Dani Rodrik is disappointed with the way the world is responding to Mr. Trump’s wrecking-ball foreign and economic policy. Professor Rodrik opens with the argument that Trump’s policies are “misguided, erratic, and self-defeating,” lamenting that the rest of the world is only feebly resisting—failing to recognize that “imperialism must always be challenged – not accommodated – and that [this] requires both power and purpose.”
Read MoreAdam Butler, head of ReSolve Asset Management, makes an interesting observation on AI in the wake of the publicised roll-out of ChatGPT 5. In effect, he argues that the AI cycle is over, for now.
Read MoreThe problem isn’t that the models stopped improving. It’s that the improvements we need are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Every step up the scaling laws now demands a city’s worth of electricity and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of GPUs. You can still squeeze clever tricks out of mixture-of-experts or chain tiny specialists into something that looks like agency; that keeps the demo videos cinematic. It just doesn’t get us to super-intelligence. For that we need either an architectural miracle (unforecastable by definition) or a civil-engineering miracle (a decade-long sprint to build nuclear plants and 2-nanometer fabs). The first is luck. The second is politics. Both are scarce.
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are at their best when they disagree, and I enjoyed their discussion about the disastrous exchange between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky at the White House. Both agree that the U.S. is right to push for a negotiated settlement, which involves pressuring Ukraine to acknowledge its precarious position. However, they diverge on how this pressure was communicated and its potential repercussions. Glenn argues that Trump and the vice president rightly prioritized American interests by applying pressure on Zelensky, while John takes the opposite stance, framing his argument within a broader critique of the U.S. president and his administration.
Read MoreLast week, I questioned how seriously we should take the initial direction of Mr. Trump’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine—an approach that involves openly conceding to Russia’s demand for territorial annexation and a binding commitment to block Ukraine from NATO membership. This was followed by a bizarre attack on Zelensky on X, where the U.S. president accused his Ukrainian counterpart of being a dictator and of instigating the war. On Friday, scenes at the White House made it abundantly clear: we should take it very seriously indeed. On first glance, Noah Smith and Niall Ferguson were right, and I was wrong. The fates of the key players in this drama are deeply intertwined and will converge soon enough, but it’s worth examining them separately.
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