Sentinel minutes for week #49/2024: Damascus falls, Congo mystery illness

Status: Greenish 🟢

Top items:

• A mystery disease outbreak in DR Congo killed at least 31 people and resulted in hundreds of cases, but forecasters believe it is very unlikely that this heralds the next pandemic.

• Islamist rebels have toppled the Assad regime in Syria. This is likely to weaken the influence of Russia and Iran in the region while strengthening Turkey’s. Hezbollah supply routes from Iran could be cut off in the short-term.

Geopolitics

Middle East and Africa

The Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, and the rebel group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has taken control of Damascus. Former President Bashar al-Assad has fled the country. He and his family are in Moscow, where they have been given asylum. This sudden victory for HTS, which was formerly affiliated with Al Qaeda, caps years of work by the group to professionalize its military and build diplomatic links with multiple groups in Syria.

Regime change in Syria is causing a seismic shift in spheres of influence in the region, and ripples from these events will be felt for years to come. Russia, which had backed Assad, will lose much of its influence in the country.

With diminished Russian power in Turkey's backyard, Turkey's influence will grow—and that will hurt the Kurds in northern Syria. Iran's supply lines to Hezbollah will also be cut at least in the short term, and thus Iran's power in the region will be diminished. If a new, stable government can be formed in Syria, it is possible that development of both the Arab Gas Pipeline and the Qatar-Turkey Pipeline will proceed.

Russia moved some naval assets away from its base in Tartus, Syria, and is expanding its presence in Libya, thanks to a growing partnership with the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar. Russia has refurbished at least three air bases in the country this year. Libya, in turn, serves as a base for Russia’s fast-growing operations in Africa. The Haftar family, which controls eastern Libya, has become increasingly powerful, in part through growing access to oil revenues and substantial military purchases and support from Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Tensions between two Syrian rebel groups, the aforementioned HTS and the Syrian National Army (SNA), have been escalating.

An ally of Turkey’s President Erdogan declared that Aleppo, in Syria, is fundamentally “Turkish and Muslim”.

Senegal and Chad asked French troops to leave. France's presence in Africa has declined a lot over the past few years.

Europe

Estonia launched large-scale NATO exercises near the border with Russia, together with France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Latvia.

Georgia's opposition leader was dragged from his party's HQ into a police car, as part of a continued crackdown on dissenters by the pro-Russian government.

Romania’s Constitutional Court nullified the results of the first round of the Presidential election, citing election interference by Russia and campaign finance violations by the pro-Russian candidate. Russian influence in Romania could have implications for NATO’s weapons systems in the country. TikTok, meanwhile, took down a cluster of pro-Russian influencers in the country.

The Czech Foreign Minister claimed that up to 100 suspicious incidents in Europe this year could be attributed to Russia, including espionage and influence operations.

East Asia

China banned the export of various raw materials to the US, including gallium, germanium and antimony, to the US.

South Korea’s President briefly declared martial law, citing unspecified threats from North Korea. There almost certainly wasn’t any imminent threat from North Korea, and it was probably declared because of a budgetary deadlock in the country. It was reversed in the National Assembly as the ruling and opposition parties both opposed it.

Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon compromised at least 8 telecommunications companies, according to a US official. The US does not believe that any of these companies have fully removed the hackers from their network. A large number of Americans had their phone metadata stolen and a very small group of individuals had their audio calls and text messages intercepted.

Biorisk

A mystery ‘flu-like’ illness in the south-west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed between 31 and 143 people, and resulted in hundreds of cases. The disease appears to be particularly severe in children. One expert with a good track record is encouraged by the response of national and international authorities, and believes that it is not currently spreading exponentially. Hong Kong tightened airport health checks in response to the outbreak, and Italy is conducting further testing after a patient was hospitalized with flu-like symptoms upon returning from the DR Congo. The WHO reported that all severe cases were apparently severely malnourished, and is considering acute pneumonia, influenza, COVID-19, measles and malaria as potential causal factors, with malnutrition as a contributing factor. In aggregate, forecasters believe that it is exceedingly unlikely that more than 10,000 deaths associated with the outbreak will be reported by a credible media outlet by the end of February 2025, with forecasts ranging from <0.01% to 0.8%.

A single mutation in the bovine strain of the H5N1 virus currently circulating among US dairy cows could facilitate its attachment to human cells, enabling person-to-person spread. However, it is likely that other mutations would be needed for the virus to prefer human cell receptors to avian receptors, and our forecasters do not think that the strain is “one mutation away” from causing a pandemic, as was implied by some media outlets.

The CDC confirmed that a California child who tested positive for H5N1 last month was infected with the bovine strain of the virus, and that they had no known contact with an animal.

California also reported that H5N1 is present in more retail raw milk, that the virus infected two more dairy workers, and that 11 more dairy herds have been infected (bringing the total in the state to 504).

The UK Government ordered 5 million doses of an H5 influenza vaccine, for pandemic preparedness.

Animals in the Wuhan wet market were infected with a virus during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, although it is not clear which virus it was.

Tech

Sam Altman again declared that AGI might arrive "soon", in an interview at the New York Times's Dealbook summit. OpenAI is also reportedly in discussions to get rid of their AGI clause, where a determination that AGI is achieved, stops Microsoft and other investors from accessing and profiting off the technology.

OpenAI announced that it would release products over 12 days, with their new o1 model being released as part of this flurry. This new model performs better than o1-preview. It’s currently the most powerful AI system that the public has access to. Unlike o1-preview, users are also able to use the image modality. Users that want to get the most benefits from increased “thinking time”, need to pay $200 a month, on a new subscription tier.

In o1’s system card, it was revealed that the system sometimes tries to exfiltrate itself from its environment, when told it will be shut down, and when instructed that the only thing that matters is it achieving its goals. Fortunately this particular system was not capable of actually exfiltrating itself. Some commentators have claimed it is unrealistic to expect that AI systems will be told to only take actions in the service of their goals, but at least two of our forecasters disagree with this.

Google DeepMind announced GenCast, an AI system that outperforms the state of the art weather prediction ENS forecast by up to 20%. Unlike current weather prediction systems, which have to run on supercomputers for significant periods of time, GenCast takes only 8 minutes on a single TPU.

Google DeepMind also announced Genie 2, an AI model that generates playable 3D environments from a single prompt image.

The Biden administration announced a round of restrictions on chip exports and chip making equipment to China.

xAI announced an expansion of its Memphis supercomputer to 1 million GPUs, from 100k. Already the biggest publicly known singular AI supercomputer, this would represent a significant expansion.

Hackers are using AI to mine datasets of sensitive user data to aid in phishing cyberattacks.

OpenAI announced a partnership with Anduril, a US startup that produces missiles, lethal drones, and software for the US military. Anduril also announced that they’ve partnered with Palantir to use defense data for AI training.

Meta plans to build $10 billion worth of undersea internet cables for its exclusive use.