World Bank’s 2026 Report on AI. “Developing countries do not need to build trillion-dollar, all-purpose models to benefit from AI. But importing AI tools is also not enough. Countries must adapt AI to local languages, institutions, data, and development needs; ensure that national systems can work seamlessly with multiple platforms and providers; and steadily build the skills and infrastructure needed to do more. Low-cost tools—“small AI”—can put scarce expertise within reach of millions, through text messages, voice calls, basic phones, and other technologies that work even where electricity, computing power, and internet access are limited. The gains are already visible. AI is helping to accelerate medical screening, assisting farmers with more accurate weather forecasts, and aiding teachers in creating better lessons for students.”
Tyler Cowen: “In the late 19th century, various railroads went bankrupt—but that didn’t stop rail from knitting together much of the world. In the early part of the 20th century, there were over 100 auto companies in the U.S. By the end of the 1930s, Ford, General Motors (GM), and Chrysler controlled 80 percent of the market. Bankruptcy, it turns out, doesn’t stop progress. A similar logic holds for all the companies that built the AI infrastructure, whether we are talking about data centers, cloud computing, chips, energy, or other inputs into production. There is plenty of capital to step in and support any part of the AI supply chain that might be experiencing economic trouble.” [via Arnold Kling]
Semi Analysis: “A day in AI now feels like a year in any other industry. Model releases, software breakthroughs, and hardware improvements are compressing multi-year cycles for any other industry into weeks. Over just the past few months, agentic AI has crossed a real inflection point, driving a step-change in the value of tokens while software and hardware improvements have sharply reduced the cost of generating them.”
Janan Ganesh: “We don’t in fact live in interesting times. Only historical ignorance gulls us into mistaking this for an era of unusual chaos. The inflation rate in 2022 was about half what it was at the turn of the 1980s. The wars of today are localised and inconclusive. Technocrats have become deft at mitigating what should be all-consuming disasters, whether financial or biomedical, with a bailout here and a furlough there. A visitor to 2026 from a couple of generations ago would notice the low levels of violent crime, the general material comfort and the racial peace before noticing the joker in the White House or even the talk of war. Welles was right. Upheaval is a creative spur. There is just less of it than people are able to perceive. That the 38th film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a cultural event is embarrassing, and in a sense our highest achievement.”
