Raging Mideast War is Escalating

Today is Day 13 of the US-Israel war on Iran! It has already outlasted the 12-day war initiated by Israel – as is this war, by the way – on June 13, 2025, with the US joining nine days later. 

In fact, US President Donald Trump affirmed on Monday the war against Iran will end “very soon” but not this week!

“We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely”, the Orange Man trumpeted the destruction of more than 50 Iranian naval ships, and decimation of its air force and anti-aircraft defenses. 

He also said that the war would be over when Iran no longer had the capacity to use weapons against the US, Israel and other allies for a long time, according to CNBC on March 09, 2026. 

In fact, Trump had blithely described the war on Iran as a “short-term excursion”, maintaining that the US is ahead of schedule and already achieved “tremendous success”, as per Al Jazeera on March 10.

But this time around, the conflict has engulfed neighboring Arab countries, entering an escalatory phase as Tehran unleashed its 37th wave of missile and drone attacks across the region. 

Oil, gas and fuel storage facilities in Israel’s Haifa were repeatedly targeted while Gulf states scrambled to intercept drones and missiles heading toward energy hubs. Sirens echoed from Bahrain and Kuwait to Dubai, UAE, as defenses raced to stop incoming threats. 

At the same time, Washington and Tel Aviv intensified airstrikes inside Iran, hitting key sites across the country. 

Already, oil production in Iraq has dropped by 70%, from 4.3 million bpd before the conflict to 1.3 million bpd. Saudi Arabia has lowered output by 2 million to 2.5 million bpd, while the UAE has cut 500,000–800,000 bpd, and Kuwait has cut 500,000 bpd.

On top of that, drone attacks have hammered key infrastructure, including the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia and the Ras Laffan gas facility in Qatar, the latter responsible for 20% of global LNG supply. Already, QatarEnergy declared force majeure on LNG shipments yesterday.

Moreover, Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a global energy chokepoint, handling about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and significant liquefied natural gas (LNG) and fertilizer.

Predictably, Trump threatened “death, fire and fury” if Iran keeps obstructing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Tehran hit back, vowing it won’t allow “one liter of oil” to leave the Middle East until US and Israeli attacks cease. A top Iranian official even warned Trump to be careful not to be “eliminated” himself. 

With oil and gas facilities now at the center of the battlefield, the conflict is rapidly turning into a wider energy war.

And more. Yesterday, Iran identified new targets, i.e., offices and infrastructure run by top US companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications. Al Jazeera confirms this, saying the companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, and those companies offering cloud-based services that are located in multiple Israeli cities, as well as in some Gulf countries. 

And banks too. Yesterday, state-owned Bank Sepah in Tehran which were reportedly responsible for processing salary payments for Iran's military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, got hit by enemy missile(s). This presents Iran with the option to target economic centers and banks belonging to the US and Israel within the region. It's damn serious because Iran's military command (Khatam al-Anbiya) are warning civilians to stay at least one kilometer away from these establishments in the region.

The raging war is escalating, that's for sure. Yet, just hours ago, Trump is telling Axios in a 5-minute interview that there's "practically nothing left" to target in Iran! 🤣🤣🤣

As of March 11, the death toll has reached over 1,300 in Iran and at least 11 in Israel, with additional casualties reported among US troops in the region. 

Microsoft's Attempt to Block Word "Microslop" Backfires

Microsoft just gave the Internet a masterclass in the Streisand effect. The company added "Microslop" – a derisive nickname for Microsoft that took off after Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year – to the auto-moderation block list on its official Copilot Discord server. Any message containing the word was silently swallowed by bots before it could appear in chat, reports Windows Latest. 

Users figured this out almost immediately and did what users always do: they started swapping letters. "Microsl0p" (with a zero instead of an "o") sailed right past the filter. Other creative variations piled in. Microsoft escalated to banning individual accounts, and then locked portions of the server and hid two days' worth of message history from late February. 

The result was the opposite of what Microsoft wanted. "Streisand effect in full swing", one Reddit user observed. The story spread across PC Gamer, Futurism, TechRadar, and PCWorld within hours. The nickname "Microslop" is now exponentially more famous than it was before Microsoft tried to stamp it out. 

The Copilot Discord launched in December 2024 and initially attracted a positive community, but the mood has gone sour as Microsoft keep cramming AI features into everything from Windows 11 to Notepad. 

Banning a nickname doesn't fix the underlying complaint – it just confirms it. If your product's reputation is so fragile that a portmanteau can threaten it, maybe the problem isn't the word. 

Note: The Streisand effect is a phenomenon where an attempt to hide, censor, or remove information has the unintended consequence of causing it to become more widely known and publicized. Instead of suppressing the information, the act of trying to cover it up increases public curiosity, causing it to go viral. 

In 2003, the American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, and Pictopia.com for $50 million for violation of privacy. The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. The case had sought to remove Image 3850, labeled as "Streisand Estate, Malibu", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's mansion was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document coastal erosion to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance. 

In fact, the said print had been downloaded only six times prior to Streisand's suit, two of those being by her attorneys. After the lawsuit became public, over 420,000 people visited the site in a month. 

Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the name when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over its use of the resort's name. 

"How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect", wrote Masnick, "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", Techdirt, January 05, 2005. 😂😂😂

In her 2023 autobiography "My Name Is Barbra", Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote: "My issue was never with the photo... it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo". 😬😬😬

In case you're wondering, Copilot and ChatGPT are not the same, though they share underlying OpenAI technology (GPT models). The key difference is their focus: ChatGPT is a versatile, general-purpose conversational AI for creative tasks and learning, while Microsoft Copilot integrates directly into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (Word, Outlook, Teams) to act as a secure, context-aware productivity assistant for work-related data and workflows.

Big Tech's High-stakes AI Gamble

Skyrocketing AI infrastructure outlays have raised investor concerns over future returns and the potential for a bubble. 

Already, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta announced plans to spend a combined $660 billion on artificial intelligence in 2026. 

Certainly, the spending is humongous, even as tech companies are racing to get a lucrative piece of the proverbial pie. 

But there are concerns with overhyped valuations and uncertain profitability. A case in point is OpenAI having secured computing agreements with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle worth over $1 trillion. And Nvidia alone completed more than 100 AI-related venture deals in 2024. 

Analysts warn that much of the investment flows within a small group of closely linked companies, are creating what they describe as circular financing that inflates market values beyond the industry’s actual profits. 

According to a recent PwC survey, most CEOs say their companies have not yet seen financial returns from AI, with only 12% reporting both higher revenue and lower costs. 

Still, this won't discourage Big Tech from spending big (except it is said, Apple, which so far, are keeping AI infrastructure spending low). 

At the same time, in the back of their minds, they are painfully aware that they'll get punished when investors begin worrying they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending. 

A Big Tech’s high-stakes gamble on a fickle future.

Manchester City scored twice at Anfield to earn a 2-1 Premier League victory over Liverpool on Sunday.

It was Dominik Szoboszlai who sent Reds into the lead in the 73rd minute with a glorious free-kick goal which clipped the woodwork before nestling in the back of the net. 

But Citizens levelled ten minutes afterward and then scored again from the spot (90+3) to wrap up the game. 

Thus, Man City keep their title race alive as they close the gap on leaders Arsenal to six points. And Liverpool remain sixth, five points off the top four.

Google’s Sergey Brin Admits He’s Hiring Workers Without Degrees

Whether it’s Nike’s Phil Knight, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, or Google’s Sergey Brin, many of the world’s most influential business founders can trace part of their success back to Stanford University. Nestled in the foothills of Silicon Valley, the school has long functioned as a launchpad for tech’s elite. 

But the rise of artificial intelligence is challenging long-held assumptions about the value of higher education. As tech reshapes entry-level work and companies rethink traditional hiring pipelines, the payoff of a four-year degree – especially from elite institutions – is increasingly up for debate. 

Still, Brin (right) doesn’t regret his own academic path. Speaking to Stanford engineering students last month, he said his decision to study computer science was not driven by a fixation on credentials. 

“I chose computer science because I had a passion for it”, he said. “It was kind of a no-brainer for me. I guess you could say I was also lucky because I was also in such a transformative field”. 

Even in an era when AI can write code, Brin cautioned students against chasing – or abandoning – fields of study based solely on automation fears. 

“I wouldn’t go off and switch to comparative literature because you think the AI is good at coding”, he said. “The AI is probably even better at comparative literature, just to be perfectly honest anyway”. 

Brin met Google cofounder Larry Page in 1994 during his second year of graduate studies at Stanford. Together they developed PageRank, an algorithm they later renamed Google and would become a company in 1998. 

Google’s hiring practices today reflect how dramatically the industry has shifted. The tech giant is now embracing workers without college degrees. 

“In as much as we’ve hired a lot of academic stars, we’ve hired tons of people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees”, Brin said. “They just figure things out on their own in some weird corner”. 

Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute. And Google aren't alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring. 

That’s forcing a broader reckoning over what a degree actually signals and whether it’s still a reliable proxy for talent.

“I don’t think necessarily because you go to an Ivy League school or have great grades it means you’re going to be a great worker or great person”, said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in 2024. For many roles, skills matter far more than credentials, he added: “If you look at skills of people, it is amazing how skilled people are in something, but it didn’t show up in their resume”.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has made a similar case, despite holding three degrees (including a JD from Stanford). He’s been outspoken about the pressure young people face to pursue elite credentials – and dismissive of how much they matter once on the job. 

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian. No one cares about the other stuff”, Karp said during an earnings call last year. 

That mindset is spreading beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, according to Great Place to Work’s CEO Michael Bush. 

“Almost everyone is realizing that they’re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement”, Bush told Fortune. “That snowball is just growing”. 

For Brin, the implications ultimately go beyond hiring. With credentials losing their gatekeeping power, he said universities themselves may need to evolve: “I just would rethink what it means to have a university”.

Apple Siri Deal Drives Google Past Historic Trillion-dollar Milestone

On Monday, Apple announced a huge new deal with Google – the AI version of Siri will be powered by Google Gemini. 

Not long after, Google achieved something very few other Big Tech companies have. Specifically, Google's parent company Alphabet became just the fourth company to hit a $4 trillion stock market valuation, following Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, per CNBC. 

The other three companies all reached that threshold less than a year ago, so this is a recent phenomenon in the stock market. 

It should be noted that Apple and Microsoft are both back below the $4 trillion line, so Google could easily lose this honor at any time, for any reason. 

And in case you're wondering just how much money is four trillion dollars, here's a fun fact. If you were to convert the $4 trillion into one dollar bills and stack them on a football field, the resulting pile would be about half a mile high, roughly equivalent to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Or if you were to simply stack one bill on top of the other, the resulting pile would reach far past the moon.

Amazon Announce Mass Layoffs Amid AI Push

Amazon, on Tuesday, announced job cuts – 14,000 corporate jobs, representing a 4% reduction in their office workforce – and adding that they are not done with the layoffs! Reuters had claimed the day before that this number could ultimately reach 30,000. 

Staff in the US, Canada, and Europe have been informed of the layoffs, according to internal Slack posts viewed by Business Insider. 

The layoffs are the company's biggest since 2023, when 27,000 jobs were slashed globally. 

This decision comes amid a wider trend where corporate giants eliminate tens of thousands of positions as they intensify automation. Meaning, AI is “enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before”. Data from tracker Layoffs.fyi indicates that nearly 113,000 tech employees were let go among 218 tech firms globally this year. 

Already, since 2024, Amazon have committed about $40 billion to four data center projects in the US, as it builds up its infrastructure to try to compete with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others. 

I get this impression that technology is being leveraged primarily to increase corporate profits and concentrate wealth. 

Celtic narrowed the gap at the top of the Scottish Premiership to six points as interim manager Martin O'Neill delivered an emphatic 4-0 victory over Falkirk in his first game in charge in 20 years. 

Johnny Kenny's first-half double (30, 40), followed by Benjamin Nygren (58) and Sebastian Tounekti (73) strikes, earned a comfortable win for a side who had suffered successive league defeats. 

There's a long way to go for Celtic to be fully back on track but this was a really positive step that lifted the mood ahead of Sunday's League Cup semi-final against Rangers.

Tech CEOs Sing Donald Trump's Praises

The US president may not exactly be popular with many of his fellow citizens – well, maybe except for the MAGA crowd – because of his erratic policies and turnaround actions. But one category of Americans appears to adore him, believe it or not!

At a White House dinner on Thursday which Donald Trump hosted for an elite band of tech CEOs or as Trump dubbed them, the "high IQ group" – it is ostensibly about bolstering tech innovation within the United States – the assembled techie nobility took turns to openly sing his praises! 

Obviously, they must have thought the world of him and they don't seem to mind prostrating themselves at the feet of a bloated Orange Menace! 

Everybody who's who in Silicon Valley were there. Notable guests in attendance included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google founder Sergey Brin and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Obviously, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was absent).

Amongst the choicest plaudits:

"You and your policies are really helping a lot", Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Trump. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su praised "the amount of acceleration that we've seen just in the few short months that the administration has been in place". 

Oracle CEO Safra Catz struck a note of adoration at "the fact that you are our president" and that Trump quickly recognized the importance of AI. "You've unleashed American innovation and creativity – all the work you're doing in basically every cabinet post in addition to what's coming out of the White House is making it possible for America to win". 

"Thank you for being such a pro-business and pro-innovation president", OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded. "It's a very refreshing change. We're very excited to see what you're doing to make all of our companies and our entire country so successful". And he added for good measure that his company would "invest a ton in the United States". 

I couldn't help but flinch, cringe and squirm!

At the London Squash Classic 2025 yesterday, Malaysia's Sivasangari Subramaniam progresses to the women's semi-finals after she disposed world No. 18 Jasmine Hutton of England 11-9, 11-5 in just 20 minutes. 

The world No. 8 will take on second seed Amina Orfi of Egypt today.

Bomb the Shit Out of Moscow and Beijing

Donald Trump told a private gathering of donors at New York’s Pierre Hotel on May 14, 2024 that he once sought to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine and to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping from attacking Taiwan by threatening to “bomb the shit” out of Moscow and Beijing in retaliation, according to a leaked audio obtained by CNN and detailed in a new book published on Tuesday. 

The said book, "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America" chronicles how US President Trump secured his victory in the November 2024 election, and how former President Joe Biden's team dismissed concerns about his age in the US campaign cycle. 

It is authored by Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of the New York Times and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post. And it is based on over 300 interviews conducted over 18 months.

Nvidia beat Apple and Microsoft to the $4 trillion mark. 

Apple entered this year as the world’s most valuable company at just about $3.9 trillion before tumbling in recent months amid Trump’s tariff turmoil. 

Nvidia and Microsoft traded places as the world’s most valuable company in recent months, before the former surged ahead to reach the $4 trillion mark first. The US chipmaker have had a remarkable march to record highs and have soared around 21% this year, thanks to their leading role powering the artificial intelligence boom. Nvidia’s chips power the data centers that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google need to fuel their AI models and cloud services – and AI investments are only expected to grow. 

Global spending on AI infrastructure is expected to surpass $200 billion by 2028, according to market research firm The International Data Corporation.

700 Engineers Pretend To Be AI

London-based Builder.ai, one of UK’s best-funded technology start-ups and once valued at $1.5 billion, backed by major investors including Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority, SoftBank’s DeepCore, and IFC, have declared bankruptcy and announced on LinkedIn that they would be "entering into insolvency proceedings". 

They were exposed in May this year for falsely marketing their app-building services as an AI-powered no-code platform that promises to make software creation "as easy as ordering pizza".  

Investigations revealed that the company’s much-touted AI assistant, “Natasha”, was largely a façade – most of the work was done manually by 700 engineers based in India. 

Additionally, Builder.ai, founded in 2016 by Sachin Dev Duggal (right), and previously known as Engineer.ai, engaged in financial misconduct through “round-tripping” with Indian social media firm, VerSe Innovation to inflate their revenue figures – a tactic that helped attract investment. 

Between 2021 and 2024, both companies had billed each other large amounts, even though no real services were provided. In fact, Builder.ai even claimed $220 million in 2024 sales, but their actual income was closer to $50 million. An independent audit exposed the discrepancy, prompting lender Viola Credit to seize $37 million from Builder.ai’s accounts. 

Left with only $5 million in restricted funds, the company’s operations across five countries – including India, the UK, and the US – came to a standstill. With regulatory issues freezing fresh capital, Builder.ai failed to pay staff, leading to nearly 1,000 layoffs. 

Also, the company reportedly owe $85 million to Amazon and $30 million to Microsoft in unpaid cloud services. A US federal probe is underway, with investigators seeking access to their financial and client data. 

Builder.ai’s downfall has reignited concerns around “AI washing” – branding basic tech services as AI to capitalise on investor excitement. Phil Brunkard of Info-Tech Research Group noted that many start-ups “scaled fast without robust technology or governance”, riding a wave of unchecked hype. 

With regulators now probing how AI firms market their products, the Builder.ai episode has become a cautionary tale. What was sold as an AI revolution turned out to be a conventional outsourcing firm cloaked in buzzwords. The result: employees out of work, millions in investor losses, and renewed demands for transparency and accountability in the AI start-up ecosystem.

The Crawl Back to Russia

Foreign businesses that left Russia three years ago are crawling back to the country, Kirill Dmitriev, who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy, has said. 

These companies pulled out of Russia, either due to supply problems caused by unprecedented sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, or the risk of facing secondary sanctions or even public relations pressures. 

"The trend is there, we see that some firms are already returning. It’s just that there is no publicity around it. The process, however, is certainly underway", Dmitriev told journalists on Thursday. 

According to the investment envoy, American businesses alone lost over $300 billion from leaving the Russian market. 

When asked about conditions for the return of Western businesses to Russia, the president’s economic aide noted that the government are actively engaged in “setting the rules” for the process. According to Dmitriev (right), it's not about putting up barriers, but giving priority to protecting domestic businesses. 

In recent months foreign companies that had left Russia have begun to register new trademarks in the country, signaling their potential return. Among them are McDonald's, Hyundai, Intel, Microsoft, LG, IKEA, Chanel, Rolex, and Louis Vuitton, according to data from the Russian patent office, Rospatent.

Yesterday, Arsenal fought back from 2-0 down to salvage a 2-2 draw against Premier League champions Liverpool at Anfield. 

Andy Robertson had floated in a cross and an unmarked Cody Gakpo six yards out was there at the near post to power a header into the net in the twentieth minute. Then, Mohamed Salah's wonderful pass found Dominik Szoboszlai, who squared for Luis Diaz to tap into an empty net just 87 seconds later.

After half-time, Arsenal came roaring back. On forty-six minutes, they glanced a header into the far corner. And in the seventieth minute, the Gunners scored again to level the score.

But with a trip to Brighton & Hove Albion and a home game against Crystal Palace with a trophy presentation to come, Arne Slot's side have two opportunities to make more memories before the season is through.

US Companies Still Doing Business in Russia

In spite of multiple rounds of sanctions imposed on Moscow by Washington, Kirill Dmitriev, President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries, disclosed that some 150 US companies continue to operate in Russia. 

Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Microsoft, IBM, McDonald’s, and many other American brands decided to withdraw from the country after the escalation of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022 and the ramping up of sanctions against Moscow by the administration of then-US President Joe Biden. However, still many other enterprises opted to stay, with some doing so by re-branding their Russian enterprises. 

😂😂😂

Speaking on the sidelines of the meeting of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs in Moscow on Tuesday, Dmitriev insisted that these American firms “absolutely want to continue doing business in Russia”.

At the same meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin had expressed bewilderment why the G7 are called the "big" seven, although they are hardly "visible on the map"! As reported by TASS on March 18. 

😕😕😕

The GDP growth in the G7 countries for 2024 was just 1.9%, while the BRICS countries saw a growth rate of 4.9%. In Russia, the growth was 4.1% for two consecutive years, as highlighted by Putin. 

[Note: Russia was a member of the G8 (which existed in the G7 format, comprising the UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, the US, France, and Japan since 1976) from 1997 until its suspension].

The US Economy Is Suddenly Looking A Bit Shaky

It didn't take long for doom and gloom to slowly but surely manifest itself under US President Donald Trump's presidency. And many people will be cheering.

I just saw a news report that the Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 10% from its record high set in late 2024. The S&P 500 is also down nearly 9% from its February peak. And Monday saw the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 posted its worst day since September 2022, wiping out more than $1 trillion in value. Investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones lost almost 900 points, slipping below its 200-day moving average for the first time since November 01, 2023.

The market selloff comes as Trump’s back-and-forth tariff announcements have unnerved investors and stoked fears that the US economy could be headed for a major slowdown, or even a recession. 

The spreading fear is that Trump's tariffs – which are taxes on goods applied as they enter the country – will lead to higher prices and dent growth in the world's largest economy.

Even Trump in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday acknowledged that the economy was in a "period of transition", when asked about suggestions of a potential recession. 

Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, pushed back against those projecting a bleak outlook for the country. In an interview with CNBC, Hassett said Americans can be optimistic about the US economy and that that tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico and China were already bringing manufacturing and jobs to the United States. 

"There are a lot of reasons to be extremely bullish about the economy going forward", he pronounced. Still, he admitted there were some "blips in the data" for this quarter, which he pinned on the timing of Trump's tariffs and the "Biden inheritance".

The above aside, a Harris poll from February 13 to 15, among a nationally representative sample of 2,131 US adults found that 51% of Americans now believe that the US economy is worsening, while just 20% said it was improving and 29% said it was the same.

China's Alibaba Release AI Model Qwen 2.5-Max

While tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google largely recovered Monday’s losses as investors speculated they could benefit from cheaper input costs, Nvidia’s shares remain depressed as experts question the conventional wisdom that expensive equipment is needed to produce AI models.

And on January 29, in a Q&A during ASML’s fourth-quarter earnings call – a session that was dominated by the sudden emergence of DeepSeek – President and CEO Christophe Fouquet (right) suggested onlookers shouldn’t have been so surprised by the arrival of a new player in the AI race. 

“I know some of you maybe were surprised in the last few days that a new company suddenly comes and wants to compete”, Fouquet said. “Well, I think we have to get used to that, because this is such an opportunity that there will be more and more players to grab this". 

He later added: “AI is a huge opportunity. Therefore, I think you should expect to see a few elephants in the room in the next few months, or few years, because everyone will want to be in”.

He's so right, y'know!

On that same day too, Chinese tech company Alibaba released a new version of their Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that they claim surpasses the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. 

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Chinese New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also their domestic competition. 

"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B", Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on their official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models. 

The January 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of their R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States. 

But DeepSeek's success has predictably led to a scramble among their domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. 

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to their flagship AI model, Doubao-1.5-pro, which they claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. 

This echoed DeepSeek's claim that their R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on a number of performance benchmarks.

Happy Chinese New Year 2025

Here's wishing you and your family a very happy Chinese New Year! 

新年快乐 (Xīnnián kuàilè)!

My choice of CNY videos this year. It's a light-hearted skit that celebrates family, tradition, and the importance of remaining true to our roots regardless of where life takes us. 

My yesterday's post "Everybody Is Freaking Out About DeepSeek" refers. 

Major US tech stocks – including Nvidia, Microsoft and Tesla – suffered a stunning $1 trillion rout on Monday as fears over an advanced Chinese artificial intelligence model triggered hysteria from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. 

Chipmaker Nvidia, which rode the AI wave last year to become the richest company in the world, plunged nearly 17% – erasing $589 billion in value in the largest one-day drop in market history – as investors learned about DeepSeek, a China-based startup launched just last month. 

DeepSeek’s launch – referred to by tech investor Marc Andreessen as “AI’s Sputnik moment” – triggered a global meltdown that slammed AI firms and chipmakers.

Bizarre Backstory on Black Myth: Wukong

Undeniably, "Black Myth: Wukong" is a resounding success, having sold a remarkable 10 million copies in just 3 days. As well as an eye-watering three million concurrent players across all platforms. 

 

I don't know much about video games, nonetheless, I'm impressed by it. I daresay it has truly presented itself to be an incredible game.

As reviews poured in, it’s becoming clear that critics have generally enjoyed it. It garnered an 82 percent rating on OpenCritic, receiving praise for its sleek, cinematic visuals and exciting, high-octane combat scenes – but more importantly, it successfully translates the Chinese mythology of monkey god Sun Wukong into a compelling action RPG. 

Amidst it all, there is this bizarre backstory that alleged that Sweet Baby Inc., a Canadian narrative consultancy company had tried to blackmail Game Science to pay $7 million in "guidance fees", ostensibly to incorporate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) elements into "Black Myth: Wukong". And when the developer refused to pay up, it is claimed games media coordinated a campaign to attack the Chinese studio. Because, you know, journalists are corrupt and all that.

As a response to this rejection of their service, Rebekah Valentine, an IGN journalist wrote a hit piece accusing Game Science of fostering a culture of sexism and misogyny. However the write-up has been said to contain maliciously mistranslated tweets that were meant to paint Game Science in a negative way. 

To make matters worse, ScreenRant and Gamespot additionally doubled down in their reviews of "Black Myth: Wukong", referencing IGN's angry article on Game Science.

The Sweet Baby Inc. story has gained traction amongst gamers – it's all over Youtube which is where I first found out about this – but whether it is true or not, I really cannot tell. I did, however, track down an X post by @Pirat_Nation published June 14, 2024 on the subject in question but I should state here that it hardly works as proof.

But neither do I want to discount it. After all, many Western companies (e.g. American Airlines, Cisco, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Novartis, Starbucks) have enthusiastically embraced the woke agenda and Sweet Baby Inc. may be one of them.

The above aside, I do know that there are many, many "diverse" characters in "Black Myth: Wukong" and amongst them:

I reckon this proves there is, indeed, DEI in "Black Myth: Wukong"! 

😛😛😛

Anand Mahindra Takes a Dig at Microsoft's Global Outage

A widespread technical malfunction originating from Microsoft's Azure backend disrupted operations across airlines, banks, and major corporations globally, impacting services from customer communications to financial transactions. 

 

Millions of Windows users around the world experienced the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) error forcing the system to restart or shut down. This sparked a wave of memes on social media as multiple users posted humorous reactions poking fun at the situation. 

 

Mahindra Group Chairperson Anand Mahindra, known for his influential presence on the Internet, also reacted to the outage by posting a picture that aptly describes the situation. The image shows two men in law enforcement uniforms riding water buffaloes while patrolling the streets. 

 

''The pace of global commercial activity right now – post the #microsoft #crowdstrike outage'', he wrote while sharing the post on Friday.

 

Reacting to the telling picture, one user said, ''Just shows how dependent we are on digital currencies and computers It's like the world will come to a halt if something goes wrong with the internet and computers/AI systems''. 

 

Another user commented, ''This outage highlights our heavy reliance on a handful of companies. It's a real concern and a wake-up call for the world to develop alternatives for every critical service. Diversification is key to resilience''. 

 

A third joked saying, ''Amazing patrol vehicle''. 

 

A fourth wrote, ''Hahah this is so funny'', while another added, ''Good reminder that technology has a breaking point, too''. 

 

In their first statement after the massive Microsoft outage caused by an update to CrowdStrike 'Falcon Sensor', the security firm's top man has said the issue has been isolated and a fix has been deployed. 

 

In a statement on X, their CEO George Kurtz said that the company are working with customers who have been impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, adding that Mac- and Linux-based systems have not been affected.

Apple Replaced as the World’s Second-most Valuable Company

Nvidia have overtaken Apple to become the world’s second-most valuable company, with furious demand for the artificial intelligence chipmaker’s shares taking their valuation to over $3 trillion. 

 

Shares of Nvidia gained 5.2 percent on Wednesday to close at $1,224.40, lifting the company’s market capitalisation to $3.012 trillion.

 

Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, rose 1.91 percent, while Apple gained 0.78 percent. 

 

Nvidia’s rally continues an extraordinary streak of gains for the California, US-based firm, whose graphics processing units have fueled a boom in artificial intelligence (AI). The company’s revenues have soared more than 260 percent over the past year as tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon race to roll out AI.

 

Americans love to believe they are righteous and morally upstanding, even if that is a big lie.

 

👇This is the original United States of America, where over 20 million Native Americans dispersed across over 1,000 distinct tribes, bands, and ethnic groups populated the territory:

 

But when the Europeans arrived on American shores, the lands, before long, bled uninterrupted as Native Americans were soon slaughtered.

 

In fact, it has been claimed that over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids had been waged on the "Indians", the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. 

 

By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, according to www.history.com. 

 

They have been almost wiped out! The description "slaughter" doesn't begin to detail the mass killings that visited the Indians; it was pure genocide! 

 

And according to www.history.com, the reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land – and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them. 

 

Even more fundamentally, the Native Americans were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. And so, the Indians were painted as pagan savages who must be eliminated in the name of civilization and Christianity.

 

The Indians became a broken, vanishing race. Ironically, just over 100 years later, the resilient American Indian population survived into the 21st century and swelled to more than 5 million people.

 

Fast forward to today. According to the US Census Bureau (2022, October 11), people who are American Indian (or Alaska Native), often considered an “invisible minority”, make up just 2.9% (9.7 million, alone or in combination*) of the total US population of 329.5 million in 2021.

 

[*Race, like all other US Census data, is self-reported. Since 2000, the US Census allowed people to indicate more than one race. 

 

Those who marked “American Indian or Alaska Native” along with one or more additional races are classified as “American Indian or Alaska Native in combination”. Those who marked only “American Indian or Alaska Native” are categorized as “American Indian or Alaska Native alone”]. 

 

The white Americans have yet to properly face up to the genocide. And to think, these Americans remain stubbornly convinced that they are superior to everybody else. This explains why they are so determined to maintain US hegemony over the rest of the world.

 

As for the American Indians, sad to say, they are a defeated people and having to submit themselves to their colonisers.