to say aloud how things really stand. And so it is to Treasury Secretary Yellen’s credit that in a speech at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 20, she attempted to do just that. Her talk was an interesting mix: combining realism with an attempt to cling to older illusions that went, I suspect, beyond mere politeness.
Read MoreApril 3 saw the death of one of the last Thatcherite greats, Nigel Lawson. He was ninety-one. Serving as Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) between 1983 and 1989, Lawson played a vital part in creating a British economic revival so strong that it took the combined efforts of both the Conservative and the Labour parties decades to destroy it…
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