Sentinel minutes for week #4/2025: Trump executive orders, DeepSeek R1, Gaza/Israel hostage exchange.
Sentinel status: Green—no urgent costly action deemed needed from our reserve team.
Top items:
Trump signs orders reshaping the US executive.
Gaza/Israel ceasefire and hostage exchange.
DeepSeek founder meets with the second most powerful official in China.
Geopolitics
The Americas
President Trump signed many executive orders. A few salient ones are: reforming the federal government hiring process, stopping DEI, establishing DOGE, withdrawing from the WHO, declaring illegal immigration a national emergency (c.f. the National Emergencies Act), pausing aid, or removing barriers to AI. He also revoked several executive orders, and in particular, Biden’s Executive Order 14110 on safe AI. Here is a tracker with all the orders, via Ben Shindel.
After an initial impasse, the US and Colombia have reached a deal on deportation. Colombia initially refused military planes with deported immigrants, but backed down after Trump threatened 25% tariffs.
The US Central Valley citrus crop is at risk because immigrant farmworkers, fearing deportation, aren't showing up to pick the crops.
Colombia declared a state of emergency against leftwing guerrilla attacks that lead to 100 deaths.
Europe
Several US and European intelligence officials reportedly believe that ruptures of undersea cables in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage. Undersea cables do rupture (often accidentally) around 100-200 times per year on average.
Sweden seized a ship after an undersea data cable connecting Sweden and Latvia was damaged.
Talks are underway between European allies about the possibility of putting boots on the ground to protect Ukraine from further Russian aggression in the aftermath of a peace deal. Ukrainian officials believe that between 40,000 and 50,000 foreign troops operating as a security force across the 1,000 km frontline could be feasible.
Denmark's Prime Minister and US President Donald Trump reportedly had a heated discussion about the possibility of America gaining control of Greenland or its resources, with some Danish sources describing the call as "horrendous".
British Royal Navy ships were mobilised to respond to a Russian spy ship in the North Sea.Syria's new government has reportedly ended Russia's lease of a port in Tartus.
Hundreds of Swedish troops arrived in Latvia on Saturday to join a Canadian-led multinational brigade along NATO’s eastern flank.
British nuclear submarines were equipped with software designed in Belarus.
Trump has told Putin to end the Ukraine war and ‘make a deal’.
South Korea’s military believes North Korea is sending more troops to Russia.
US reported deployment of modified B61-12 nuclear bombs in Europe.
Farmers in Russia, the world's leading wheat exporter, are finding it difficult to grow grains profitably, leading some to plan to shift away from growing grains at all.
Large demonstrations in Slovakia protested the PM's pro-Russian shift.
Middle East
Israel and Hamas finally agreed on a ceasefire, which has taken effect. Now the hostage swap part is beginning. Hamas will release all women and children hostages, but not male soldiers (yet), Israel will allow 600 truckloads of aid into Gaza each day.
Israeli forces will remain in southern Lebanon beyond a 60-day deadline stipulated in a ceasefire deal because its terms have not been fully implemented, the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Friday.
Trump called on Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices to induce Russia to negotiate on Ukraine
The US moves to re-designate Iran-backed Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, and the UN suspends operations in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen after staff detentions.
Iran currently has about 200 kg of uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% needed for making weapons. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency estimate, that is close to enough material, in principle, if enriched further, for five nuclear weapons.
Israel has decided to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, according to a senior European diplomat.
Asia
More Chinese "barges", which appear to be self-propelled landing ships, were spotted in satellite images of a Guangzhou shipyard taken over the past few months, including a possible prototype that was spotted as early as May 2024.
Taiwan has activated back-up communication for the Matsu Islands as undersea cables were disconnected due to "natural deterioration".
India and China might both build a dam in the Himalayas, making them clash with locals and with each other.
Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has warned of a “third world war” over US and China relations.
A record number of US companies are considering leaving China amid fears of increasing trade tensions between the US and China.
Africa
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a bill allowing land seizures by the state without compensation.
Biorisk
The Trump administration temporarily blocked external communications, halted grant payments, paused the grant review process at the National Institute of Health, and canceled all travel and meeting attendance from all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the NIH and CDC. Bird flu data is not yet being updated. The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published in some form since 1930, halted publication.
War clinics in Ukraine witness a sharp rise in drug-resistant infections. More than 80% of all patients admitted to Feofaniya Hospital had infections caused by microbes which are resistant to antibiotics.
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported an 18.5 per cent case fatality rate for their Lassa fever outbreak, with 10 deaths and 54 confirmed cases recorded between December 30, 2024 and January 5, 2025. In 2024, Nigeria recorded 9,685 suspected cases of Lassa fever, 1,187 confirmed cases and 191 deaths.
A new case of mpox clade 1b was detected in the UK.
Artificial Intelligence
President Trump announced a $500billion AI infrastructure project, Stargate, a joint venture by OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle. Elon Musk has claimed they don’t have the money, and it remains unclear whether they do. No public funds are announced to be invested in the project.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released a new model, R1, and open sourced it. R1 performs comparably to OpenAI’s recent o1 model. This was a surprise to basically everyone, and suggests the gap between the US and China on AI is much smaller than previously thought. Dan Hendrycks writes:
An explanation of DeepSeek: China had the past two years to close the gap and develop a base model comparable to GPT-4. They got that good of a base model last year.
On top of a good base model, recent reasoning advances (e.g., o1) do not require that much compute to replicate. o1 can be replicated without tens of thousands of H100s.
If you know which research dead ends to avoid (e.g., MCTS) and roughly know what research direction to pursue, replication is much easier. These algorithmic insights likely slowly leaked through SF party conversations and other channels. It probably takes a few months once you have the idea for o1 to replicate it.
That's how DeepSeek did it without much compute.
As well as the risks associated with open sourcing powerful AI systems, DeepSeek poses a problem for those calling for the US to race ahead on AI against China, in a dash to superintelligence. Those calling for this, such as Leopold Aschenbrenner, have argued that the safest scenario is where the US has, maintains, and grows a “healthy lead” over China. This now looks significantly less tenable. There are alternative options available to an AI arms race, such as international cooperation.
DeepSeek’s R1 model on OLLAMA has already seen 700K pulls. De-proliferating such models would require highly invasive measures. China created an $8.2B AI investment fund, but it might expand after the founder of DeepSeek met with the second most powerful official in China. Another Chinese lab released an o1-level model.
Forecasters think that there is a 26% chance that the best state of the art general purpose publicly available AI model will be Chinese by the end of the year.
DeepMind expects clinical trials of AI-designed drugs this year.
Nvidia stock plummeted.
> As well as the risks associated with open sourcing powerful AI systems, DeepSeek poses a problem for those calling for the US to race ahead on AI against China, in a dash to superintelligence. Those calling for this, such as Leopold Aschenbrenner, have argued that the safest scenario is where the US has, maintains, and grows a “healthy lead” over China. This now looks significantly less tenable.
Not sure how you quantify "significantly less tenable", but
1.) isn't the difference in compute available still the largest factor, even assuming faster algorithmic convergence
2.) o1/r1 are far from superintelligent systems
3.) I still expect it to make a decisive difference if you can deploy 10 vs. 1000 vs. 1000000 instances of your superintelligent system
I've really enjoyed reading these over the past while. Thanks so much for all your hard work.
I had a, probably not so significant question, about the "natural deterioration" thing.
In another part of the update, in the Europe part, talking about undersea cables rupturing, somewhere between 100-200 a year, would this rupture fit into one of these "natural deterioration" breaks? and was the 100-200 a figure for Europe, or globally?
Not super important question, just curious. If you had any places I could read more if you didn't wanna answer feel free to link them, too.
Thanks again!