We must improve our strategic and tactical adaptation, particularly in the wake of the events of last week. Algorithmic support to military learning and adaptation at all levels will help.

Well, there are five key things that need to occur.

• First, military institutions must build and sustain environmental awareness: This includes fields such as geopolitics, national policy, demography, technologies, and national and institutional relationships.
• Second, they must develop a view of what is likely to succeed in that environment, from the tactical to the strategic level. The development of this view of what is likely to result in success and the extensive testing of such views by military organizations is crucial.
• Military organisations need to make changes that get them closer to their view of fitness and learn from those changes. This includes new and evolved doctrine and organisations.
• They must retain and share knowledge in themselves and in individuals about the information that improves their chances of success. This includes the ability to collect and absorb lessons, disseminate the implications of these lessons (new tactics and strategies, evolved training and education) and continue to learn based on the interaction of the institution with its environment.
• Finally, military organisations need to measure success and failure of engagement with the environment: This is the capacity of an institution to gauge its actions in moving toward this definition of fitness, which leads to further change in institutional and individual actions, objectives, and notions of suitability.

When and Why Do Autocrats Purge Militaries?

Some purges of the military take place within a more general crackdown against political and other elites, as in Stalinist Russia during the Great Terror, or Xi Jinping’s current shakeups of the PLA under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns. Others prepare large-scale mobilizations, as when Adolf Hitler purged the German armed forces a year before the invasion of Poland, or they come before an escalation of an ongoing conflict, as in Stalin’s 1941 purges.

When an established leader feels vulnerable, he might purge the military as part of “coup-proofing.” Officials can become scapegoats for a war going badly, as with Vladimir Putin’s 2024 purges of senior defense officials. Sometimes leaders can micro-manage military policy (as Putin has done intermittently since the start of the war), and this is a sign of weakness and insecurity.

1. Understand how authoritarianism wins: by picking off competing power centers

2. How authoritarianism loses: the other power centers refuse to be cowed

3. How democracy wins: by building power outside the executive

AI Advances Fastest When We Find Unnatural Ways of Doing Things

LLMs3 have been making more and more tasks look “like chess”, amenable to efficient automation. There are still many tasks they can’t handle, but the boundary keeps moving.

One could interpret this as the unfolding of a single cluster of innovations around LLM architectures and training. In this scenario, the transformer architecture provided a single leap forward in “squishy skills”, and over the last couple of years we’ve just been applying it at increasing scale and in cleverer ways. In that case, we might eventually hit a wall, with tasks like childrearing and corporate strategy waiting for another breakthrough that could be many years away.

Alternatively, perhaps the road from GPT-3.5 to Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2 and o3 has included further progress on the squishy side of things. I’m not sure how to rigorously define this, let alone measure it, but I believe there is a real question here. If we are seeing progress on that side, then even tasks that require deep judgement may soon look “like chess”, where AIs can outdo us, and human capability won’t seem so impressive. If not, then some skills may continue to elude AI for a while, and we’ll say that humans are uniquely suited to those things.

I’m not sure which track we’re on. I wish we had more information about how OpenAI’s latest models have racked up such impressive scores on FrontierMath and Humanity’s Last Exam. That might shed a bit of light. But I’m sure we’ll learn more soon. Whichever skills continue to seem like the best fit for the still-mysterious workings of the human brain, will be the last to fall to AI.

Subscribed

We must improve our strategic and tactical adaptation, particularly in the wake of the events of last week. Algorithmic support to military learning and adaptation at all levels will help.

Well, there are five key things that need to occur.

• First, military institutions must build and sustain environmental awareness: This includes fields such as geopolitics, national policy, demography, technologies, and national and institutional relationships.
• Second, they must develop a view of what is likely to succeed in that environment, from the tactical to the strategic level. The development of this view of what is likely to result in success and the extensive testing of such views by military organizations is crucial.
• Military organisations need to make changes that get them closer to their view of fitness and learn from those changes. This includes new and evolved doctrine and organisations.
• They must retain and share knowledge in themselves and in individuals about the information that improves their chances of success. This includes the ability to collect and absorb lessons, disseminate the implications of these lessons (new tactics and strategies, evolved training and education) and continue to learn based on the interaction of the institution with its environment.
• Finally, military organisations need to measure success and failure of engagement with the environment: This is the capacity of an institution to gauge its actions in moving toward this definition of fitness, which leads to further change in institutional and individual actions, objectives, and notions of suitability.

The only platform not owned by billionaires? Really? You sure about that?

Facebook, TikTok, Twitter (back before it became the gathering ground for the Hitler Youth brigade), Instagram, and others, there was a time when they weren’t owned by “billionaires,” either. There was a time when Amazon, for example, was owned by this clown:

The Tipping Point: Growth at All Costs

The moment a social media platform reaches mainstream adoption, the stakes shift. No longer just a cool tool for early adopters, the platform has become a full-fledged business. Investors start demanding returns. Advertisers see a goldmine of attention. And the pressure builds—not just to grow, but to dominate.

What was once a company built on innovation suddenly pivots to a strategy of growth at all costs:

Oracle, which has secret partnerships with Israel, has told employees to love the country or work elsewhere.

Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.

And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.

Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.

While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.

You rarely see legacy media outlets creating the kind of branded sponsorship content that’s the bread and butter of the Creator Economy. To just give one example, the Washington Post has 7 million followers on Instagram, and there are probably lots of brands that would love to be featured in its images and video, especially since that audience skews younger. Yet I can find no evidence of any sponsored content there. I found the same thing when I checked out the Instagram accounts for CNN (20 million followers), LA Times (1.2 million followers), and Vanity Fair (9.2 million followers).

We must improve our strategic and tactical adaptation, particularly in the wake of the events of last week. Algorithmic support to military learning and adaptation at all levels will help.

Well, there are five key things that need to occur.

• First, military institutions must build and sustain environmental awareness: This includes fields such as geopolitics, national policy, demography, technologies, and national and institutional relationships.
• Second, they must develop a view of what is likely to succeed in that environment, from the tactical to the strategic level. The development of this view of what is likely to result in success and the extensive testing of such views by military organizations is crucial.
• Military organisations need to make changes that get them closer to their view of fitness and learn from those changes. This includes new and evolved doctrine and organisations.
• They must retain and share knowledge in themselves and in individuals about the information that improves their chances of success. This includes the ability to collect and absorb lessons, disseminate the implications of these lessons (new tactics and strategies, evolved training and education) and continue to learn based on the interaction of the institution with its environment.
• Finally, military organisations need to measure success and failure of engagement with the environment: This is the capacity of an institution to gauge its actions in moving toward this definition of fitness, which leads to further change in institutional and individual actions, objectives, and notions of suitability.

When and Why Do Autocrats Purge Militaries?

Some purges of the military take place within a more general crackdown against political and other elites, as in Stalinist Russia during the Great Terror, or Xi Jinping’s current shakeups of the PLA under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns. Others prepare large-scale mobilizations, as when Adolf Hitler purged the German armed forces a year before the invasion of Poland, or they come before an escalation of an ongoing conflict, as in Stalin’s 1941 purges.

When an established leader feels vulnerable, he might purge the military as part of “coup-proofing.” Officials can become scapegoats for a war going badly, as with Vladimir Putin’s 2024 purges of senior defense officials. Sometimes leaders can micro-manage military policy (as Putin has done intermittently since the start of the war), and this is a sign of weakness and insecurity.

1. Understand how authoritarianism wins: by picking off competing power centers

2. How authoritarianism loses: the other power centers refuse to be cowed

3. How democracy wins: by building power outside the executive

AI Advances Fastest When We Find Unnatural Ways of Doing Things

LLMs3 have been making more and more tasks look “like chess”, amenable to efficient automation. There are still many tasks they can’t handle, but the boundary keeps moving.

One could interpret this as the unfolding of a single cluster of innovations around LLM architectures and training. In this scenario, the transformer architecture provided a single leap forward in “squishy skills”, and over the last couple of years we’ve just been applying it at increasing scale and in cleverer ways. In that case, we might eventually hit a wall, with tasks like childrearing and corporate strategy waiting for another breakthrough that could be many years away.

Alternatively, perhaps the road from GPT-3.5 to Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2 and o3 has included further progress on the squishy side of things. I’m not sure how to rigorously define this, let alone measure it, but I believe there is a real question here. If we are seeing progress on that side, then even tasks that require deep judgement may soon look “like chess”, where AIs can outdo us, and human capability won’t seem so impressive. If not, then some skills may continue to elude AI for a while, and we’ll say that humans are uniquely suited to those things.

I’m not sure which track we’re on. I wish we had more information about how OpenAI’s latest models have racked up such impressive scores on FrontierMath and Humanity’s Last Exam. That might shed a bit of light. But I’m sure we’ll learn more soon. Whichever skills continue to seem like the best fit for the still-mysterious workings of the human brain, will be the last to fall to AI.

Subscribed

We must improve our strategic and tactical adaptation, particularly in the wake of the events of last week. Algorithmic support to military learning and adaptation at all levels will help.

Well, there are five key things that need to occur.

• First, military institutions must build and sustain environmental awareness: This includes fields such as geopolitics, national policy, demography, technologies, and national and institutional relationships.
• Second, they must develop a view of what is likely to succeed in that environment, from the tactical to the strategic level. The development of this view of what is likely to result in success and the extensive testing of such views by military organizations is crucial.
• Military organisations need to make changes that get them closer to their view of fitness and learn from those changes. This includes new and evolved doctrine and organisations.
• They must retain and share knowledge in themselves and in individuals about the information that improves their chances of success. This includes the ability to collect and absorb lessons, disseminate the implications of these lessons (new tactics and strategies, evolved training and education) and continue to learn based on the interaction of the institution with its environment.
• Finally, military organisations need to measure success and failure of engagement with the environment: This is the capacity of an institution to gauge its actions in moving toward this definition of fitness, which leads to further change in institutional and individual actions, objectives, and notions of suitability.

Some Senate Republicans took issue Wednesday with President Trump’s escalating criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and his false assertion that Ukraine provoked the ongoing war with Russia, now in its third year.

Trump’s “dictator” remark came in a scathing post on his TruthSocial social account, and followed comments by Zelenskyy earlier in the day that he “would like to see more truth from the Trump team.”

The only platform not owned by billionaires? Really? You sure about that?

Facebook, TikTok, Twitter (back before it became the gathering ground for the Hitler Youth brigade), Instagram, and others, there was a time when they weren’t owned by “billionaires,” either. There was a time when Amazon, for example, was owned by this clown:

The Tipping Point: Growth at All Costs

The moment a social media platform reaches mainstream adoption, the stakes shift. No longer just a cool tool for early adopters, the platform has become a full-fledged business. Investors start demanding returns. Advertisers see a goldmine of attention. And the pressure builds—not just to grow, but to dominate.

What was once a company built on innovation suddenly pivots to a strategy of growth at all costs:

Oracle, which has secret partnerships with Israel, has told employees to love the country or work elsewhere.

Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.

And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.

Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.

While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.

New Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and acting Antitrust Division chief Omeed Assefi endorsed the 2023 merger guidelines. There’s a new bipartisan consensus.

Some big news today on the political antitrust front. The most consequential antitrust power struggle you’ve never heard of has been won… by the good guys. The short story is the Trump administration just said they will enforce antitrust law to stop harmful mergers using the guidelines that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter helped create in 2023.

Here’s the longer version. For years, BIG has been writing about the problems with corporate consolidation, a phenomenon which raises prices, lowers quality, harms wages, and fosters shortages. And consolidation is a result of too many big corporate combinations, when two companies combine into one so they can reduce competition in a market. Corporate mergers, I’ve noted over and over, ruin everything. But mergers weren’t always common in America. So where did this consolidation craze come from? And how can it be stopped?

We were warned that this day was coming. We, like the Europeans, just hoped it wouldn’t. My new piece on the implications for Pacific security of last week’s geopolitical earthquake in Europe.

As I watched with growing unease the statements by Trump, Vance, Hegseth and Kellogg last week, it became clear that the political earthquake that hit Europe last week would also have aftershocks across Asia. In this piece, I conduct an initial assessment of the key impacts of the new Trump Doctrine for working with allies and authoritarian regimes, and the implications for Australia.

There have been many interpretations of the behaviour of the new US administration in Europe and America. Perhaps the best description might be offered by Vladimir Lenin, who is reputed to have stated: “There are decades where nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen.”

This shift has been described by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal as peace through weakness. In an era in which aggressive, technologically advanced and industrialised authoritarians believe the time has come to reorder the international system, Trump’s retreat from the world will only provoke and embolden dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping.

This piece was published yesterday by the Sydney Morning Herald.

#1: Trump’s Early Honeymoon Is Over—And the Gender Divide Remains

The weekend before Trump’s inauguration, 49% of young Americans (18-29) in our SocialSphere tracker expressed optimism about his presidency—likely fueled as much by frustration with Biden as pure excitement for Trump.

• In Biden’s final days, his approval among young voters was just 34%.
• Only 23% believed he met their expectations.
• 45% felt his presidency had negatively impacted their lives.

#2: Economic Concerns Dominate Gen Z’s Political Priorities

#3: Cultural Issues Still Matter, But They’re Not the Main Event

While cultural issues still exert influence, economic challenges—rising costs, employment instability, and healthcare accessibility—are the principal concerns for Gen Z voters.

Tomorrow in Ukraine, Russian soldiers will attack Ukrainians. Russian drones and bombs and rockets will target Ukrainian homes. A criminal war of aggression will continue.

Tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, Russian officials will discuss the future of Ukraine with an handful of Americans, delegated by a president who sympathizes with the Russian view of the war. The Russians will have the luxury of talking about Ukraine without the presence of Ukrainians.

The headlines are about “peace negotiations.” But what is really going on? How should we think about this unusual encounter in Saudi Arabia?

Here are ten suggestions, drawn from years on working on relations among the three countries, and from some recent personal observations at the Munich Security Conference.

Part of charting that course is defining the goal a little bit more clearly than tends to follow a narrow look back at the 2024 election.

And again, Joe Biden won the 2020 primary. Most Democrats really dislike Donald Trump and do not share leftist intellectuals’ antipathy to Clinton and Obama. Most Democrats are highly motivated by their desire to preserve the social safety net, to protect abortion rights, and to defeat the MAGA movement. It would require at this point a certain boldness of thought — and certainly a thick skin — to run against the party establishment with a moderate rather than leftist inflection. But I think the pathway is relatively clear. Because the 2018 and 2022 cycles went well for Democrats, there is plenty of talent on the bench. And because the senior party leadership discredited itself with its handling of Biden’s age, there is plenty of openness to outsider figures. People keep asking me who I think is the favorite for 2028 or who is my personal favorite. The answer is, it depends.

You rarely see legacy media outlets creating the kind of branded sponsorship content that’s the bread and butter of the Creator Economy. To just give one example, the Washington Post has 7 million followers on Instagram, and there are probably lots of brands that would love to be featured in its images and video, especially since that audience skews younger. Yet I can find no evidence of any sponsored content there. I found the same thing when I checked out the Instagram accounts for CNN (20 million followers), LA Times (1.2 million followers), and Vanity Fair (9.2 million followers).

Connect these dots. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime wants to empower the nationalist far-right in Europe and side with Russia over Ukraine in order to divide European democracies and weaken the Western alliance — and strengthen Putin and the global oligarchy.

Make no mistake. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is not only undermining democracy in the United States. It is also laying the foundation for undermining democracies around the world.

The new poles of international power are coming to be global democracies versus a global oligarchy. The United States is emerging on the side of global oligarchy.

Trump’s emergency application took direct aim at a precedent from 1935 in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Congress can shield independent agencies from politics.

That case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress used decades later to protect the Special Counsel.

So what now? I’m afraid the Trump White House and the Supreme Court have teed up the Dellinger case to mark the end of Humphries Executor — and therefore the practical end of independent agencies. They may carve out the Federal Reserve on some pretext, but they are bent on centralizing presidential power.

How life at universities is suddenly, and dramatically, shifting

It’s still early, but we’re starting to see some sorts of pushback. I don’t claim to know everything that’s going on out there, but here are just a few examples I’ve seen:

• More than 1,000 political scientists have signed a letter expressing grave concern about Trump’s rapid erosion of U.S. democracy and the rule of law, with the hope of drawing greater attention among news reporters.
• Scholars are building networks of people who can serve as reviewers for faculty whose research has suddenly become controversial but are coming up for tenure or promotion review.
• Scholars are organizing meetings and new sections at annual conferences to defend academic free speech.
• The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has become a logical coordination point for this work and has become increasingly active in drawing attention to the administration’s attacks on higher education.

PARIS — As U.S. and Russian envoys prepare to begin talks in Saudi Arabia on ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders have called an emergency meeting in Paris after being cut out of the peace negotiations.

The gulf between the U.S. and Europe on the Ukraine war and security issues crystallized for Europeans this past weekend at the Munich Security Conference, says Elie Tenenbaum, head of the Security Studies Center at the French Institute for International Relations.

“Their worst nightmare has come true,” he says. “They see that the Trump administration is going to bypass them and try to strong-arm Ukraine in negotiating a deal with Russia to end the war.”

Musk is moving fast and breaking important things

And here’s the thing: If a rocket blows up, you can build a new rocket and try again. “Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?

This isn’t a hypothetical question: Musk, with backing from Donald Trump, is blowing up significant parts of the U.S. government as you read this. And we can already see the shape of multiple potential disasters.

So last week, when the Trump administration began laying off large numbers of probationary workers, the only real questions were how quickly it would become clear that essential government functions were being compromised and just how scary the damage would be.

Mass layoffs in government are here. Oddly, the antitrust agencies aren’t affected. Or are they? Meanwhile, Trump Antitrust chief Gail Slater had her nominating hearing in the Senate last week.

So what’s the long-term effect? That’s not clear. Obviously the people being let go are going to be hurt, and certain regions will likely experience economic pain. But will these firings actually affect the country more broadly? There’s clearly a lot of waste in government, but the idea that it’s all waste seems exaggerated. I suspect the Federal government is so pervasive, and there’s so much in our society that runs on it, that we won’t realize what’s gone for some time. So I’d like to hear from you. If you’re a reader of BIG and you work in government or in a company or organization funded by government, please consider filling out this survey that I put together, especially if you are concerned about layoffs. The basic idea is to give us some sense of how Americans will be affected by the cuts.

And now let’s get to the second event, which is antitrust chief nominee Gail Slater, a former J.D. Vance staffer, having her nomination hearing in the Senate on Wednesday. It’s unusual for the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division to be appointed so quickly, which means that this area is something Trump cares about. And indeed, while the right is trying to shake up government, the one part of the Biden agenda they haven’t rejected is antitrust. For instance, the Trump Antitrust Division recently challenged a big tech merger, which shocked Wall Street. Then, a few weeks ago, DOJ lawyers argued in a Google case the way they would have were Biden still in charge. Finally, last week, the FTC and DOJ oversaw a regulation on merger notifications go into effect, eschewing the broader pause on updating rules.