"Elon Musk says any company that isn’t spending $10 billion on AI this year like Tesla won’t be able to compete" (TSLA)

This.

This is such an important concept to grasp. It's the advantage flywheels, the rich get richer, winner-take-all reality of business in 2024.

From Fortune via Yahoo Finance April 29:

Elon Musk has a message for America’s business leaders—either prepare yourself for the AI revolution or start writing your corporate obituary.

At a juncture in time when Tesla’s CEO is cutting back on investments into new vehicle capacity, he is spending $10 billion this year alone to bulk up on AI training and inference, and position Tesla at the forefront of the industry for real-life applications outside of generative AI.

“Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete,” he posted on X Sunday.

Spending on AI inference would primarily be targeted at his range of cars, a possible indication that he is preparing the ground for the next generation of his custom-designed Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer known as HW5.

The distinction between training and inference is important since close observers will know Musk is currently working on another major AI project, his humanoid robot dubbed Optimus after the 1980s cartoon vehicle that transformed into a sentient robot.

This bold and risky pivot toward AI—and by implication away from his previous focus on a tenfold increase in car sales to 20 million EVs annually—definitively answers the perennial question whether Tesla is an automaker or a tech company in favor of the latter.

Any typical auto executive would have long since invested in rejuvenating one of the oldest product ranges in the auto industry. For example, Tesla’s EV archrival, BYD, is pumping out one new model after another across its portfolio of brands with the help of its small army of 90,000 vehicle engineers.

Tesla will spend around $10B this year in combined training and inference AI, the latter being primarily in car.

Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024

Musk however seems to view his cars more as an iPhone on wheels, a premium device for delivering high-margin software, that can be sold at lower profit since revenue will be recouped by offering services around the vehicle.

For the moment, that approach has not worked. Tesla has found itself forced to repeatedly cut prices to stimulate enough demand to keep his factories humming. Musk even recently resorted to slashing the price of his FSD software by a third.

Only 18 months ago, the idea of Tesla struggling to find customers seemed ludicrous, to borrow a favorite adjective of Musk. Yet China’s new generation of EV rivals are in a class of their own when it comes to value for money, and his own personal brand has been tarnished.

Musk’s latest answer has been to....

....MUCH MORE 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Previously:
March 18
In Nvidia's World, If You (and your company) Don't Have Money You Will Not Be Able To Compete (NVDA)

The advantage flywheels keep spinning and reinforcing each other to the point that the Pareto distribution of profits - 20% of companies reap 80% of the profits - is becoming Super-Pareto where 5% of the companies reap 95% of the profits and is approaching Hyper-Pareto at maybe 2% of companies reaping 98% of profits.

It all comes down to having the resources to keep up. 

I watched Mr. Huang give the keynote and it's all a bit much to digest before firing out comments that would make any sense at all so here are some of today's headlines to give a taste of what the intro paragraph is based on.

These are Nvidia's press releases via GlobeNewswire....

February 28
The Hyper-Pareto Distribution Of Profits Is Happening Right Now (plus an anniversary)

It's not some cutesy management* fad or pop insight like "Business secrets of Genghis Khan."

To the rich go the profits and internalizing that fact makes the rest of this portfolio construction/fund management/investing stuff easier to conceptualize and execute.

And AI is accelerating the already extant dynamic. 

*****

*Although people had been observing and discussing "rich get richer" and "winner-take-all" dynamics for over a century, one of our favorite pointers toward the current situation did come out of a business school. We've been hammering on this for so long that I start to bore myself. Here's a recapitulation from last year, linking to an article that was published seven years ago today:

HBR—From Pareto To Hyper-Pareto: "AI Is Going to Change the 80/20 Rule"

A prescient article from the Harvard Business Review, February 28, 2017:....

*****

Why Do the Biggest Companies Keep Getting Bigger? It’s How They Spend on Tech" 

...Much more important than the direct monetization of big data is the strategic advantage it can bestow over time.

In a winner-take-all economy, as in a horse race, small differences in superiority are rewarded all out of proportion to the actual advantage. A top thoroughbred may only be a couple fifths of a second faster than the field but those two lengths over the course of a season can mean triple the earnings for #1 vs. #2.

In commerce the results can be even more dramatic because rather than the 60%/20%/10% purse structure of the racetrack the winning vendor will often get 100% of a customer's business.....

Just to reiterate, every incremental advantage that a company can afford does not affect income production in isolation. They accrete in sometimes unforeseeable combinations:

How to Think About Companies: "Advantage Flywheels"

A very handy conceptual framework first posted after the start of the U.S. lockdowns, April 2020. Schools were closed so it seemed natural to link to a superb mini-MBA module.  

Eat your heat out HBR....

February 7
AI: Tesla Installing Second Dojo Supercomputer In New York Gigafactory (TSLA; NVDA)

January 5
AI: "Inside Tesla’s Innovative And Homegrown 'Dojo' AI Supercomputer" (TSLA)

It really is a big deal that a company can afford to spend over a billion dollars to build their own supercomputer and it really is a big deal that the same company has all the training data from the billions of miles of real-world driving and it really is a great example of the concept of advantage flywheels and hyper-pareto distribution of rewards, i.e. the rich get richer.

Whether it is going to open-up the $10 trillion addressable market and add the $500 billion of market cap that Morgan Stanley foresees is still an open question....

And many more. If interested use the 'search blog' box, upper left.

"Thomson Reuters Could Be the Best AI Stock You’ve Never Considered"

It could have been the Financial Times. More after the jump.

From Barron's, April 27/29:

“Before Google was in the search business, we were in the search business,” CEO Steve Hasker told Barron’s.

You may think that Thomson Reuters is in the news business, and that’s true as far as it goes—but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

News, i.e., the Reuters part of this Canadian company, accounts for only some 10% of the company’s revenue. The other 90% comes from data businesses like Westlaw, UltraTax, and ONESOURCE, which is fortuitous, because, as British mathematician Clive Humby famously opined in 2006, “data is the new oil.” In that case, perhaps it’s understandable that Thomson Reuters has been on a remarkable—though somewhat under-the-radar—run, with its stock far outpacing the market over the past decade.

Just please don’t call Thomson Reuters a media company. 

“We’re a tech stock, not a media stock,” Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker says quickly when I suggest the latter. “The distinctions have been pretty clear in terms of performance. We take unique and proprietary content, add [artificial intelligence] and machine learning, and we deliver it through best-of-breed software.”

In fact, some of Thomson Reuters’ financials and market action of its stock seem to back Hasker up. Thomson Reuters did $6.8 billion in revenue last year and has a $69 billion market capitalization. Its stock has gained 26% in the past six months, versus 21% for the market. The share price hovers around $154, and BMO analyst Tim Casey rates the stock Outperform with a $165 price target. Shares trade for 43.6 times Casey’s 2024 earnings per share estimate of $3.53—very much a tech valuation, no?

“Thomson Reuters offers a compelling mix of organic growth and free cash flow conversion with a demonstrated track record of returning capital to shareholders,” Casey wrote to me in an email. “Its core businesses have high barriers to entry, and AI represents an attractive growth opportunity.”

One key reason why data is becoming ever more valuable is that the corporate world is becoming ever more complex. Banking on that trend, —an underpinning of Thomson Reuters’ strategy—has turned out to be a damned good business. “This idea of the complexity associated with compliance, [gives us] a very significant tailwind,” says Hasker, an affable Aussie and recovered McKinsey consultant who also ran Hollywood talent agency CAA and was a top executive at measurement company Nielsen Holdings. 

“The number of laws, tax and accounting regulations, the complexity of audits, entirely new forms of regulation and governance around [environmental, social, and governance concerns], and climate, this is something that just gets ever more complex,” Hasker says. “It’s not a realistic or scalable option for companies to just add more headcount to navigate that environment. They have to rely on technology.”

A bit of intricacy comes with the territory at Thomson Reuters itself, which is the product of Thomson, a family-owned Canadian newspaper empire founded in Timmins, Ontario, in 1934, and the London-based wire service Reuters, which German-British entrepreneur Paul Reuter established in 1851. 

(Some Reuters trivia: Paul Reuter employed carrier pigeons and later was an early adopter of the telegraph, allowing his company to become the first news source in Europe to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Paul Reuter’s granddaughter-in-law—Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter—died in 2009 at the age of 96 as the last member of the the Reuter family.)

Reuters, which remains a global bastion of trustworthy, non-partisan news, was bought by Thomson in 2008. The Thomson family, Canada’s richest, owns just under 70% of Thomson Reuters via its investment company Woodbridge. The remaining balance is traded on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges.

And then there’s this slightly complex transaction: In 2018, Thomson Reuters sold 55% of its financial and risk analysis business, which competes with Bloomberg and FactSet, to Blackstone for $20 billion in cash, renaming it Refinitiv along the way. Three years later, Blackstone and Thomson Reuters sold Refinitiv, whose name has since been retired, to the London Stock Exchange Group for $27 billion in LSEG stock. Since then, Thomson Reuters and Blackstone have been selling down their stakes in LSEG....

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As recounted by FT Alphaville's founder and first editor, accompanied by Bryce Elder playing the straightest straight man since vaudeville.

December 3, 2015 

Possibly the Funniest (profitable) Thing We Saw In 2015: FT Alphaville's Founder/Editor Channels Mr. Subliminal

For our younger readers, here's Mr. Subliminal on Donald Trump cheating on his wife Ivana in 1990:

Comedian

And here's FT Alphaville's editor, Paul Murphy,

 

Hard-bitten journalist

on former FT Alphaville owner Pearson and its stock, Dec. 1, the day the Financial Times was handed over to Nikkei, while appearing to be having a normal conversation with Alphavillein Bryce Elder:

...PM

(So here’s our advice on the stock at 832p….)

PM

( Run )

BE

...Today, though, the message is dovish. So we’re all choosing to forget about 2016.

PM

( Scarper )

PM

( Get out )

PM

( Bin it )

--------
PM

( You don’t think another profit warning is coming? Oh course another profit warning is coming! )

--------
PM

( And I can tell you it’s a screaming sell. )

--------

PM

( I can tell you what happens next…)

PM

( Having focused the business down and down and down so that it’s pure corporatised education…)

-------
PM

( And with corporatised education, er, falling slightly out of fashion…)

-------
PM

( The next effort will be to slash costs — slashing with a blunt knife. A panic. )

-------
PM

( My guess is 15 per cent of the workforce will go. )

-------

PM

( Across the board. )

PM

(except not in the boardroom, of course )

PM

(It’s a lucky escape for us, cos the 15 per cent cut would have hit us as well. 100 journo jobs would have gone. )

BE

Is that enough on banks? Actually, Goldman too. Just because.

--------
--------

PM

(If you look back to the late 90s, the FT had all the bits to construct Bloomgerg. )

PM

( Had a world class consumer offering in the form of the paper )

PM

(But it also had a newswire, and an online markets business — Market Watch.)

BE

Should we move on to other matters?

11:22AM

PM

(It had data, in the form of IDC)

PM

(Had Extel. Had what became factiva.)

PM

(Had a huge EM news business.)

BE

Okay …………. I think I have to do a quick bit of de-RAW here.

--------

BE

Coincidentally, we were chasing the same story from a slightly different angle.

BE

The rumour that reached us was that National Grid was working on a bid of around $45 a share for ITC …

PM

(People here complained of a lack of investment from Pearson. Investment??? They were sucking the life-blood out of the thing. )

---------

BE

… However, that would all appear to be very, very premature..

BE

What we can say with some confidence is that National Grid’s in the ITC auction process, which kicked off a week ago …

BE

But NG only appointed a new CEO at the start of the month, and is in transition between the old guy and the new guy for the rest of the year.

BE

And NG’s balance sheet doesn’t make ~$7bn-ish deals look very easy.

BE

So. If National Grid’s involved …

BE

… It’s much more likely to be in there to look at the numbers of a rival, rather than to launch an offer.

PM

(Sure, there was one short period, during the dot comedy, that the FT was allowed to expand. It was a disaster, timing wise. But Pearson made up all the associated losses with one disposal — Market Watch. That covered everything.)

BE

Also, note, there’s no shortage of potential bidders. It’s a crowded process.

PM

(Anyway, ive said enough. We’re under new ownership now. )

PM

( Sell Pearson )

BE

Also likely to be in there are Berkshire Energy, Iberdrola’s Avangrid, Hydro One, NextEra Energy, American Electric Power ….

...MUCH MORE

India: "AdaniConneX to raise $1.44bn in sustainability linked financing for data center construction"

From Data Center Dynamics, April 29:

Financing has initial commitment of $875m 

AdaniConneX, the joint venture (JV) between Adani Enterprises and EdgeConneX, is set to raise up to $1.44 billion in sustainability-linked financing.

The JV, which was formed to develop data centers across India, will use the funding for future data center facilities. The deal will bring its financing pool to a total of $1.65bn, following a $213 million raise conducted in June 2023.

The funding has an initial commitment of $875m, which can be increased to $1.44bn, and is tied to sustainability goals. The JV says has committed to the facilities having "world-class" power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratings.

Thus far, definitive agreements have been signed with ING Bank N.V., Intesa Sanpaolo, KfW IPEX, MUFG Bank Ltd., Natixis, Standard Chartered Bank, Société Générale and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation to contribute to the fundraising....

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"Are we about to witness a rerun of the Asian financial crisis?"

Amazingly, both Soros and Mahathir, who were both old in 1997, are still alive.

From the Australian Financial Review, April 30:

Investors are becoming increasingly alarmed as buoyant economic activity and high interest rates in the US risk triggering renewed instability across Asia.

It’s not only investors who are rattled by the prospect of US interest rates remaining higher for longer. Central bankers – particularly those in Asia – are also on edge as the rampaging US dollar weighs on their currencies and risks triggering damaging capital outflows.

The Bank of Japan reportedly intervened in foreign currency markets to bolster the yen on Monday, after the Japanese currency plunged to about 160 yen per US dollar, its weakest level since 1990. Following the intervention, the yen rebounded and was trading at about 156.3 to the US dollar.

Masato Kanda, Japan’s top currency official, hinted at the intervention, saying it was “difficult to ignore the bad effects that these violent and abnormal movements [in currencies] will cause for the nation’s economy”. He said the authorities would continue to respond to wild currency moves.

The BoJ’s intervention comes as investors turn increasingly bearish on the yen, particularly in comparison with the US dollar.

In the first place, they expect that even when the Federal Reserve finally loosens monetary policy, US interest rates will remain relatively high as a result of the soaring budget deficit and the heavy levels of investment driven by America’s green-energy transition and the artificial-intelligence-related appetite for electricity-intensive data centres.

The prospect of continued strong economic activity and high interest rates in the US has triggered huge capital inflows over the past few months, as investors expect US assets to generate stronger returns than elsewhere.

But that’s creating big problems for other central banks, particularly those in Asia.

Although the BoJ is finally moving back from its long adherence to ultra-loose monetary policy – it became the last central bank to abandon negative interest rates in March – it is doing so at a snail’s pace.

Last week, the BoJ kept its key rate steady in the range of zero to 0.1 per cent. Although a weaker yen could potentially boost Japanese economic activity by making exports cheaper in global markets, the Japanese central bank is clearly worried that too sharp a decline in the currency will result in financial instability, as investors and consumers lose confidence in the Japanese economy and shift more of their money abroad.

And the yen’s weakness is clearly weighing on Japanese stocks. The Nikkei 225 index has fallen 7 per cent from the record high it reached last month.

The BoJ isn’t the only Asian central bank grappling with the stronger greenback. Others are worried that a mightier US dollar will push up the price of globally traded commodities such as oil, which are typically priced in the American currency and will lift the interest costs on their US-dollar debt.

Indonesia, China on alert
The Indonesian central bank caught investors by surprise last week when it raised its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to a record high of 6.25 per cent to support the currency.

Bank Indonesia governor Perry Warjiyo said global uncertainty had flared up following the US dollar’s resurgence and conflict in the Middle East, and this had warranted an “anticipatory, forward-looking and pre-emptive policy response”.

Although inflation has been within the Indonesian central bank’s target range of 1.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent this year, there is a risk that a weakening rupiah could fan inflation by pushing up the prices of imported food and fuel.

Indonesia is also feeling the chill effects of capital outflows – foreign investors have sold close to $US600 million ($914 million) in Indonesian government bonds this month.

Meanwhile, the Philippines and Thailand are delaying interest rate cuts to avoid destabilising their currencies, and the head of Korea’s central bank, Rhee Chang-yong, has described the won’s weakness as “excessive”. The Korean currency is the lowest it has been since 2022....

....MUCH MORE

Autonomous Fighter Jet Company Anduril And Anti-Drone Technology For Your Home

I may be jumping the gun calling them a "fighter jet company" but as far as autonomous machines go the headline is right on.

Here's the news that was garnering attention last week followed by a very interesting (for a certain group of homeowners) video. First up, from BreakingDefense, the much smaller Anduril beats out serious competitors for some Air Force loot, April 24:

Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics for next round of CCA work
The two vendors emerged successful from an original pool of five and are expected to carry their drone designs through a prototyping phase that will build and test aircraft. 

Defense startup Anduril and drone maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) have been picked by the Air Force to build and test drone prototypes for the next phase of the service’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, the Air Force announced tonight.

The Air Force’s decision winnows down a pool of five competitors to two. As a result, three other vendors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman — have been eliminated from the running.

“The companies not selected to build these production representative CCA vehicles, and execute the flight test program, will continue to be part of the broader industry partner vendor pool consisting of more than 20 companies to compete for future efforts, including future production contracts,” the Air Force said. 

As Breaking Defense first reported, the five contractors were previously picked by the Air Force for the program’s first phase, which largely focused on design work. Today’s selection narrows down the vendors who will take their designs from the drawing board to the real world. As Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter recently told lawmakers in a congressional hearing, the upcoming CCA stage will see those vendors “complete detailed designs, build prototypes and test production-representative test articles.”

Unveiled by the service as a major multibillion dollar program in the fiscal year 2024 budget, the CCA effort aims to initially field as many as 1,000 drones. According to the service’s press release today, officials plan to make a “competitive production decision” by FY26 for the first round of CCA work and “field a fully operational capability before the end of the decade.”....

....MUCH MORE

Also at Breaking Defense, autonomy in another domain, April 16:

Anduril’s Aussie drone sub ‘one year early and on budget,’ heads to production
Defense Industry Minister Pat Conroy said Anduril's Ghost Shark is part of the Australian military's $5.2 billion to $7.2 billion investment in undersea uncrewed maritime systems. 

And a primer on drone countermeasures from Mark (50 million subscribers) Rober's YouTube channel (the home adaptations are in the second half of the vid):  

A couple recent posts that highlight the problem of drones:

• "On Ukraine’s ‘Transparent Battlefield,’ There Are Few Places Left to Hide"
• "Ukraine Is the First 'Hackers’ War'”

The second article, from IEEE Spectrum focuses like a laser on drone-counter-drone.

"Tesla Stock Jumps As Elon Musk Scores FSD Wins In China Visit" (TSLA)

The stock is up $21.03 (+12.50%) at $189.32 in pre-market action.

From Investor's Business Daily, April 29:

Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk reportedly has won tentative approval for introducing Full Self-Driving in China, clearing key hurdles after meeting with top government official in a surprise visit Sunday. That could provide a key boost for Tesla, which is struggling with weaker demand as well as growing FSD concerns at home. Tesla stock jumped early Monday.

Beijing has given its preliminary blessing for Tesla to launch FSD in China, The Wall Street Journal reported early Monday.

On Sunday, Musk met with China Premier Li Qiang. Li said Tesla's growth in China is "a successful example of Sino-U.S. economic and trade cooperation", the Chinese state broadcaster reported Sunday.

Tesla has cleared Beijing's data security tests. thee China Association of Automobile Manufacturers announced shortly after the Musk-Li meeting. As a result, Chinese local authorities lifted restrictions on Tesla vehicles from certain areas.

Tesla will team up with Baidu (BIDU), which licensing mapping data and its lane-level navigation service for FSD, which isn't capable of self-driving. Baidu stock jumped early Monday.

It's unclear if the Baidu deal means that Tesla won't be allowed to export China FSD data back to the U.S.

On Tesla's April 23 earnings call, Musk said the EV giant aims to release FSD "as a supervised autonomy system in any market that — where we can get regulatory approval for that, which we think includes China."

Tesla has not said when FSD might be launched. But its official China website has changed FSD from "to be launched later" to "coming soon."....

....MUCH MORE

Equities: We 'May' Have A Breakout In The Chinese CSI300 Index

It's "May" because, although we waited patiently for over a year before calling it, we were still early on the big change of direction. As recounted March 12:

On December 27, 2023 we posted "A Bottom In Chinese Equities".

We were early. The Shanghai-Shenzhen CSI300 Index continued lower for another month.

TradingView

Finally on February 1, the rat-bastard turned up with some conviction.

Here's the latest, a poke above triple-top resistance:

Investing.com (also on blogroll at right)

What you want to see is today's action holding and tomorrow some follow-through. 

If that happens you can start to get comfortable with the idea that the sellers are out of shares they want to let go at that particular level.

"Mary Meeker Turns Her Attention to AI. Here’s What the Tech Investor Is Buying Today."

From Barron's, March 29:

It was 25 years ago that Barron’s dubbed Mary Meeker “Queen of the Net.” Today, she’s a venture capitalist with stakes in AI firms and other start-ups. 

Over a four-decade stretch, there’s arguably no tech investor with greater influence—and staying power—than Mary Meeker. As a Morgan Stanley analyst in the 1990s, she moved markets with calls on stocks like Amazon.com , Microsoft , Apple , and Dell Technologies . In a cover story more than 25 years ago, Barron’s dubbed Meeker “Queen of the ’Net.” In 2010, she moved to venture capital, leading Kleiner Perkins’ investments in Airbnb , Uber Technologies , Waze, DocuSign , Snap , and others.

Meeker went on to launch her own venture firm, Bond Capital, where she’s continued to invest in a new generation of tech leaders, including Australian graphics software firm Canva, where Bond is one of the largest investors and poised to get a windfall from a widely anticipated initial public offering.

Meeker has been on Barron’s annual list of 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance since it debuted in 2020.

When I last caught up with Meeker two years ago, she was spending a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and NFTs. She still sees promise there but has turned her attention to artificial intelligence, among other things.

In a recent interview conducted via email, Meeker offered her insights on venture capital, tech investing, and the world at large. It’s a unique look at the future, informed by Meeker’s sweeping view of the past:

Barron’s: Mary, let’s start where we did last time. Where has Bond been placing bets?

Mary Meeker: Our recent investments include KoBold Metals, a mining exploration company powered by machine learning; Yassir, a North African consumer and financial services super app; AlphaSense, a market intelligence and search platform; VAST Data, an AI-driven enterprise storage and data computing platform; Passes, a creator platform; and Applied Intuition, which makes AI software for vehicles.

That’s a lot of AI companies.

100 Most Influential Women in Finance

• 100 Top Women in Finance Blazing New Trails in the Markets, Economy, and Industry
• See All 100 Profiles

We are compelled by the opportunity for users to become more efficient as new products and services provide the ability to focus on higher priority tasks versus manual and repetitive ones—we have a long way to go here but the trends are good. On the infrastructure layer, we are focused on foundational business solutions which capture the hearts, minds, and efforts of engineers around the world.

What do you see outside AI?
AI enthusiasm has created some investor disinterest in other areas. We’ve invested in software as a service, marketplaces, and fintech in the past two years and continue to find long-term thinkers with compelling business models and capital discipline. We are believers in AI, but there are other opportunities....

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"On Ukraine’s ‘Transparent Battlefield,’ There Are Few Places Left to Hide"

From 19FortyFive, April 18:

One of the most important concepts to emerge from Ukraine is that of the “transparent battlefield”. It refers to an environment in which tactical and operational information is made available in real-time to personnel on the ground, their commanding officers, and strategic decision makers.

The exponential development and proliferation of advanced technologies in recent years have pierced the fog of war to an unprecedented degree. This is most apparent on the battlefields of Ukraine, which have become the proving grounds for new military concepts and technologies.  

One of the most important concepts to emerge from Ukraine is that of the “transparent battlefield”. It refers to an environment in which tactical and operational information is made available in real-time to personnel on the ground, their commanding officers, and strategic decision makers.

Achieving ‘Transparency’ on the Battlefield
Greater battlefield transparency is primarily driven by improvements to command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (C4ISTAR). The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sensors have had a particularly noticeable impact in Ukraine, as well as in other conflicts like the Second Nagorno Karabakh War.

As noted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “sensor saturation creates a “transparent battlefield” in which forces can be found and targeted more easily than in past decades.” Similar conclusions were reached in the British Army’s Land Operating Concept (LOpC), unveiled in September 2023. The LOpC observes that “An exponential increase in both the quality, and number of, advanced sensors and precision weapons is resulting in an expanded and more transparent battlefield.”

UAVs bolster ISTAR with cost-effective deployment and low-risk missions. Offensive UAVs like UCAVs and loitering munitions reduce target response times and improve kill chain speed.

Various sensors like radar and LiDAR provide clearer battlefield images, penetrating vegetation and aiding in target detection, especially in adverse conditions. Satellites, both military and commercial, democratize access to intelligence gathering, previously restricted to governments.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) from tools like social media and commercial satellites empowers civilians to support military efforts, providing real-time battlefield updates that were once exclusive to trained agencies. In Ukraine, civilians have acted as a “force multiplier” by providing OSINT for the Ukrainian military. A civilian with a smartphone and access to the internet can expose military forces on the move in a matter of seconds in a way that was not possible before the age of information technology.

Implications Posed by the Transparent Battlefield
On the transparent battlefield, it is far more challenging for soldiers and vehicles to remain concealed or for larger formations to achieve surprise.

As noted again by the LOpC, “It is becoming much more difficult for soldiers to hide and survive… With military actions being more closely scrutinized in real time, maintaining surprise, deception, and legitimacy will be more of a challenge.”....

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Very related at the AP a couple days ago:

Ukraine pulls US-provided Abrams tanks from the front lines over Russian drone threats

The tacticians are realizing that tanks, though still very useful hunks of steel, are safest when attacking in blitzkrieg style: forward, forward, always forward .

Which is of course a bastardization of a mis-attributed mis-translation.
Last used in 2011's #OccupyWallStreet Proclaims Victory, Announces Plan to Re-launch #OccupyMom'sBasement:

"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!"
("Audacity, audacity — always audacity!")

—incorrect quote incorrectly cited to Frederick the Great
in the movie Patton:

"De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace..."

(audacity, more audacity, and ever more audacity...)

—Georges Danton

As Houthis Cause CO2 Emissions Equivalent To 9 Million Cars, Further East The Taliban Enter Into Climate Talks

And as our readers are well aware the Taliban's great friend, Osama bin Laden was also very concerned about global warming.

First up, from Bloomberg Green, April 28:

Red Sea Diversions Spew Carbon Emissions Equal to 9 Million Cars

• Ships burn more fuel by taking longer route and boosting speed
• Undermines net zero commitments of firms reliant on shipping

Ships seeking to avoid ongoing attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea area are emitting millions of additional tons of carbon, making it tougher for companies using ocean freight to reduce pollution across their supply chains.

Instead of passing through Egypt’s Suez Canal, hundreds of vessels since mid-December are sailing around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope — a detour that adds at least a week to the journey between South Asia and northern Europe.

The additional fuel burned has led to approximately an extra 13.6 million tons of CO2 emissions over the past four months — equivalent to the pollution of about 9 million cars over that same period, according to a report from consultancy INVERTO, a subsidiary of Boston Consulting Group Inc.

“The extra emissions resulting from this crisis will increase companies’ carbon footprints – making it very hard to hit their net zero targets,” said Sushank Agarwal, a managing director at the company. “To meet these targets, companies will either need to reduce emissions elsewhere in their supply chains or invest in more carbon offset initiatives — both can be very costly.”....

....MUCH MORE

And from AFP via Al Arabiya, April 24:

The Taliban government has entered its first talks with the United Nations, donors and non-governmental organizations over the impact of climate change in Afghanistan, organizers said Wednesday.

After four decades of war, Afghanistan ranks as one of the countries least prepared to face the effects of climate change, which is spurring extreme weather and warping natural environments. 

Foreign aid to Afghanistan has dwindled since the Taliban takeover in 2021, with donors wary of backing a government considered a pariah, leaving poor and climate-vulnerable communities further exposed.

The Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) co-hosted three days of talks ending Tuesday, country director Terje Watterdal told reporters at a news conference in Kabul.

He said it was the first time Taliban officials “joined a parallel session, face-to-face and online, with a broad range of their counterparts in the West since the change of government in August 2021.”

The talks included universities, diplomats, UN agencies, donors and grassroots members of Afghan society....

....MUCH MORE

Finally, a look back at some of the concerns expressed by Mr. bin Laden. From his 2002 Letter to America, which was recently making the rounds among various Gen-Z and Gen Alpha cohorts:

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries"

In 2007 he further developed the thesis. From the AFP transcript of the Sept. 7 al-Queda video.

"...In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistic speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa.

This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives...."

—The Ottawa Citizen via Climateer Investing, September 7, 2007. [original link rotted, archived] 

If interested, that month we also had "Religious leaders unite in prayer on climate change, Osama Bin Laden on Tax Policy, Book Reviews, Globalization and More" as well as:

September, 2007  
Fidel Castro, Global Warming,W. and Apec

The Cuban Commander-in-Chief is renowned for his oratory. A Google search for: Fidel, lengthy, speeches; gives you 120K hits. Even in translation it can be mesmerizing....

...And from the link-vault:

Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index Report: "Measuring trends in AI"

Although AI has been pursued for over sixty years, it was a 2013 post, "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford?" that marked the blog's increasing  intellectual interest in AI.

The next year, "Deep Learning is VC Worthy" marked the beginning of our interest in the financial aspects.

I mean, back in 2013-14 it was all about training the AI (and it still is, hence NVDA chips).

From the journal Nature, April 15:

AI now beats humans at basic tasks — new benchmarks are needed, says major report
Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index charts the meteoric rise of artificial-intelligence tools.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

In particular, the report says, new ways of assessing AI — for example, evaluating their performance on complex tasks, such as abstraction and reasoning — are more and more necessary. “A decade ago, benchmarks would serve the community for 5–10 years” whereas now they often become irrelevant in just a few years, says Nestor Maslej, a social scientist at Stanford and editor-in-chief of the AI Index. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid.”

 

Stanford’s annual AI Index, first published in 2017, is compiled by a group of academic and industry specialists to assess the field’s technical capabilities, costs, ethics and more — with an eye towards informing researchers, policymakers and the public. This year’s report, which is more than 400 pages long and was copy-edited and tightened with the aid of AI tools, notes that AI-related regulation in the United States is sharply rising. But the lack of standardized assessments for responsible use of AI makes it difficult to compare systems in terms of the risks that they pose.

The rising use of AI in science is also highlighted in this year’s edition: for the first time, it dedicates an entire chapter to science applications, highlighting projects including Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), a project from Google DeepMind that aims to help chemists discover materials, and GraphCast, another DeepMind tool, which does rapid weather forecasting.

Growing up
The current AI boom — built on neural networks and machine-learning algorithms — dates back to the early 2010s. The field has since rapidly expanded. For example, the number of AI coding projects on GitHub, a common platform for sharing code, increased from about 800 in 2011 to 1.8 million last year. And journal publications about AI roughly tripled over this period, the report says....

....MUCH MORE 

And from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI):

Introduction -  Welcome to the seventh edition of the AI Index report. The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI’s influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI’s impact on science and medicine....

....MORE (the HAI steering committee) 

Overview - Inside The New AI Index: Expensive New Models, Targeted Investments, and More 

The new report covers major AI trends in technical advances, regulation, education, economics, and global politics....

....MORE

 

2024 AI Index TOP TAKEAWAYS and download page:

1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all.
AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.

2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research.
In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.

3. Frontier models get way more expensive.
According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4 used an estimated $78 million worth of compute to train, while Google’s Gemini Ultra cost $191 million for compute....

....MUCH MORE, including more takeaways, individual chapter downloads and the whole thing (502 page PDF) 

A couple recent visits to the Index:

Artificial Intelligence: The Great Big Stanford Uni. 2022 AI Index Report 

Stanford Uni. AI Index Report 2023: "Measuring trends in Artificial Intelligence"