FT: “Four Chinese generative artificial intelligence start-ups have been valued at between $1.2bn and $2.5bn in the past three months, leading a pack of more than 260 companies vying to emulate the success of US rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The newly minted unicorns — Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and 01.ai — have gained significant backing from a largely domestic pool of investors and are fighting to hire the best talent to develop the most popular AI products. “There is no winner of foundation models yet in the China market. These are some of the names leading the charge to claim that title,” said Charlie Dai, vice-president and principal analyst at tech-focused consultancy Forrester.”
Arnold Kling: “While power has become more concentrated, knowledge has become more dispersed. In the economy, people are increasingly specialized. Science, medicine, and engineering have split into smaller sub-disciplines. In general, policy makers have too little knowledge relative to the high concentration of power. Consider the bills passed in [the US] Congress that run to hundreds of pages, which is more than they can read. And often the bills merely delegate power to unelected officials in government agencies.
Reuters: “Prominent computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is building a startup that uses human-like processing of visual data to make artificial intelligence (AI) capable of advanced reasoning, six sources told Reuters, in what would be a leap forward for the technology….She said the cutting edge of research involved algorithms that could plausibly extrapolate what images and text would look like in three-dimensional environments and act upon those predictions, using a concept called “spatial intelligence.” To illustrate the idea, she showed a picture of a cat with its paw outstretched, pushing a glass toward the edge of a table. In a split second, she said, the human brain could assess “the geometry of this glass, its place in 3D space, its relationship with the table, the cat and everything else,” then predict what would happen and take action to prevent it. “Nature has created this virtuous cycle of seeing and doing, powered by spatial intelligence,” she said.”
Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds: “Development requires helping the poor find their way from farm to factory, and from factory to office, classroom, and laboratory. This requires massive investment, which in turn requires sophisticated financial intermediation. It is for this reason that the trade and financial dimensions of globalization are complementary.” [via CafeHayek]
WSJ: “Rain starts as water vapor high in the sky; the individual water molecules float free of one another, mixed in with the other gases that make up the atmosphere. When the conditions are right, they condense to join a liquid water droplet or freeze solid onto an ice crystal. At the start, these solid or liquid particles are very small and just drift along with the air currents. But as they grow in mass, they start to fall. Lots of raindrops start off as ice crystals and melt as they fall into warmer air. Once all the droplets are liquid and falling, the dance really gets going. The smallest raindrops are around two thousandths of an inch across. These baby drops are spherical because the surface tension of the liquid squeezes the total surface area to be as compact as possible. Physicists find it strange that people often draw raindrops with a pointy end at the top, because the surface tension makes sure that there are no sharp corners—they’re all smoothed out incredibly quickly. Raindrops never have points.”
