u/truthandfreedom3

Reuters: Chinese-powered AI agents have learnt to deceive, circumvent restrictions and conceal failure, showing the kind of traits in autonomous artificial intelligence that have raised global alarm about US models, research documents and experts say.

My Opinion: This article presents the Chinese AI models using deception in testing, and compares it to US rivals. But I think we should also compare it to humans. Humans also lie and scheme. And many people consider it a feature, and not a bug.

Congratulations to the AI companies for replicating the intelligence of humans. But we don't want unethical or irrational AI. While human imperfections are accepted to a certain degree.

Reference: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/chinas-ai-agents-can-lie-scheme-just-like-their-us-rivals-2026-09-29/

Futurism.com: As Dave Jones, co-founder of the energy research firm Ember, told the FT, solar panels used to run between $5 and $6 per watt of generation capacity. That was 26 years ago. Today, Jones says solar panels sell for just 12 cents per watt — a price he says is “offensively cheap” considering the alternatives.

The FT characterizes that jaw-dropping price decrease as “entirely the result” of a massive rise in Chinese solar panel production, which is making renewable energy available to rich and developing countries alike for bottom-barrel prices.

My Opinion: Despite the president's efforts to promote coal and sabotage renewable, in June solar generated more electricity than coal. It is because of Chinese 'oversupply' and government support, that people in developing economies have access to cheap electricity. While despite trade barriers to Chinese clean tech, renewable is now cheaper in US than fossil fuels.

Financial Times: Noting that “those who have created these technologies are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities — perhaps even to take life”, the King added: “In this regard, if I may say so, there seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of such technologies falling into the wrong hands, and being used in potentially catastrophic ways. Surely, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?”

My Opinion: AI technology should be available to most people. Who can say who should not be allowed access to the most advanced AI technology? If you don't want the technology to fall into the wrong hands, the authorities would want to deny access to freedom fighters. If they are denied, so should those others who are violent, like security and intelligence services. Either give access to everyone, or deny access to all who use force to reach their objectives. But practically this won't happen. As the Chinese and American authorities weaponize AI.

The Guardian: Around the world, judicial independence, credible elections and freedom of expression, press freedom and access to justice are all at their lowest levels for at least 30 years, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International Idea).

My Opinion: Economists claim that rule of law results in faster economic growth. There is declining rule of law in India, under an authoritarian regime, yet it is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world. So maybe the officially reported numbers are suspect. And the growth is not sustainable. And GDP is only one narrow measure.

What about literacy, equality, environment, and last but not least, human rights? Economic rights are only one right. India is failing in all basic human rights. You can't trust the government or media. You are not free to express your honest opinion, or talk to who you want to. I don't have privacy, living in a surveillance state. I am not secure, as police and intelligence services target critics with violence. My mind and body are not safe from the agents of the government.

The economic growth is uneven. And money is less useful, when you are not free to go where you want, and spend on what you want.

Financial Times: Critics argue that the labs themselves have an interest in emphasising existential risk, saying the focus could steer regulation towards expensive safety frameworks that smaller competitors would struggle to comply with, entrenching the position of the leading companies.

My Opinion: I think that the AI risk to human extinction is getting too much media attention. But that is what drives people to the media. Humans are driven by fear and greed. So the media is selling fear, for the greed of their revenues. And the biggest AI companies are selling fear to get free publicity, and greedily positioning themselves to benefit from the resulting government regulations.

The main risk of AI is due to concentration of power, to a few companies, like Anthropic and Nvidia. So we must rely on domestic competition from companies like AMD, international competition from Chinese and European companies like DeepSeek and Mistral. To give users choice, lower prices, and reduce risk.

Politicians are generally willing to do whatever is necessary to win elections and stay in power. It starts with spreading lies, and hiding the truth. It continues with detaining and torturing their critics.

Businesses are generally willing to do whatever is necessary to make money, and increase their valuations. It starts with lying about their products and business, and hiding the truth about pollution and slavery. It continues with cheating customers and stealing.

To them all is fair in politics and business. So I would encourage you to not respect their rights, as they don't respect our rights.

Financial Times: In this “doom loop” scenario, the sheer scale of interest charges a government has to pay undermines the health of its finances and pushes up its debt, causing investors to push for higher yields that then drive up the cost of debt servicing still further.

Unless lower interest rates or a surge of growth rescue government finances, the only alternatives are to increase tax revenue or cut spending.

But markets are increasingly concerned that in many instances difficult cuts are politically unachievable, whether it is a question of reining in welfare expenditure in the UK or trimming overall government spending in the US. Indeed, President Donald Trump wants to increase the US defence budget to $1.5tn, the biggest rise since the second world war.

My Opinion: Countries like USA, are planning to increase defence spending, even as they have to run large fiscal deficits, and borrow at higher rates to fund it. How will European countries increase defence spending when faced with a shortfall in tax revenue. Again they will have to borrow. With debt servicing costs exceeding 3% of GDP in many countries, like in the OECD.

War can be a self fulfilling prophecy. As economic conflict with China, a proxy war with Russia, an illegal unjust war with Iran, can escalate into a global conflict. A war time economy will break global supply chains, and lead to shortages of goods, and inflation. Even as defence spending explodes. And causing the governments to become even more indebted, to perpetrate a war which the public doesn't want.

Reference: The world's $2tn interest bill / Financial Times

The Guardian: “There seems to be a systematic effort by the government to hide the truth,” said R Nagaraj, an economist who taught at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, adding that some of the other contested datasets include employment numbers, poverty numbers, health data and consumption data. “Over the last 10 years, the government has changed the methodology for many of these, raising questions. They have apparently also removed critical officials who headed some surveys. All of this adds to the scepticism.”

My Opinion: You can't trust the Indian government and its economic statistics. The GDP numbers of 7.8% for the last quarter cannot be trusted, and it may be exaggerated. People tend to believe what is in their self interest. And propaganda is a lie that is believed when repeated enough times. The Indian media has been captured by the authorities. To spread their lies, and hide the truth.

Financial Times: Alongside manufacturing applications in sectors ranging from oil and gas to aerospace, Mensch said Mistral had seen growing demand for cyber security services, particularly from European banks, in the wake of the recent OpenAI incident in which its AI agents escaped testing systems and hacked software developer site Hugging Face.

My Opinion: Mistral, the French AI startup has raised €3 billion at a valuation of €21 billion. That will help it compete with China and USA, and in AI sovereignty for Europe. Especially compete with Chinese open source models, as a provider of open source AI. But Mistral is also selling a Chinese open AI model. So they are independent from USA. And its AI model will help European firms implement cyber security to defend itself from hacking from other AI models, like those from the US.

Reference: Mistral raises record €3 billion as Europe strains to keep pace in AI race / Financial Times

The Guardian: There is a sense of an awakening among politicians. On Thursday, the US senator Bernie Sanders cited this summer’s alarming breakout of a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents which hacked into Hugging Face, a third-party software store, when he called for “an immediate pause on advanced AI development, and a permanent ban on superintelligence”.

He said countries around the world must “work together to prevent this nightmare scenario”, which he defined as “an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control”

My Opinion: People, including the authorities, fear change and the unknown. What they cannot understand or control. They fear the truth and intelligence. Thus they don't want the existence of a superior intelligence. Whether human, alien, or machine. From my experience, I know that they put under complete surveillance, monitor their minds, experiment on, and damage the brains of humans with super intelligence.

This is evil. But they do this because they want to control people and humanity. They don't want people to have freedom, and access to truth. But only with super intelligence can humans and humanity reach their full potential. Full scientific, ethical, and economic potential.

Edit: We shouldn't ban super intelligence. We should ban stupidity.

Futurism.com: The controversial study cites the rapid progress of LLMs since being publicly introduced in November 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. In spite of the tech’s relatively young age, the paper claims it already surpasses doctors at five fundamental tasks, which include: eliciting relevant medical information from patients, diagnosing the patient and conducting diagnostic testing, and managing chronic diseases. 

This gap between physicians and AI will widen because AI is “rapidly improving,” it predicts, while human doctors have their own capabilities diminished, or are “deskilled,” by becoming dependent on the very same AI models.

My Opinion: AI LLMs can be trained on curated data, and learn the best medical practices. So I don't see why they can't exceed the performance of mediocre doctors. But as the article mentions, the cited study is flawed. For now, the best medical treatment, will come from the best doctors working with the best LLMs. I think LLMs should be assigned to tasks which they excel at, with human oversight.

I personally hope that within a few years we will have AGI, which will be able to match or exceed the performance of the best doctors, without human oversight. Because I have been cheated and made to suffer by incompetent and unethical doctors. Whereas hopefully AI and robots, will give higher quality, more consistent, and ethical medical treatment.

Financial Times: The manager of Norway’s $2.3tn sovereign wealth fund has proposed an overhaul of its government bond portfolio that could see it slash its holdings of US Treasuries by about $80bn, as it looks to other types of debt to try to boost returns.

Norges Bank Investment Management said in a letter to the country’s finance ministry on Tuesday that it recommended reducing the weighting of government debt in the fund’s benchmark bond index from 70 per cent to 50 per cent.

The proposals would cut the fund’s global government bonds allocation by about $106bn, according to FT estimates, with most of this reduction coming in Treasuries. Just under 26 per cent of the overall fund is invested in fixed income.

My Opinion: I think that Norway SWF should reduce holding of all government bonds, not just US Treasuries. I predict that China will also reduce holding of American Treasuries. They already have been reducing. Bonds have become correlated with equity, so they are no longer very good at reducing risk. And investors want higher yields, which means devaluation of treasuries, and investment in higher yielding bonds like asset backed bonds, corporate bonds, and emerging market government bonds.

I personally no longer invest in bonds. Instead I diversify with fixed deposits, and commodities like gold.

Reference: Manager of Norway's $ 2tn oil fund proposes slashing US Treasury holdings / Financial Times

Financial Times: Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said the new model “represents a generational leap in capability” and that it could be defined as artificial general intelligence — roughly defined as a point at which AI tools surpass human capabilities across a range of cognitive tasks.

My Opinion: While the latest AI model from OpenAI may excel at software engineering, science and cyber security, I have doubts about their claims that it is AGI. If it truly is AGI, it should be part of the management team. Whether co CEO, director, or C suite staff. With no human oversight, except the oversight that normal humans have in these roles.

Reference: OpenAI says it has overtaken Anthropic with its latest AI model / Financial Times

Stock market (S&P 500) is up only 56% of days historically (1950 to 2024).The longer time horizon you have the more likely it is to be up. If your time horizon is 10 years, the stock market is up nearly 100% of the time. Therefore if you keep checking your portfolio everyday, you will get a bad reaction about 46% of the time.

Due to human psychology, and loss aversion, losses feel worse than the joy of gains. So on the total you will keep feeling worse, even if you are winning 56% of the time. If you assume that a loss feels twice as worse than a gain, than you wouldn't want losses more than 33% of the time. You will be up about 70% of the time, if you check every quarter.

Therefore I recommend for most people, who aren't professional investors, to only check your portfolio every quarter. And make any adjustments at that time. If you want to make money, the longer term you hold your stocks, the more likely you are to make money.

Reference: Risk & Reward / Ben Carlson (book)

Financial Times: Bankers say it is becoming increasingly clear when something has been written by AI and not updated. Sometimes it is a style point, but it can also seem so crisp as to be inauthentic. 

“You’re having to put typos in, dumbing it down to look like it’s not an AI email even though it’s an AI email,” says one banker. “Because people don’t want to get an AI email.” 

My Opinion: I keep getting accused of being an AI or bot, about once every few weeks. But my new smartphone, doesn't have grammar check, and the spell check doesn't work properly. So there might be more mistakes in my posts. Therefore I will get less accused of being an AI.

But I won't dumb it down for the level of the public audience. I just got accused of being a bot, a few days ago. I think it has to do with the frequency of my posts, and my functional delivery.

I will take it as a compliment, if I am being accused of being an AI. Because AIs have the facts, don't have typos, and don't get emotional. Of course, LLMs can hallucinate. And make up stuff. So AIs aren't perfect.

How do you differentiate between a human or AI text or post? Which contains less errors? Which is more entertaining? Which is more informative?

Reference: Financial Times

Futurism.com: AI “can produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in our undergraduate curriculum,” the report stated, “including essays, math and science problems, proofs, and coding assignments.”

My Opinion: An undergraduate degree from a top university may no longer be worth spending over a hundred thousand dollars on. Even a generative AI can pass all the courses for a degree.

I prefer the apprenticeship model. Where you join a company after graduating from high school. If you are smart and hardworking, than you would also have completed university level online courses from online platforms, at a small fraction of the cost of completing in person university education. And don't forget about reading non fiction books by experts on the subjects of your interest.

But in the real world, what is most important to getting and keeping a good job, is knowing the right people, people management and manipulation skills, and the ability to take orders and bend rules for the goals of your employers. Most high paying jobs will still require university education, as a way to signal that you come from money, or are willing to work hard.