More Gartner On AI: "By 2030, 80% of Neocloud Providers Are Expected to Cease Independent Operations" (CRWV)

Following on October 14's IBD article: "Why Gartner AI Outlook Sent CoreWeave Stock, Neoclouds Reeling".

From Gartner, October 14:

Gartner Says Over $3.5 Trillion of AI Infrastructure Spending Could Be Exposed to Impairment by the End of 2030 
By 2030, 80% of Neocloud Providers Are Expected to Cease Independent Operations

More than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by the end of 2030, if AI providers continue their current pace of capital spending, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.

“In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030,” said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner. “However, our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period.”

“Through 2030, AI data center owners would need to generate a cumulative $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover announced capital spending, financing costs, and a 12% return on invested capital (ROIC), which we assume to be the hurdle rate of investment capital,” said Sommer. “However, total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI data centers during this period is forecast to reach no more than $3.6 trillion. Because most AI-native providers operate asset-light business models, we predict that less than half of AI revenue will be earned by providers that own significant AI infrastructure.”

Failure to achieve sustainable ROIC on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest....

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"Black Thurdsay" For Korea's KOSPI Index

From the Yonhap News Agency via UPI, October 15: 

Seoul shares crash over 7 pct on chip rout amid AI, inflation woes 

South Korean stocks plunged more than 7 percent Thursday as major chipmakers extended losses amid growing concerns over the sustainability of investments related to artificial intelligence (AI) and rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. The Korean won weakened against the U.S. dollar.

After opening 5.59 percent lower, the benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) extended its losses, tumbling 454.59 points, or 7.57 percent, to end at 5,554.22, after dipping as low as 5,450.81. 

The KOSPI fell for the seventh consecutive session, marking its longest losing streak since September 2024. Thursday's closing price was the lowest since April 7, when the index fell below 5,500.

The sharp sell-off prompted the Korea Exchange (KRX) to activate a sell-side sidecar shortly after the market opened, suspending program selling for five minutes as KOSPI 200 futures fell more than 5 percent for at least one minute.

As losses deepened, the bourse operator activated a circuit breaker at 12:38 p.m., halting trading on the main bourse for 20 minutes after the KOSPI dropped more than 8 percent from the previous session's close....

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Here's the three-month chart for the index from TradingView:

 

Down 16.59% in the last month, down 20.20% over the last three months.

"Scientists Collected Deep-Sea Rocks. They Spontaneously Caught Fire in The Lab."

From ScienceAlert, October 11:

Scientists investigating the possibility of a 'gold rush' on the bottom of the ocean have hit upon an unforeseen 'landmine'.

Researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) are now warning that some deep-sea minerals may spontaneously combust when they are brought to the surface.

In 2022, that happened to two samples of metal-sulfide rocks collected from the deep seafloor.

The event caused temperatures above 100 °C in the lab and completely oxidized the original samples.

An article on the discovery, published in Scientific Reports, is being shared early, before full editing, to give the public faster access to new research.

According to the USGS, this is a "potential hazard that could merit special consideration if deep-sea mining of seafloor massive sulfide deposits moves forward".

"The production of heat through exothermic reactions has not been investigated in seafloor massive sulfide deposits but has the potential to cause rapid onset fires on ships," claims the recent article.

The combustible rocks were collected by the USGS in 2022, during a deep-sea investigation of the Escanaba Trough, in collaboration with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....

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Also at ScienceAlert, October 11:

A New 'Super Ice' Is 10 Times Stronger, Bringing It Close to The Strength of Concrete

Kurt Vonnegut, call your office. 

"Stock Selloff Extends to Asia as Chip Rout Deepens"

Tokyo's Nikkei Index is down 2190 points (3.23%) While Seoul's KOSPI is down another 5% in early trade.

From Bloomberg, October 14/15 

A selloff in equities spread to Asia after chip stocks tumbled on Wall Street, as hotter-than-expected US inflation fueled bets on more aggressive Federal Reserve rate hikes. Treasuries rallied.

MSCI Inc.’s Asia Pacific equities gauge dropped 1.5%, heading for a fourth straight decline, led by losses in South Korea, a bellwether for artificial intelligence investment. The Kospi Index slumped as much as 6.5% to its lowest since late July, with chip heavyweights Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. tumbling at least 7%.

Tech sentiment remained weak, with Nasdaq 100 Index futures falling as much as 1%. Earlier, the Russell 2000 entered a correction and a closely watched gauge of US semiconductor stocks had its longest losing streak since May 2025. CoreWeave Inc. shares plunged as much as 17%. Its debt due in 2032, which investors bought at par four months ago, traded at less than 78 cents on the dollar.

The fastest US inflation in five months prompted traders to ramp up bets on further Fed tightening, raising the prospect of additional rate hikes, even if policymakers pause in October. While Treasuries initially sank after the data was announced, they recovered most of the losses on appetite for bond yields near multiyear highs....

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"Chinese AI firms tap cheaper ‘dim sum’ offshore yuan debt for funding edge"

Cheap coal-fired electricity plus cheap funding plus a national strategy of distilling frontier AI models make for a formidable competitor.  

From Bloomberg via The Japan Times, October 14:

Tencent Holdings is leaning into cheap offshore yuan debt to bankroll its artificial-intelligence infrastructure, the latest prominent example of leading Chinese technology firms using that edge over global rivals.

The Chinese technology giant sold nearly $5.7 billion of bonds this week to support its AI investments in its largest offering in more than six years. In a shift from its previous debt sales, the deal was dominated by dim sum notes, which carried lower borrowing costs.

Tencent priced 26 billion yuan ($3.9 billion) of offshore yuan securities on Tuesday, with its 10-year and 30-year portions carrying coupons of 2.4% and 3%, respectively, well below the more than 6% yields on the dollar notes. In all, the yuan tranche accounted for more than double the amount raised in the dollar portion.

Tencent’s growing preference for dim sum bonds is part of a wider trend among borrowers seeking cheaper yuan financing as dollar yields surge. That could help fuel Chinese technology companies’ spending on AI-related projects. Other firms that are investing heavily in AI, such as Alibaba Group Holding and Kuaishou Technology, have also raised money in the dim sum debt market over the past two years.

Chinese technology companies are taking advantage of the lower funding costs at a time of abundant offshore yuan liquidity, said Zerlina Zeng, head of Asia credit strategy at Creditsights Singapore. New issues from the sector will likely remain strong over the next 12 months as they further ramp up capital expenditures, she said.

The availability of cheap funding is becoming an even more critical factor in the global AI race as concerns mount over the risks tied to the massive wave of AI investment and debt issuance. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan warned this week that insufficient capital could become the next constraint on the industry’s growth....

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Also at The Japan Times October 14:

U.K. and Indian economies set to overtake Japan, IMF says 

"Nvidia's secret weapon for accelerating AI factories" (NVDA)

From The Deep View, October 14:

Nvidia has figured out a way to build AI factories a lot faster.

These massive data centers bring together billions of dollars of computing equipment into a facility where a ton of different tech, power, cooling, and logistical systems have to work together seamlessly. Managing that kind of complexity is one of Nvidia's strengths.

With chip design, Nvidia architects everything virtually in a simulated environment long before the first manufacturing process starts. And since today's chips and processors have become enormously complex, that orchestration is where the magic happens, in terms of speed, efficiency, and innovation.

Nvidia is applying this same mindset to building AI factories by partnering with Siemens and implementing digital twins, or virtual replicas of real-world environments. This allows Nvidia and its partners, such as hyperscalers and neoscalers, to simulate these elaborate facilities ahead of time and rehearse all of the processes that make them work.

"You’re really building a data center scale computer, along with all the technology, it’s not just about the GPU," Vladimir Troy, Nvidia's VP of AI infrastructure, told The Deep View. "This is the fundamental part that I think people miss about accelerated computing. If you just optimize the GPU, then you have the fastest GPU, and your bottlenecks could be everywhere else."

Digital twins are the key to making it all happen by allowing engineers to simulate a facility's physical behavior. Siemens brings the simulation, automation, and industrial engineering expertise while Nvidia brings the accelerated computing, its Omniverse platform, and the experience with synthetic data.

"You can improve the time-to-token by [roughly] 40% if you’re using digital twins," Ales Alajbegovic, global program manager of industrial metaverse for Siemens, told The Deep View. "If you don’t use digital twins, I don’t even know how you can build this."

In this case, time-to-token is referring to the period from the time you break ground on the facility to the time it's serving its first useful AI query for the public. That metric is critical because AI usage continues to scale up, despite public sentiment turning negative on AI. In the past 18 months, we've gone from roughly 15% of the global population regularly using AI to 19%. And in places like Singapore and UAE, two-thirds of the population are already using it regularly.

All of that usage is putting tremendous strain on today's data centers. Without more data center capacity, the industry faces the risk of AI queries taking much longer to run, the most powerful models being limited to those who can afford to pay a premium, and slowing down some of the most promising uses of AI for science and healthcare. That's why so many of the world's leading cloud and data center companies are building out future capacity, despite limitations on power and component shortages for RAM and data storage....

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We saw in the August 2025 earnings call transcript:

....Leading enterprises across industries have adopted Thor, including Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, Figure, Hexagon, Medtronic, and Meta. Robotic applications require exponentially more compute on the device and in infrastructure representing a significant long term demand driver for our data center platform. NVIDIA Omniverse with Cosmos is our data center physical AI digital twin platform built for development of robot and robotic systems. This quarter, we announced a major expansion of our partnership with Siemens to enable AI automatic factories, leading European robotics companies, including Agile Robots, Neurorobotics, and Universal Robots, are building their latest innovations with the Omniverse platform. Transitioning to a quick summary of our revenue by geography....

And before that:

NVIDIA GTC Financial Analyst Q&A March 19, 2024 Video and Transcript

...Rockwell has connected it to their tools for industrial automation. Siemens has connected to their, so it's a bunch of APIs that is physically based and it produces image or articulation and it connects a whole bunch of different environments. And so these APIs are intended to supercharge third party tools. And I'm super delighted to see the adoption across it, particularly in industrial automation. And so those are the five things that we did.... 

"Why Gartner AI Outlook Sent CoreWeave Stock, Neoclouds Reeling"

From Investor's Business Daily, October 14:

CoreWeave (CRWV) stock plunged Wednesday as shares in other artificial intelligence-focused "neoclouds" also sold off after market research firm Gartner predicted an industry shakeout.

In a news release, Gartner forecast that by 2030 "cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud providers to cease independent operations."

Gartner said failure to achieve sustainable return on invested capital on rapidly depreciating assets would result in a wave of asset write-downs.

Shares in Nebius (NBIS), Iren (IREN), Hut 8 (HUT), Digital Island (DOCN), Cipher Digital (CIFR) and Applied Digital (APLD) also retreated on Wednesday.

"Through 2030, AI data center owners would need to generate a cumulative $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover announced capital spending, financing costs, and a 12% return on invested capital, which we assume to be the hurdle rate of investment capital," said Gartner analyst Will Sommer, in a report.

Neoclouds: Huge AI Data Center Investments....

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"Greta Thunberg joins Paris student protests"

From the Telegraph, October 13:

Climate activist condemns ‘extremely violent’ police response as French school unrest continues  

Greta Thunberg has travelled to Paris to join the student protests sweeping France.

The Swedish climate activist joined pupils outside the Paul-Éluard lycée in Saint-Denis, where about 20 lawyers in robes formed a human chain to protect the teenagers from alleged police brutality.

Ms Thunberg, 23, condemned what she described as an “extremely violent” police response, and said: “Our future is being robbed away from us.”

She told reporters: “They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights.

“Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises ... it’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”....

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She echoes Iran in calling for restraint on the part of the French authorities. 

Inflation: CPI Headline UP 0.6% In September, UP 3.7% Year-over-Year

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 14:

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX - SEPTEMBER 2026

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in September after rising 0.4 percent in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.7 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The index for gasoline rose 9.1 percent in September, accounting for over half of the monthly all items increase. The energy index increased 5.2 percent over the month following a 2.1-percent increase in August. The shelter index rose 0.4 percent in September after rising 0.3 percent in August. The index for food was unchanged in September, as the index for food away from home increased 0.2 percent and the index for food at home fell 0.1 percent. 

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.3 percent in September, as it did in August. Indexes that increased over the month include recreation, used cars and trucks, education, airline fares, medical care, and apparel. Conversely, the index for communication was among the small number of major indexes that decreased in September.

The all items index rose 3.7 percent for the 12 months ending September, a larger increase than the 3.4-percent increase reported for the 12 months ending in August. The all items less food and energy index rose 2.6 percent over the year, following a 2.4-percent increase over the 12 months ending August. The energy index increased 20.4 percent for the 12 months ending September. The food index increased 2.5 percent over the last year. 

Table A. Percent changes in CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): U.S. city average....

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Fuel Oil up 74.2%  over the twelve months is going to hit the Northeastern U.S. states hard:

• Maine: ~59% of households use it as a primary heat source
• New Hampshire: ~43% of households
• Vermont: ~40% of households
• Connecticut: ~39% of households
• Rhode Island: ~29% of households
• Massachusetts: ~24% of households 

Capital Markets: "China's Trade Surplus Swells and the Market Awaits US CPI"

From Marc to Market:

Investors are wary of the unwinding one of the most crowded trades, long the AI ecosystem.  Despite cracks, the market remains resilient. So far, the rise in interest rates has not derailed the narrative. The dollar’s fortunes also seem to be to some extent linked the AI. It seems clear that the significant US current account deficit has been largely financed by foreign flows into the US equity market. While some observers see shades of the tech bubble, it is notable that while the Nasdaq Composite peaked in February 2020 and the S&P peaked six months later, the Dollar Index did not peak until July 2001. Even then, the sharp dollar decline did not begin in earnest until April 2002.  

The dollar is mixed.  The Australian dollar and Norwegian krone are the strongest in the G10, gaining 0.3%-0.4%. The euro, Japanese yen, and Swiss franc are slightly softer.  The euro has derived little support from the easing of the tensions within European bond markets. The French premium, for example, as narrowed from over 150 bp to about 135 bp today, while the euro remains trapped in its trough, having recorded new lows for the year on Monday, slightly below $1.1155.   Meanwhile, India has engineered a short squeeze of the rupee and the PBOC continues to encourage a gradual appreciation of the yuan through its daily fix....

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Taiwan’s GDP [growth] to reach 10.7%, IMF says

If they keep this up they'll be able to buy that big land mass to their west.

From the Taipei Times, October 14: 

BIG SURGE: Taiwan, the only economy projected to post double-digit percentage growth this year, and South Korea account for 62% of net trade in AI-related computing hardware  

The IMF has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s GDP growth to 10.7 percent this year, the highest projected rate in the Asia-Pacific region, amid the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

In its latest World Economic Outlook report released yesterday at its annual meetings in Bangkok, the IMF raised its forecast for Taiwan’s growth from the 5.2 percent it projected in April, making Taiwan the only economy in the world projected to post double-digit percentage growth this year.

Taiwan’s projected growth far outpaces that of neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan at 0.7 percent, South Korea at 3.3 percent, Singapore at 5 percent and Hong Kong at 3.8 percent, the report says....

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Internet-of-Things: Anthropic Warns AI Worms Could Infect Smart Homes, Self-Replicate And Become Difficult To Dislodge

Not the future we were promised.

From Yahoo Finance via MSN, October 13:

Anthropic warns AI could self-replicate across smart home devices, become challenging to shut down 

Smart homes, especially from lesser-known brands, have been a potential vector for hackers to launch cyberattacks across the web, or gain unwanted network access for some time.

But artificial intelligence is adding a new wrinkle to the problem. According to research by Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), rogue AI models could soon be able to break into internet of things devices, ranging from smart stoves and TVs to intelligent refrigerators, and self-replicate across further gadgets.

Such models would be more difficult to shut down, because there's no central hub to take them offline. And while they may move slowly across devices, the company says the models can figure out how to propagate across devices they are unfamiliar with.

The announcement comes after Apple (AAPL) debuted its HomeView, putting the smart home market back into mainstream focus.

Anthropic performed its tests using Android-based devices.

It also follows a report that hackers broke into internet-connected refrigerators in French grocery stores, raising temperatures, ruining food, and starting fires.

During its own testing, Anthropic said it found that larger AI models can split themselves up and run across multiple devices. Some models also managed to pass knowledge to replicated versions of themselves, enabling them to adapt to different hardware....

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At (mis)-Anthropic, October 12:

AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

Fortunately the Climateer Investing Master Plan for World Domination has been prepared with just such a contingency in mind. Linkage to:

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline 

Low tech with backward-facing arrow of time (take that Eddington) 

And for those who dare: 

NO TECH MAGAZINE
Technology for Luddites 

Stuff to think about when the lights go out. 

April 20, 2025 - Welcome to the new Dumb House

“Just like the arts-and-crafts movement was a reaction against industrialization, we’re now experiencing a reaction against the smart home. People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live.”

Read more: Why the Ultrarich Are Unplugging From “Smart Homes”, The Hollywood Reporter, April 2025. Thanks to Manuel.

April 17, 2025 - The West is Bored to Death

“Suppose Schopenhauer is right that life boils down to a flight from either boredom or pain. Insofar as the vast material abundance of wealthy, industrialised society has had an analgesic effect (there is simply less physical pain than in the past, before fluoride and anaesthesia and sedentary lives), it would seem to have solved one problem only to amplify the other. In place of pain, we have ennui, the quintessential modern condition. It follows directly from overabundance: an endless stream of video “content” or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix.”

Read more: The West is Bored to Death, Stuart Whatley, The New Statesman, April 2025.

You probably won't be able to read either magazine after the worms take over so get to it now and trust that your powerful memory will be there when you need it. 

Elon Musk Explains The Sell-Off In Memory Stocks

He seems to have a fairly good grasp of this stuff. And solar, and batteries and rockets and...

When China figures out how to manufacture a product, their ability to scale is often greater than the rest of the world combined. We saw this with lithium batteries and solar, for example. SpaceX is a rare counter-example, where its mass to orbit is roughly an order of magnitude greater than the rest of the world, BUT China now does a majority of non-SpaceX mass to orbit. SpaceX is an anomaly in the matrix. Maybe RAM will be different, but RAM was a low margin commodity only ~3 years ago. LP5 and LP6 are designed to a common standard that China seems to be solving fast. Newer HBM architectures and things like an SRAM layer below logic and 3D stacking RAM on top of logic while finding a way to keep the logic cooled will be harder to solve.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2026

Capital Markets: "Softer Rates, Heavier Dollar"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

The pullback in bond yields is the main development in the global capital markets today. Rates eased in Asia Pacific, but the eye of the storm has been in Europe and benchmark 10-year yields are off mostly 4-7 bp today. The move is being led by France and Italy. However, the fundamental driver, outside of lower (~2%) oil prices seem elusive. The protests in France continue. In the US, where the 10-year yield is off around five basis points to below 5.20% for the first time in a little more than a week, there is speculation that the Treasury is considering reducing the coupon supply in quarterly refunding and perhaps doing away with the 20-year bond altogether and replaced with bills.

The US dollar is trading softer amid the lower interest rate environment. The Canadian dollar is the laggard. The disappointing jobs data before the weekend make it more difficult for the Bank of Canada to close the policy rate gap, which is the widest since the late 1990s. Among emerging market currencies, Indian officials have engineered a powerful short-squeeze, and the rupee is up around 0.5% today. It gained almost 1% yesterday. Even as China’s 10-year yield slipped it lowest level (below 1.65%) in more than a year, the PBOC set the dollar’s reference rate at its lowest level since January 2023....

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NASA And SpaceX Are Thinking About Using A Starship Rocket As A Space Station

Headlining September 28's article on SpaceX attempt at getting Starship into orbit (successful) I called the rocket ridiculously huge. That really doesn't do justice to just how big the thing is.

Even the numbers, 124 meters/407 feet tall, diameter: 9 meters (29.5 feet) are difficult to comprehend.*

From Space Science's Facebook page, September 25:

SpaceX plans to convert a Starship upper stage into a permanent, standalone orbital space station. New NASA documentation reveals that the company proposes using the massive interior volume of its stainless steel spacecraft to create a long-term habitat in low Earth orbit. 

Rather than returning the vehicle to Earth for reuse, this specialized station concept would remain permanently in space after launch. The sheer size of Starship gives it over six hundred cubic meters of internal space, which offers a living and working volume comparable to a major portion of the International Space Station inside a single rocket hull.

This proposal fits into NASA's broader strategy as the agency prepares for the eventual retirement of the International Space Station. By supporting commercial station concepts, NASA aims to transition its research activities to privately operated platforms while cutting the high operational costs of maintaining aging orbital infrastructure.

The primary technical hurdle for turning a Starship into an orbital outpost involves repurposing its massive propellant tanks once they are emptied in orbit. Engineers would need to safely vent residual liquid methane and liquid oxygen before converting those empty volumes into pressurized, human-rated living areas and scientific research laboratories. 

Converting a single rocket hull directly into a fully functioning space station could significantly lower the cost of building large structures in orbit. Do you think converting spent rocket stages into permanent space stations is a practical path forward for orbital habitats? 

*Here's one of the pictures they use at Wikipedia [picture deleted at Wiki]: 

 (cached)

You can just about make out the two trucks with their headlights on.

The people next to the cybertruck at the base of the tower are pretty much just a munchkin blur. 

"Tech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’"

Warning: distressing content.

From Bloomberg, September 11:

A growing post-exit ecosystem is helping founders deal with the unexpected difficulties of becoming extremely wealthy.

It was the kind of exit every entrepreneur dreams about. After bootstrapping a software startup together, Anastasia Koroleva and her husband sold for nine figures: 100% cash on Day 1, zero earnouts, no strings attached. But what followed blindsided the founder and former Skadden Arps M&A lawyer. Instead of the soft life she’d expected, Koroleva found herself dealing with years of unease and a painful divorce.

“Everything was very different from what we expected, and that was shocking for me,” she says. “I went through quite a difficult adjustment to that new reality.”

Today, 16 years after her payout and nearly three years into hosting her podcast, Exit Paradox, Koroleva explores what happens when net worth removes the need to work. Her interviews with the extraordinarily wealthy have uncovered a recurring theme: For many, the exit does not feel like a crowning achievement — or, at least, not for long. It can feel more like an existential rupture. Guests describe becoming staggeringly rich using the language of trauma: “recovering from a $500 million sale,” “thrashing about for a decade” or drifting in a state of aimless ennui.

Koroleva’s podcast is one piece of a growing ecosystem of content, coaches, therapists and communities giving people who’ve amassed more money than they’ll ever need somewhere to talk freely — a gap traditional wealth advisers and founder networks don’t fill. Its rise reflects two shifts: a tech sector generating wealth at breakneck pace and a post-Covid culture far more willing to talk about mental health.

“There’s been a tremendous softening of conversations around mental health and well-being among entrepreneurs,” says Sherry Walling, a clinical psychologist who specializes in founders. She credits that partly to the shock of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh’s death in 2020. “I do think that we’ve moved on from it as the world’s tiniest violin.”

Last November, Walling co-authored a playbook on the subject, Exit Strategy. She’d seen too many clients who’d done everything they set out to do, achieved the big exit — and were miserable. “There were some really dramatic stories,” she says. “People being suicidal, just really, really lost in their post-exit experience.”....

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Thanks For The Memories: Korea's KOSPI Continues To Fall, Down 5.46% On Tuesday

As noted On October 8, "Meanwhile Korea's KOSPI index, of which Samsung and SK hynix comprise a bit over half the weighting" hence the memory ref. in the headline. I'll be here all week, be sure to tip the staff...

From Business Insider, October 12/13:

South Korea's chip-heavy stock market is plunging again as AI investors find more reasons to worry 

South Korea's stock market plunged on Tuesday as investors found a new reason to worry about the AI trade.

The benchmark Kospi index fell more than 7% intraday to its lowest level since July 31, extending a dramatic reversal for what was once the world's hottest AI-fueled stock market.

AI chip heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix led the losses, falling 9% and 10%, respectively, by midday.

The weakness spread across Asia, with Japan's Nikkei and Taiwan's chip-heavy Taiex both falling around 3%. The declines followed another weak session for US semiconductor stocks overnight, including Micron.

Investors were weighing a growing list of concerns about the AI trade, from rising Chinese competition to questions over how the industry's massive infrastructure buildout will be financed.

"The latest catalyst has been further evidence of China's growing ambitions across the AI ecosystem," Chris Weston, the head of research at Pepperstone, wrote in a note Tuesday.

Weston pointed to Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT, which said it had made progress in developing technology that could pack more data onto memory chips and that it plans to introduce a new server-memory product by year-end.

CXMT has yet to demonstrate it can manufacture the technology at scale, and the announcement does not immediately challenge South Korea's lead in high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI accelerators...

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The stocks and index made a small recovery late in the session with Samsung and SK Hynix down 7% and 9% and the index down the headlined 5.46%.

Fun fact: As a side-note on index construction, because the big chip makers are falling more than the overall index their weighting in the KOSPI is declining.

(as usual, fun facts on the internet are very often not really that much fun) 

Here's one year of the KOSPI via TradingView:

 

Euro AI: "Ecosia founder clarifies move away from Mistral – It’s about open models, not China"

Yeah, whatevs, dude.

An exclusive from EU-Startups, October 9:

Ecosia’s decision to drop French AI provider Mistral is not a move towards Chinese technology, but rather a shift towards more affordable, energy-efficient open AI models, founder and CEO Christian Kroll clarified in a conversation with EU-Startups.

“We’ll probably be using Melious.ai in future. Unlike Mistral, this is a European company that offers high-quality, affordable AI inference powered by green electricity,” shared Christian in an exclusive interview.

The Berlin-based search engine recently made headlines after POLITICO reported that it was replacing Mistral with open models, including Chinese offerings such as Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi.

However, Christian stressed that the company’s focus is on open models rather than their country of origin. These offer lower costs, greater flexibility and reduced energy consumption, aligning with Ecosia’s environmental mission.

Addressing concerns about political censorship in Chinese AI models, Christian explained that Ecosia can switch to alternative models when dealing with sensitive subjects, such as questions about Taiwan. The company is also working to eliminate political biases from its AI-generated answers.

The models are accessed through German platform Melious, which operates on European infrastructure powered by low-carbon energy. This allows Ecosia to use internationally developed AI while keeping its infrastructure and data processing in Europe....

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The Tesla/SpaceX Chip Fabrication Plant Is Hiring (TSLA; SPCX)

From Elon Musk:

@elonmusk In 1941, Ford built the biggest factory on Earth. By 1944 it was rolling out a B-24 bomber every hour. Lindbergh called it "the Grand Canyon of the mechanized world." Terafab will be 25 times bigger. https://t.co/NIw4GpE1dh

— Museum of American Exceptionalism (@AmericaMuseum) October 12, 2026

"Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today..." (MSFT)

From The Verge, October 12: 

Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs
The new Maia 300 chip will start rolling out to production AI workloads in 2027. 

Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the “primary AI inference system” for Microsoft’s products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it’s also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks.

Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. “We expect Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems,” says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud group. “And in a full 96-accelerator configuration, it delivers up to 7x the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200.”

These efficiency improvements will allow Microsoft to rely mainly on its in-house AI chips soon, instead of ones from Nvidia and AMD. “We will scale our Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making Maia the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services,” says Guthrie....

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"Americans Hall, Woodford win Nobel prize for work on stabilising economies"

From Reuters, October 12:

• Winners' work leaves policymakers better equipped to deal with shocks, says Nobel committee chair
• Woodford says new framework helped policy after global financial crisis
• Hall and Woodford's work underpins concepts including sticky inflation and output gap 

US academics Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the 2026 Nobel economics prize on Monday ‌for decades of work developing ground-up models currently used by central banks and finance ministries across the world to stabilise economies.

 

"With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume," John Hassler, Chair of the Committee for the Prize ​in Economic Sciences, said in a statement.

 

The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in ​Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 12 ⁠million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).

 

One of the laureates' key insights is that economies could only be kept on an even keel by taking ​into account the millions of decisions made at a micro-level by households and businesses, rather than by using top-down theories of how economies work.

 

"...Authorities ​shouldn't view stabilization of the economy as an exercise that is simply conducted by people pulling levers to control the economy independently of what people in the economy understand about this," Columbia University's Woodford, 70, told a news conference.

 

In contrast to the oil shocks of the 1970s, when central banks struggled to combat ​sky-high inflation, Woodford said the new framework was useful during the global financial crisis of the late-2000s to bolster traditional tools of monetary ​policy.

 

"Making more explicit statements about the likely future path of interest rate policy, as opposed to relying on simply being able to cut interest rates ‌further immediately, ⁠that was an important part of the policy response in the years from 2009 onward," he said....

....MUCH MORE

Over the years we've been more intrigued by Woodford than by Hall.

Professor Hall has only a couple brief  appearances on the blog, one was a mention in passing by John Cochrane. He's a member of the MIT economics mafia (ditto Woodford) though not pictured on the handy chart. (PhD advisor Robert Solow)

Woodford on the other hand...we once introduced (October 2014) using the term of art favored by the cognoscenti: 

Minneapolis Fed: "Interview with Michael Woodford"
One of the big dogs.

It seems everyone wanted to talk to him. Here he is a year earlier:

Goldman Sachs' Allison Nathan Interview with Economist Michael Woodford

And a few months prior to that. April 2013"

Let's Just Proclaim Jubilee: "Quantitative easing should be used to write off government debt"

From the Telegraph:
Helicopter QE will never be reversed

Readers of the Daily Telegraph were right all along. Quantitative easing will never be reversed. It is not liquidity management as claimed so vehemently at the outset. It really is the same as printing money. 

Columbia Professor Michael Woodford, the world's most closely followed monetary theorist, says it is time to come clean and state openly that bond purchases are forever, and the sooner people understand this the better.

"All this talk of exit strategies is deeply negative," he told a London Business School seminar on the merits of Helicopter money, or "overt monetary financing".

He said the Bank of Japan made the mistake of reversing all its money creation from 2001 to 2006 once it thought the economy was safely out of the woods. But Japan crashed back into deeper deflation as soon the Lehman crisis hit.

"If we are going to scare the horses, let's scare them properly. Let's go further and eliminate government debt on the bloated balance sheet of central banks," he said. This could done with a flick of the fingers. The debt would vanish. 

Lord Turner, head of the now defunct Financial Services Authority, made the point more delicately. "We must tell people that if necessary, QE will turn out to be permanent."

The write-off should cover "previous fiscal deficits", the stock of public debt. It should be "post-facto monetary finance".

The policy is elastic, for Lord Turner went on to argue that central banks in the US, Japan and Europe should stand ready to finance current spending as well, if push comes to shove. At least the money would go straight into the veins of the economy, rather than leaking out into asset bubbles....MORE 

There is some really dark humor in that "horses" reference, here's the story:

 Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

• Reply to a young actress who asserted that an older actor in a production showed too much affection for the leading man (c. 1910); as reported by Alan Dent in Mrs. Patrick Campbell, p. 78 (1961). Source

If I'm interpreting this correctly, one of the sharpest monetary theorists in the world is saying we're fucked; and might as well do the economics equivalent of "Let the good times Roll."

Oddly enough Professor Woodford holds the John Bates Clark Chair at Columbia but did not win the Clark Medal.
He did however win a MacArthur 'Genius Grant'.

That's all I know. For more here's 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/summary/

"Foreign investors flee South Korean stocks as AI boom loses steam"

On Monday the big index, the KOSPI closed down 3.65% (-241.69) at 6,384.24.

From Investing.com, October 10: 

South Korean stocks are struggling to attract buyers as enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-related investments fades, triggering heavy foreign outflows and a sharp decline in trading activity. 

Trading turnover in South Korea’s $4.3 trillion equity market has plunged 70% from its late-May peak, while the benchmark Kospi has fallen 22% in the second half of 2026, according to Bloomberg.

The reversal follows a first-half rally that made the Kospi the world’s best-performing major equity benchmark, driven largely by demand for AI memory chips.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which together account for more than half the index’s weighting, have become a source of vulnerability as investors question whether the semiconductor boom can continue.

Foreign investors have withdrawn $131 billion from Korean equities this year, the largest outflow among major Asian markets, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg.

Concerns over demand were evident when Samsung shares declined Thursday despite the company reporting a nearly ninefold increase in quarterly operating profit.

Market support from corporate share repurchases is also weakening. Samsung and SK Hynix are approaching completion of combined buyback programmes worth 55 trillion won ($41 billion).

Retail participation has similarly declined following July’s selloff.

Outstanding margin loans have fallen to approximately 33 trillion won from a June peak of 38.6 trillion won, while brokerage deposits have dropped to around 100 trillion won from nearly 140 trillion won.

Investors are increasingly favouring Taiwan, whose technology sector offers broader exposure to the AI supply chain....

....MORE 

"Thieves pull off Italy’s biggest-ever wine heist, stealing 30,000 bottles worth 5 million euros"

From the Associated Press, October 9: 

Thieves stole about 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most prized wines worth an estimated 5 million euros ($5.8 million) from a winery in Tuscany, in what the producer described Friday as the country’s largest wine theft on record.

The theft targeted Marchesi Antinori’s facility near Cortona, in the province of Arezzo, where a group of at least seven thieves on Saturday night made off with bottles of some of Italy’s most sought-after wines, including Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso. The theft was discovered Monday, but the company made it public on Friday to avoid interfering with the investigation.

Chief Executive Renzo Cotarella said the thieves disabled the winery’s alarm system and surveillance cameras before entering with two large trucks. Using the company’s forklifts, they loaded the vehicles with wine and fled during the night.

“It is certainly a very well-prepared gang,” Cotarella said, adding that it may be the same group that has targeted other Italian wineries in recent months. “A theft of this size and value has never occurred in Italy.”

The stolen bottles were all from the 2023 vintage and are typically sold at a retail price of between 150 euros and 500 euros each. They included about 10,000 bottles of Solaia, one of Antinori’s flagship wines, from what Cotarella described as an exceptional year.

The company, founded in 1385 and run by the Antinori family for 26 generations, said it was alerting customers worldwide to be wary of offers outside official sales channels....

....MORE 

Lost Parchment Reveals People Who [contracted and] Survived The Black Death (plus Germany's Chancellor Merz)

I was reminded of this story by German Chancellor Merz (no, not his Skeletor-like appearance), more after the jump. 

From The Conversation via ScienceAlert, 17 May 2026:

In our research in the British Library's medieval collections, we have identified a previously unnoticed document that provides fresh insights into the survivors of the outbreak of plague known as the Black Death (1346–53). 

The document – a scrap of parchment inserted into an account of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire – records how much time peasants were absent from work when struck down by the plague.

It also reveals the names of those who survived and how long their employers believed recovery could take.

In our recent paper with Barney Sloane, we shed new light on a group of 22 tenants who probably contracted plague, languished on their sickbeds for several weeks, and then recovered.

As one of the deadliest pandemics in recorded history, it has been estimated that between a third and two-thirds of the population of medieval Europe died during the Black Death.

Given the sheer scale, many historians have focused on discovering details about those who died. Yet this has left the histories of those who contracted plague and recovered largely untold.

Despite the deadliness of the disease, it was possible to recover from plague, and medieval chroniclers mention the possibility – however unlikely – of survival. For example, Geoffrey le Baker, a clerk of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, wrote in the following decade that he thought recovery depended on people's symptoms:

People who one day had been full of happiness, on the next were found dead. Some were tormented by boils which broke out suddenly in various parts of the body, and were so hard and dry that when they were lanced hardly any liquid flowed out. Many of these people escaped, by lancing the boils or by long suffering. Other victims had little black pustules scattered over the skin of the whole body. Of these people very few, indeed hardly any, recovered life and health.

But who recovered? Why did so many succumb to the disease when others survived? And just how long was this "long suffering"?

Unfortunately, there is remarkably little documentary evidence because most medieval sources record information about mortality rather than ill health.

Unique list of plague survivors
A unique inclusion in the account of the manor of Warboys details a group of people who fell ill between the end of April and the start of August 1349.

The monks of Ramsey Abbey wrote a list of their tenants who had fallen sufficiently sick that they could not work on the lord's lands and detailed the length of time that they were absent.

People were clearly affected differently by their experience of plague.

The quickest recovery was that of Henry Broun who missed just a single week of work. By contrast, John Derworth and Agnes Mold had much more protracted illnesses and were both absent for nine weeks.

The average length of illness was between three and four weeks, with three-quarters of people returning to work in under a month. The speed of their recoveries is all the more surprising given that they were entitled to up to a year and a day of sick leave from work.

This list of survivors includes a preponderance of tenants who occupied larger holdings on the manor....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at ScienceAlert, October 8:

Sexually Transmitted Diarrhea Is Exploding in The US. And It's Growing Resistant to Medicine

And Chancellor Merz? It was re-reading his sick leave edict:

Germany's Chancellor Merz: We can no longer accept the extraordinarily high levels of sick leave in our companies. We are abolishing sick leave by telephone and introducing the requirement to submit a medical certificate from the very first day of illness. We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 2, 2026

And Skeletor? 

Skeletor is the main antagonist of the Masters of the Universe franchise, and is the most dangerous threat on Eternia. His only goal is power, and to that end, he will not rest until he possesses the secrets of Castle Grayskull, which will enable him to become master of the universe. This places him in direct conflict with the only man powerful enough to stop him, He-Man.... 

— fandom

War Comes To The Arctic

It's actually been going on for a while* but is now accelerating and expanding. 

From ZeroHedge, October 10:

Ukraine's Drones Reach Russia's Arctic "Gas Capital"; Is Nornickel's Palladium Next? 

For most of the war, Russia's Arctic was the part of the map nobody bothered to defend. That changed a month ago.

On September 9, Ukraine's Special Operations Forces said their drones flew "more than 3,000 kilometers" to hit two gas condensate plants in the Yamalo-Nenets region: Gazprom's Novy Urengoy condensate treatment plant, with a design capacity of 19.5 million tons of feedstock a year, and Novatek's Purovsky plant near Tarko-Sale, which processed 13.4 million tons of condensate in 2025 (Hromadske, Al Jazeera). "Until today, this was considered an absolutely safe rear area for the aggressor," the SOF said. Bloomberg and Reuters both picked up the claim; the Kremlin's envoy to the Urals, Artem Zhoga, confirmed it was the first attack to reach the Arctic.

On Tuesday Moscow gave its answer: cash. The Yamalo-Nenets government approved a payment of 1 million rubles (about $11,700) for every drone destroyed over the region, the highest bounty any Russian region has offered, according to TASS (others pay 20,000-200,000 rubles). The money goes to local "mobile fire groups," and there is a catch: per the decree, it is paid only if the defended facility suffers no damage, and the kill has to be confirmed by the military commissariat. Joining a fire group pays 100,000 rubles if you have a job and 150,000 if you don't, and requires signing a Defense Ministry contract (Barents Observer).

Paying the unemployed more than the employed to stand on the tundra with a machine gun: nothing says confident air defense quite like it.

Regular readers know we have been tracking Ukraine's drone range creep since it first reached Western Siberia last October. Since then the line has moved from Tyumen to Omsk (hit again on Thursday) to the Arctic Circle. So the obvious next question, and the one now going viral on X, is whether Norilsk, home of the world's biggest palladium miner, is next. As we show below, that is the wrong question: the Nornickel asset that matters for palladium is not in Siberia at all, and it is much closer to Ukraine than Novy Urengoy.

What Actually Got Hit

As usual, Russian officials described the strike as a successful interception. Yamal governor Dmitry Artyukhov said "falling debris" caused a fire at "one of the city's industrial facilities," with no casualties (NV). Somehow the debris keeps landing on the most expensive equipment.

Ukrainian OSINT group CyberBoroshno says the drones hit the de-ethanization unit at Novy Urengoy. That matters more than it sounds: the unit's gas feeds the Novy Urengoy gas chemical complex, which can make up to 400,000 tons of low-density polyethylene a year, so without it the chain from condensate to plastic stops (per RBC-Ukraine, Militarnyi). Satellite imagery also reportedly shows damage at Purovsky. Both of those claims come from Ukrainian OSINT and Russia has published no production data, so treat them accordingly.

Purovsky is the more interesting target for markets. According to Novatek's own description, most of its stable condensate goes by rail to Ust-Luga on the Baltic for processing and export, the same port complex Ukraine has hit repeatedly, most recently when drone strikes crippled Russia's key Baltic ports in March. Ukraine has now hit Novatek's condensate chain at both ends, 2,800 km apart.

The region is not a side show either. Yamalo-Nenets produces roughly 80% of Russia's natural gas and holds about two-thirds of its gas reserves (Al Jazeera); Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 sit at its northern edge. The Fire Point FP-1 that its maker says carried out the attack costs under $60,000 to build. Even in Arctic economics, a million-ruble bounty per drone and a $60K drone is a trade that only works for one side.

All of this lands while Moscow's oil and gas budget is already shrinking: the Finance Ministry cut its 2026 oil and gas revenue estimate to RUB 7.6 trillion from RUB 8.9 trillion.

The Norilsk Siren That Wasn't (Quite)

Which brings us to this morning's viral claim, courtesy of Visegrád 24: "The city of Norilsk has started testing its air raid alarm system" because Ukraine "could be about to extend the range" of its drones, which "have a range of 3500 km. Norilsk is 4500 km away."....

 

....MUCH MORE
*September 18, 2024 - Ukraine Is Bombing Russia's Far North
That's a long way from Kyiv. 

• September 11 - Governor: Murmansk is under drone attack
• September 11 - Ukrainian attack on Kola Peninsula comes as Russian Navy launches strategic exercise
• September 12 - "We are all afraid," woman in Olenegorsk says as Ukrainian drones attack local airbase
• September 12 - Ukrainian drones are on the way. Murmansk again closes airspace

April 2025 - "Norway Is on a 100-Day Mission to Test Military Limits in the Arctic"

Matt Levine On Compute Futures Manipulation

From Bloomberg Opinion's Money Stuff, September 17:

....Compute futures

I wrote once about egg market manipulation:

There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market.

That’s the core idea of market manipulation: You find some small illiquid market that determines the price of some much larger and more liquid market. You buy $100 million worth of stuff in the large liquid market, without moving the price much. Then you buy $1 million worth of stuff in the small illiquid market, causing the price — in the illiquid market, and also in the liquid one — to double. You sell your stuff in the large liquid market for $200 million (it’s doubled), again without moving the price much. Then you sell your stuff in the illiquid market, maybe driving the price down to zero, but so what: You lose $1 million on your small-market manipulative trades, and make $100 million on your large-market manipulated trades.

In general, this is hard to pull off, because what markets have structures like that? Why would some giant liquid market depend on some small illiquid market for its pricing? There are a few salient examples — eggs, Indian index options, interest-rate swaps in the 2000s — but they’re kind of weird.

But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. The other day, I quoted a judge’s opinion in an insider-trading lawsuit, saying:

This is modern trading — where algorithms, AI agents, and career traders are all jockeying, minute by minute, for the newest hot trade, using analyst information, market trends, news reports, scuttlebutt from online forums, and other tea leaves to make split-second decisions.

You could tell a story like this: The marginal prices of stocks are set by, you know, four hedge funds; they are set by “algorithms, AI agents and career traders” reading “tea leaves to make split-second decisions.” The stock market is big and liquid. But the tea leaf market is weird and small. The marginal price setters in stock markets are looking to some data sources to set prices, and those data sources might be small and niche and manipulable, and if you can manipulate them you might have a big impact on stock prices.

Arguably the biggest market in the world right now is, like, “AI.” Trillions of dollars of stock market capitalization, of data-center financing, of expected capital expenditures and revenues, all depend on the path of artificial intelligence adoption. The modern debt market is basically built on the value of computer chips as debt collateral. If there is news suggesting that AI progress will be faster or slower than expected, that causes huge shifts in value.

Meanwhile we’ve talked occasionally about compute futures. Several exchanges are working on developing financial futures products to price and hedge the expected future cost of computing power. This has an obvious use case in the AI buildout; I wrote once:

If you can lock in the future price of computing capacity, then building computing capacity is a less speculative endeavor. You’re not building a data center hoping to sell compute to the AI startups of the future; you’re building a data center knowing that you can sell compute at the futures price that you’ve locked in.

But this is all pretty early and small right now; the compute futures are more of a proof of concept than a robust liquid market for AI computing.

Here is a fascinating story from Semafor reporting that “the US Commerce Department last month ordered Kalshi to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute,” and has “also pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission … to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days.” (“’This story is false,’ a Commerce spokesman said,” though.) Why? “It’s unclear why Commerce is worried about the nascent market,” but: 

One potential reason floated to Semafor by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips, which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded, which could lead to volatility even without bad actors.

That is: Maybe you can spend a small amount of money to manipulate the market for the value of computer chips as long-term debt collateral. The whole AI economy is, arguably, built on that value. If it goes down, maybe hedge funds will notice. Maybe that will crash the prices of AI stocks and bonds. Maybe you can make a lot of money in the biggest market by spending a little money in the compute futures market.....

....MUCH MORE in that issue of Money Stuff:

The Whole Indian Options Trade Was Too Good

EbitdAI 

Not like other AI safety advocates 

Things happen

So much more.