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Science & Tech
Hard Numbers: Russia’s oil slump, South Africa mine rescue, Somaliland opposition wins election, Japan buys out workers
Oil tanker SCF Primorye, owned by Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot, transits the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey, April 29, 2024.
3.28 million: Russian exports of crude oil fell to an average of 3.28 million barrels per day in the four weeks leading up to Nov. 17, with shipments from western ports mostly serving Turkey and India falling by nearly 30%. Russia has been trying to restrict flows of oil in coordination with OPEC standards to buoy prices and has pledged further production cuts between March and September of next year.
350: South African authorities are mulling whether to try rescuing at least 350 illegal miners who are hiding in underground shafts at the Stilfontein mine to the southwest of Johannesburg. The miners have remained underground to avoid arrest amid a crackdown on artisanal mining, which is often controlled by gangs. A court order on Monday instructed police to allow those within the mine to leave. Locals say there may be as many as 4,000 miners in the shaft, and authorities are not sure it is safe to send a mission. Some miners have emerged looking frail and malnourished.
63.92: The opposition leader of Somaliland, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahu — better known as “Irro” — won the presidency of the quasi-independent state with 63.92% of the vote, a clear mandate over incumbent Muse Bihi. Irro is promising to boost economic opportunities in Somaliland, especially for women, and hopes to persuade incoming US President Donald Trump to recognize his government independently of Somalia.
9,219: Over four dozen of Japan’s largest companies have paid out 9,219 employees with early retirement and voluntary severance in 2024, roughly triple last year’s numbers. Japanese corporations are historically very reluctant to fire workers, but the yen’s weakness and sluggish growth are forcing companies to streamline with buyouts.Hard Numbers: Doctor vs. machine, Pony rides to an IPO, Hot chips, Foxconn’s crazy demand
4.5 billion: A Chinese self-driving car company, called Pony AI, is attempting to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company, which is backed by the Japanese automaker Toyota among others, is seeking a $4.5 billion valuation for its initial public offering. The company previously tried to go public in the US through a blank-check company, but plans fell apart when China cracked down on such deals.
72: Nvidia's new Blackwell AI chips are reportedly overheating when installed in server racks designed to hold 72 chips. The company has already faced delays due to design flaws with these chips and is now asking suppliers to modify the designs of the racks numerous times. This issue could further delay sales to the largest tech companies in the world, such as Google and Meta.
Donald Trump isn’t finished nominating his presidential Cabinet — and some of his top candidates might have a tricky time getting confirmed, even by a Republican-controlled Senate. Still, Trump’s early picks already offer signs about how he might direct his federal government’s approach to artificial intelligence.
Duane Pozza, a former Federal Trade Commission assistant director in the first Trump administration who is now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, said the government’s approach to AI is at an “inflection point,” and Trump has big decisions to make about how much of Joe Biden’s AI legacy he wants to undo. “The next administration will decide whether to roll back any part of the executive order,” he said, referring to Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI from October 2023, “and how to best implement policies to support AI innovation for US global competition.”
Antitrust the process
Trump’s selection of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz could also have implications for AI. Gaetz’s nomination has drawn intense bipartisan scrutiny over his professional inexperience and brash demeanor, and allegations of sexual misconduct and illegal drug use that were the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation, the findings of which have not yet been released. If confirmed, Gaetz could carry out Trump’s prosecutorial whims by targeting the president’s enemies in Silicon Valley — over the years there have been many, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
But the Justice Department is also one of two antitrust authorities in the United States alongside the Federal Trade Commission. And while we don’t know who Trump will pick to succeed Lina Khan as chair of the FTC — she might resign, but she can technically stay under a successor is confirmed — Gaetz, along with Vice President JD Vance, has signaled sympathies for Khan’s tough-on-tech outlook in the past and even suggested she should stay on under Trump.
Benjamin Sirota, a former Justice Department antitrust prosecutor and current partner at the law firm Kobre & Kim, said the lines between traditional Democratic and Republican stances in antitrust law have blurred. He expects Trump will usher in “a retrenchment from some of the most aggressive policies and priorities of the current regime, but not a wholesale retreat.”
“We could see Trump enforcers seek to rapidly resolve large, pending digital monopolization cases,” especially if they’re looking to cut costs, said Diana Moss, vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute, alluding to cases filed against Google and Amazon under Biden. While she said Trump’s antitrust chiefs may single out disfavored companies, she otherwise expects a return to more traditional methods of determining market power than Khan’s Neo-Brandeisian principles, which look beyond price increases toward broader standards of consumer harm.
With federal investigations into AI companies having started under Biden, it’s unclear whether Trump might target political enemies. One potential target is OpenAI, whose CEO, Sam Altman, is a consistent Democratic Party donor and whose relationship with Microsoft is already reportedly the subject of a federal antitrust investigation.
Keeping China at bay
Trump and Biden both have aggressive stances toward China, so there should be some continuity in litigating the ongoing trade war. The focus under Biden has been pouring funds into chip companies building manufacturing facilities in the United States while enacting export controls to limit China’s ability to get powerful US-made chips.
Hanna Dohmen, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, expects the administration to “continue using the expansive international trade toolbox to restrict China's ability to buy, make, and access AI chips.”
“The Trump administration likely will not try to roll back the CHIPS and Science Act because there is bipartisan support for onshoring semiconductor manufacturing,” she added, noting that the administration is more likely to favor deregulation and tax credits in the future rather than additional CHIPS Act spending.
There are more unknowns than knowns
Plans for the second Trump administration are still coming together, but the proposed Cabinet is full of outsiders without deep track records on artificial intelligence. Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, said it’s his focus to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world,” likely through deregulatory efforts at a time when liberals and climate change activists are deeply concerned by the energy consumption of data servers needed for AI.
Brendan Carr, a Federal Communications Commission member who Trump has nominated to chair the bipartisan agency, has been particularly aggressive toward social media companies, which have long depended on artificial intelligence for content moderation efforts. And much of the government’s involvement with AI will fall under the jurisdiction of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor nominated for defense secretary, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, nominee for director of national intelligence, neither of whom have fleshed out their positions on AI.
But of course, the real influence behind Trump’s AI decision-making — at least while the two are still cozy — may be Elon Musk, who has been tapped to run something called the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and has Trump’s ear.
Musk has been deeply critical of government regulation over the years, frequently feuding with agencies including the Securities and Exchange Committee and the FTC. And while Musk has expressed public concerns about the risks of AI, once calling for a pause on AI development, he has also built his own AI company called xAI that developed the chatbot Grok. Musk has supported California’s proposed AI safety bill but also sued to block the state’s deepfake law. If Musk becomes an influential member of Trump’s team, even outside of a formal Cabinet post, the government’s AI policy may be, well, whatever Elon wants it to be.A hurricane
Artificial intelligence models are getting better at predicting the paths of hurricanes.
Earlier this year, a model called GraphCast from Google’s DeepMind AI lab was able to accurately predict the path of Hurricane Beryl, forecasting that it’d take a turn away from Mexico and hit Texas. That prediction was correct — and came a week earlier than conventional meteorological models. Meanwhile, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ own AI model correctly predicted that Hurricane Francine would hit Louisiana before traditional models. These models can process large amounts of historical data to make their forecasts, while other models such as Nvidia’s FourCastNet work by modeling the entire Earth.
Still, while AI weather models appear good at tracking the direction of hurricanes, they struggle with determining other factors such as the intensity of the storms. So, at least in the near term, these models will work alongside human modelers rather than replace them.
A microchip and the Taiwanese flag in an illustration.
The award marked the first finalized disbursement of the CHIPS Act since it was passed in 2022 and will go toward building TSMC's three new chip factories in Arizona — helping offset the $65 billion cost.
A total of $36 billion has been approved by Congress and directed by the Commerce Department to foreign companies such as TSMC and Samsung, as well as US companies including Intel and Texas Instruments. The delays, in addition to the normal snail’s pace of bureaucracy, stem from the fact that the Commerce Department spent much of the past two years negotiating with semiconductor companies, procuring specific commitments before finalizing the amounts they’d receive.
President Joe Biden needs to disburse the payments quickly because the future of the CHIPS Act is in question. When Donald Trump takes office in January, he may fulfill campaign promises to dismantle the Biden initiative or ask the Republican-controlled Congress to repeal it. Alternatively, the president-elect could carry on with the disbursements, which could further a bipartisan goal of beating back China’s AI ambitions.
President Joe Biden meets with China's President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Lima, Peru, on Nov. 16, 2024.
In a 90-minute meeting on the sidelines of the APEC conference in Lima, Peru, on Saturday, the two world leaders hashed out the agreement after months of reported resistance from China to engage at all in nuclear arms talks.
In a national security memo last month, the Biden administration explicitly prohibited the use of AI to skirt existing protocols around launching nuclear weapons. But China had resisted making a public declaration until now.
The two countries are locked in a race to build up their respective AI capabilities — and that’s deeply intertwined with their military ambitions. The US, which has a technological edge due to having the largest global chip designers and AI software companies, has enacted strict export controls to keep this technology out of China’s hands. With the Trump administration coming to power in January, it’s unclear how Washington’s China policy will change, though it is expected to be similarly aggressive.
In a GZERO Global Stage discussion at the 7th annual Paris Peace Forum, Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO, highlighted the crucial role of science in fostering peace and expressed concerns over rising populism undermining scientific efforts.
"We need good science to navigate these waters... If you don't invest in scientific endeavors, it's going to be problematic," she said.
Ramos also addressed the challenges of artificial intelligence potentially widening global inequalities due to its concentrated development in a few countries. Emphasizing the need for ethical AI, she stated, "We need to invest to change it because AI is amazing. It's a promising tool, so we really need to get it right."
UNESCO is proactively addressing these challenges by framing an international standard for ethical AI, developed in collaboration with 194 countries. "We move away from a technological discussion to a societal one to say, is it enhancing our human rights? Is it not discriminating? Is it helping us with the environmental transition? And if the answer is no, we need to invest to change it because AI is amazing. It's a promising tool, so we really need to get it right," Ramos asserted.
This conversation was presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft at the 7th annual Paris Peace Forum. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical debates on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.