SemiAnalysis: “With the meteoric rise of Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, Perplexity, and other “GPT Wrappers” or AI token-powered apps hitting mainstream recognition, we are seeing more and more companies emulate Anthropic’s focus on selling tokens as a service, rather than bundled as a monthly subscription like ChatGPT.”
The Atlantic: “Google has faced a bumpy road since generative AI exploded a few years ago. The technology has presented the biggest threat yet to Google’s search business, and the company’s share of the market recently dropped to its lowest in a decade. At the same time, usage of Google’s AI tools has skyrocketed over the past year, and the company recently rolled out a new AI search mode in an attempt to steal search queries back from the likes of ChatGPT. Now, with the company’s personalization advantage, Google could surge ahead. Whether Google or another company gets there first, this new era of AI is coming. For years, we have been shedding information online through clicks and likes, photographs and files, emails and search queries. That digital exhaust is now getting a second life. Already, it can be difficult to figure out whether text that you encounter online is generated by AI. Soon, while looking back on old emails, you might even feel that way about your own writing.”
WSJ: “Well aware of the U.S.’s continued economic and military superiority, the advisers say, Xi is seeking to avoid direct confrontation, while holding China’s ground in a protracted, all-encompassing competition. Xi aims to achieve what Mao Zedong used to call a “strategic stalemate”—an enduring equilibrium where American pressure becomes manageable and China buys time to catch up to the U.S. “For China, ‘strategic stalemate’ is the most realistic and preferred outcome in the foreseeable future,” said Minxin Pei, a Claremont McKenna College professor and editor of the quarterly journal China Leadership Monitor. “Strategic patience, conservation of resources and tactical flexibility will all be critical in achieving this stalemate.” In some ways, Beijing is pursuing a sort of guerrilla warfare, sparked by Henry Kissinger’s analysis of the nature of asymmetric conflicts: “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.””
Alex Tabarrok: “India’s wildly skewed public wage structure. Government salaries far exceed what is justified by GDP per capita or job requirements, distorting education, employment, and unemployment throughout the entire economy in deeply wasteful ways. The only real solution is to bring public sector pay back in line with economic fundamentals.”
