Sentinel minutes for week #47/2024. Internet cables, AGI Manhattan Project, DeepSeek model.
Status: greenish.
Top items:
Biden and Xi agree humans should control nukes,
a US govt commission recommends an AI Manhattan Project to race to AGI,
AI development continues to advance, with DeepSeek soon to release a powerful model,
Two internet cables damaged in the Baltic sea
Artificial Intelligence
Deepseek, a Chinese AI company, has developed a reasoning AI model which appears to rival OpenAI’s o1 models. DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview appears to out-perform o1-preview on mathematics, is similar on coding, and weaker on other tasks. Deepseek say they will release their model weights.
This might suggest that Chinese AI companies are less far behind American AI companies than thought. However, we can’t be sure what AI systems OpenAI might have developed internally. Two weeks ago, Sam Altman said in an interview that he was excited for AGI in 2025.
METR (formerly ARC evals) published a paper evaluating AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts.
In general, we find that AI agents perform better than humans at AI research engineering tasks when both are given 2 hours, but they perform worse at higher time budgets […] Compared to our tasks, real-world ML research often involves much larger projects using more compute over longer periods of time, so we think that the high-budget results are the most important.
Eli Lifland, a top forecaster and friend of Sentinel wrote that this significantly shortens his AI timelines.
President Biden and President Xi agreed that humans, not AI, should control nuclear weapons. The White House said in a statement “The two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons”
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) published a 793 page report with its top recommendation being that…
Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability. AGI is generally defined as systems that are as good as or better than human capabilities across all cognitive domains and would surpass the sharpest human minds at every task.
USCC commissioner Jacob Helberg, told Reuters that “China is racing towards AGI... It's critical that we take them extremely seriously.” Garrison Lovely, a colour journalist covering AI topics, writes that:
Despite this length, there are only a handful of mentions of AGI, and all of them are in the sections recommending that the US race to build it.
In other words, there is no evidence in the report to support Helberg’s claim that "China is racing towards AGI.”
Others have pointed out that Jacob Helberg and Sam Altman are close friends: Altman officiated Helberg’s wedding.
Max Tegmark wrote an article in response to the report, calling an AGI race a “suicide race”.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei said at the recent AI safety summit in San Francisco that mandatory safety tests are needed for AI models.
Geopolitics
Middle East
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu, former defense chief Gallant, and Hamas leader al-Masri, who is likely dead.
Lebanon is seeking changes to a US ceasefire proposal to ensure a quicker withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon.
The IAEA condemned Iran for the second time this year for failing to cooperate fully.
Nearly 100 trucks carrying food for Palestinians were looted in Gaza. Hamas security forces retaliated by killing over 20 gang members involved in the looting. Israel cited distribution challenges as the main obstacle in aiding Gaza.
Europe
As the Biden Administration draws to a close, the US gave Ukraine permission to launch ATACMS into Russia. Two days later, Ukraine fired ATACMS into Russia, and a day after that, Ukraine launched UK Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia.
Partially in response to Ukraine's use of US ATACMS and UK Storm Shadow missiles in Russia, Putin announced that Russia had changed its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for a potential nuclear response to a conventional attack. The new doctrine would allow a nuclear response to a conventional attack on Russia by any country that is supported by a nuclear power. However, as the AP notes, the new doctrine "is formulated broadly to avoid a firm commitment to use nuclear weapons and keep Putin’s options open."
After Ukraine fired US ATACMS and UK Storm Shadow missiles into Russia, Russia fired a ballistic missile at the city of Dnipro into Ukraine. It was an experimental, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with hypersonic capabilities, but not an ICBM. However, it was not the first nuclear-capable missile the Russia has fired into Ukraine; Russia has also used Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles in Ukraine. While Putin is clearly expressing a nuclear threat with the launch of a nuclear-capable IRBM into Ukraine last week, fears over the use of hypersonic missiles, in general, may be misplaced.
Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables—one between Finland and Germany, the other between Sweden and Lithuania—were damaged. The German defense minister said that he assumes that the damage was an act of sabotage.
A Chinese-flagged cargo ship, suspected of causing the damage, was being monitored by the Danish navy and investigated by Swedish police. The ship seems to have crossed both submarine cables at times matching when they broke. Many Western countries believe that Russia was ultimately behind the damage.
Estonia's foreign minister has said that European troops could be needed to secure a peace deal in Ukraine. He said that although the best security guarantee for Ukraine is NATO membership, Europe (perhaps the UK-led Joint Expeditionary force including the Nordic and Baltic states) would have to put boots on the ground if NATO membership for Ukraine is opposed by Washington.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has said that a "freeze" of the conflict along the existing frontlines would be unacceptable to Russia.
An article in Foreign Policy argues that Russia is running out of some weapons.
Bloomberg News reports that North Korea may end up sending up to 100,000 troops to help the Russian war effort.
When asked about the possibility of a US cut in defense funding for Ukraine, Ukraine's President Zelensky told Fox News that, "If they will cut, I think we will lose."
A new Gallup poll found that more than half of all Ukrainians now want Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. Support for the war has fallen in every region in Ukraine from 2022 to 2024.
As Russia has ramped up sabotage efforts in Europe, with targets that include defense companies, US officials are now warning that US defense companies' facilities and staff overseas, and perhaps in the US as well, could also be targeted.
Russia has begun production of nuclear shelters.
United States
US President-elect Trump continued to pick more Cabinet members from among the anti-establishment wing of US politics. Some observers argue that Trump’s cabinet picks are generally not there to steward their departments, but to dismantle them. On the other hand, Ian Bremmer remarked, "it’s not like trump’s nominees are going to stay in their posts for long." One of them, Matt Gaetz, facing allegations of sex trafficking and drug use, quit before he could start..
While Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, several of his Cabinet picks so far are tied to The Heritage Foundation's presidential transition roadmap.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining their plans for how to greatly reduce the size and budget of the US federal government.
The FBI arrested a Florida man who has been charged with planning to plant and remote-detonate a bomb at the New York Stock Exchange.
Based on a possible increase in tariffs after Trump, it seems advisable for our US readers to buy big-ticket items soon, perhaps either during the upcoming Black Friday (November 29) or after-Christmas sales—but in any case before the incoming Trump administration.
Biorisk
In the US, a child in California has been diagnosed with H5N1 bird flu. The child had no known contacts with any infected animal, and authorities are investigating a potential wild-bird exposure.
Our forecasting team made estimates of the infection fatality rate that H5N1 would have in OECD countries, were it to become pandemic. Our aggregated 90% confidence interval was 0.07% to 9%, with our aggregated median point estimate for the IFR of 1% (range, 0.2% to 2%).
It’s important to note the infection fatality rate is not the same as the case fatality rate, which does not capture asymptomatic infections—and is also often estimated based on detected cases. The IFR isn’t based on detections or symptoms, but rather on actual infections. In general, an IFR of X implies a CFR greater than X.
The first case of mpox clade I was diagnosed in the US. And the WHO added another mpox vaccine to their emergency listing. This allows countries & procurement processes to coordinate a bit better around acquiring it.
A whooping cough epidemic was declared in New Zealand.
Cyber
T-Mobile was hacked as part of a broader Chinese effort.
The US Secret Service has been using data from phones to locate users, without a warrant.
Climate
Parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef are seeing their worst-ever losses in 39 years of monitoring.