AI sovereignty
A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.
That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.
Apple to fine-tune Gemini independently, no Google branding on Siri, more – 9to5Mac – Apple white labelling Gemini is similar to the Google Search deal in that its outsourcing heavy compute. But also interesting in that it’s making the AI invisible, Apple has hold of the experience and so gains its own AI sovereignty.
The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.
Engram: How DeepSeek Added a Second Brain to Their LLM | rewire.it | rewire.it Blog – China making major strides to move the state of the art in LLMs forward.
How AI Destroys Institutions by Woodrow Hartzog, Jessica M. Silbey :: SSRN – interesting if alarmist paper that indicates the need for organisations to have more control over their intentional use of AI through AI sovereignty.
‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.
Beauty
Dermatologists criticise ‘dystopian’ skincare products aimed at children | Skincare | The Guardian – Dermatologists have criticised an actor’s new skincare brand, calling it “dystopian” for creating face masks for four-year-olds, warning that the beauty industry is now expanding its reach from teenagers to toddlers.
It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.
A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.
China
Apple Reportedly Canceled Orders of Chinese iPhone 17 Pro Displays | MacRumors
Consumer behaviour
A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’”
The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
The surprising truth about who the loneliest generations are – BBC News – interesting read that matches up with research I did for a consumer brand brief that didn’t happen in the end. I wrote about it more here.
How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.
Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.
Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.
Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.
The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.
“It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case
Culture
How hip-hop is shaping the fight for Taiwan’s future | Dazed
Design
The Designer’s Playbook for AI Products | by Dára Sobaloju | Bootcamp | Dec, 2025 | Medium – the old rules still apply mostly
Economics
The Art of Slowing Down: Why the UAE’s Growth Story Is Now Impossible to Ignore – Intern Pierre
The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman (University of Chicago) – the prinicpal burden seems to be on US industry and highlights the difficulty in trying to unwind global supply chains through tariffs
Gadgets
How Oura Ring Capitalizes on Gen Z Women’s Health and Wellness | Vogue
Why are MP3 players making a comeback? | Dazed – also sound quality, in particular the iPods with the Wolfson DACs
Ideas
Nobody knows how large software products work | sean goedecke
Korea
Luxury
Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.
Six thousand new perfumes in 2025: Why manufacturers are flooding the market
Marketing
Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.
That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.
“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”
Materials
Drones: Decoupling Supply Chains from China | Royal United Services Institute
Media
How DVDs and CDs are becoming cool again in the age of streaming – The Washington Post – artefacts are memories and are imbued with meaning in a way that streaming can’t be.
Online
Techrights — Baidu and Yandex Have Overtaken Microsoft in Asia | Techrights
Security
Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”
Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought
SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military.
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
Thailand’s tilt toward China tests treaty alliance with US | Defense News
Software
AI agents and the 90% problem – by Kyle Chan
Exclusive | Meta Buys AI Startup Manus for More Than $2 Billion – WSJ
Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them
Geek Squad Agents reflect on 20th anniversary of Y2K – Best Buy Corporate News and Information
The Politics Of Superintelligence
Wireless
China Issues First Penalty for Starlink Use in Territorial Waters | GCaptain
