Sentinel minutes for week #52/2024

Status: Greenish 🟢

Top items:

• The CDC found mutations that may enable upper-airway infection and greater transmission in an analysis of H5N1 specimens from the US’s first severe case in Louisiana, but the changes would have been more concerning if they were found in animal hosts or in the early stages of infection.

• Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its latest model, which is reportedly competitive with GPT-4o on some metrics and which apparently cost only $5 million to train.

• A power cable carrying power from Finland to Estonia broke down. The EU claimed that the ship responsible is part of Russia’s “shadow fleet.”.

Geopolitics

Eurasia

Putin says Russia is ready to compromise with Trump on the Ukraine war.

Sweden says that China denied a request for prosecutors to board a ship linked to the cutting of two undersea cables in the Baltic. Sentinel previously covered the severing of these tables. The Yi Peng 3 has now left the waters it had been anchored in despite an ongoing investigation.

Meanwhile, a power cable linking Finland and Estonia broke down this week, with the head of the Finnish grid saying that sabotage could not be ruled out. Finnish authorities boarded the ship. European officials later accused Russia of sabotaging the cable, the Estlink 2, with the ship responsible accused of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet.”. NATO has said it will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea in response.

The owner of a Russian cargo ship which sank off the Spanish coast following three explosions has said that the sinking was an act of terrorism, though they did not specify who they thought was responsible. The company has been linked to the Russian defence ministry.

An Azerbaijan Airlines flight, which had been due to land in Russia, crash-landed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. It’s more likely than not that Russian air defenses hit the plane. Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised but stopped short of claiming responsibility.

Poland scrambled fighter jets as Russian launched missiles into Ukraine, but reiterated that such actions are standard procedure when there is a perceived threat to Poland’s borders and airspace.

A UK anti-corruption minister has been accused of having taken £4bn in bribes for a Russia-funded nuclear plant in Bangladesh.

Italy’s cabinet has passed a law decree that allows it to continue supplying Ukraine until the end of 2025.

Elon Musk has backed Germany’s AfD party in an opinion piece in German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. The text of his opinion piece is hard to find in Google, but can be read here.

The US imposed sanctions on Georgia’s former prime minister Ivanishvili.

Dutch exports to Kyrgyzstan, i.e., transshipments to Russia, are still high, despite sanctions.

Middle East

Syrian opposition factions announced that they will dissolve and merge under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.

The Institute for the Study of War thinks that promises by HTS of ethnic and religious reconciliation are fragile. The interim government has established a reconciliation program under which former regime elements are granted amnesty in exchange for disarmament and registering with the interim government. The terms of this amnesty have not been publicly discussed, and the lists could be used by sectarian actors to target former regime elements in the coastal areas, who would be predominantly Alawite. The interim government began targeting “criminal gang leaders” who did not hand over weapons and settle with the interim government in Latakia on December 25. An old video surfaced on December 25 showing Sunni fighters desecrating a major Alawite shrine in Aleppo, which could increase Alawite fears.

The NYT reports on Israeli documents authorizing the killing of up to 20 civilians for each “combatant,” and how estimations were based on faulty assumptions—e.g., counting the number of phones in a sector when there was no electricity, and thus no power for phones.

The Famine Early Warning System (FEWS.net) removed a famine warning for Gaza after pressure from Israel and the US, the latter of which controls its funding, through USAID. It’s sad to see an early warning organization succumb to political pressures. Here is a statement from USAID questioning population numbers—and thus whether the technical definition of famine will be met

Israeli forces raided a Gaza hospital.

Israel struck an airport in Yemen, where the WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus was present, injuring a UN colleague of his who is now in a stable condition. The WHO head said on Friday that he was not sure he would survive the air strike.

A US anti-missile THAAD system was used in Israel to intercept a projectile from Yemen.

An internal publication of Iran's IRGC says it fears anti-regime unrest following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and Iran’s judiciary has issued instructions to attempt to prevent protests. But Iran has also lifted a ban on Google Play and WhatsApp after 2 years.

The Houthis are threatening to expand attacks to Israeli ports and other locations.

Africa

Russia continues to move out of its military bases in Syria and move more military assets into Libya. In Libya, Grand Mufti Sheikh Sadiq Gharyani called on Libyans to expel Russian forces.

The French military is withdrawing or being ousted from more African countries.

The Nigerian media is up in arms after a survey-based report estimated that there were 2.2M kidnappings, of which 600K resulted in deaths, per year. The estimates were made using a survey-based method: 3.2% of households reported a kidnapping in the last year. We are not convinced by the methodology—consider lizardman’s constant—though they did interview 12K households. On the other hand, a friend with Nigerian family says these numbers are plausible. This number of deaths would correspond to ~2x the peak homicide rate in El Salvador.

Asia-Pacific

Yields on China's 2-year bonds may soon fall below 1%. This, together with other market signals, suggest that the Chinese economy is facing strong deflation pressure. Chinese deflation could trigger a global debt deflation spiral.

Americas

The US may exceed its debt limit by January 14, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In aggregate, forecasters believe that there’s a 98.5% chance (range: 97% to >99.5%) that the US will raise or entirely eliminate its debt ceiling in 2025. One reason that our team’s forecasts weren’t higher is that they are accounting for the possibility of weird things happening, such as Trump (or Biden) minting the coin.

The certification of the US Presidential election will take place on January 6, 2025. One forecaster thinks there’s only a 15% chance that more than 5% of House Democrats will vote to block the certification of Trump’s victory in any state.

Trump's transition team wants the US to pull out of the WHO.

Biorisk

The CDC found mutations that may enable upper-airway infection and greater transmission in an analysis of H5N1 specimens from the US’s first severe case in Louisiana. In some respects, the mutations were similar to those found in the severely ill patient in Canada. However, the mutations likely occurred when the patient’s disease was advanced; the mutations were not found in poultry and did not occur before the patient contracted the virus or even during the early stages of the disease. This means that spread to close contacts was almost certainly not facilitated. Moreover, it isn’t too surprising that mutations occurred during the clinical course of the disease, because flu viruses do tend to develop adaptive mutations in new hosts.

Two more confirmed cases of H5N1 were found in dairy workers in California, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in California to 37 and the total number in the US to 65.

Wastewater sampling in Southeast San Francisco showed a spike in H5 influenza on December 20, but recent readings suggest that it was an outlier.

The WHO reported that the "mystery illness" that had recently killed several dozen people in the Democratic Republic of Congo was "acute respiratory infections complicated by malaria."

One researcher expects to see a 150% increase in Parkinson’s disease cases in years to come because of Covid.

Tech

Semiconductors

The Biden administration announced a new US trade investigation into older Chinese semiconductors that could result in more US tariffs on chips from China.

Taiwan’s science ministry warned that spending cuts as a result of legislation passed by Taiwan’s opposition last week could hit funding for semiconductors and AI.

Social media

Trump asked the US Supreme Court to delay the pending TikTok ban in the United States, which would come into effect on January 19th (a day before Trump takes office), if the company cannot be sold.

Musk de-monetized people on Twitter arguing against H1B visas.

AI

OpenAI

The Information reported that in an undisclosed agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI last year (2023), the companies agreed to consider AGI reached only when OpenAI develops systems that have the “capability” to generate the profit cap for early investors such as Microsoft: around $100 billion.

The determination of whether AGI is achieved is significant, because OpenAI’s non-profit board—which nominally controls OpenAI, and whose duty is specified as being to humanity rather than investors—is tasked with making the determination, when appropriate, that AGI has been attained, which has the consequence that AGI systems are excluded from commercial agreements with Microsoft and other investors. This has been called the “AGI clause”.

In recent weeks, there have been reports that OpenAI wants to remove the AGI clause. On Friday, OpenAI outlined their plan to shift to a new for-profit structure, a public-benefit corporation. Miles Brundage, who recently quit OpenAI and had led policy there, commented that he had serious concerns about the plan: “I worry about the non-profit being a side thing that gives license to the PBC to become even more of a “normal company,” while not compensating in key areas where this move could be detrimental (e.g. opposition to sensible regulation).”

Microsoft is working to reduce its reliance on OpenAI and integrate non-OpenAI models into 365 co-pilot products.

The family of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji are demanding that the FBI investigate his death. They have also hired their own private investigator and did a second autopsy. They say: “Suchir’s apartment was ransacked , sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him in bathroom based on blood spots.”

DeepSeek

Chinese AI lab Deepseek released a model on par with Claude 3.5/GPT-4o, trained for “just” $5M. By doing “everything right,” and being very familiar with the architecture, DeepSeek is able to punch way above its weight. In aggregate, our forecasters believe there’s roughly a 3.5% chance (range: 1% to 7%) that a DeepSeek model will be outperforming the best OpenAI model on December 31, 2025.

Natural disasters

Geological evidence suggests that there's a 1 in 6 chance of a massive volcanic eruption this century. According to Lloyd’s, this would potentially reduce global GDP by 0.2% to 0.7% over 5 years and temporarily cool the globe by perhaps 1C, though this would be an average, and the impact on some regions would be much greater.