Philippa Kaur

IT IS Common lore in Silicon Valley that no company has a bigger moat than Nvidia, the world’s dominant supplier of chips for artificial intelligence (AI). That was true until January 27th, when a Chinese firm called DeepSeek, bearing an AI model that it said cost less than $6m to train, blew a nearly $600bn hole in the value of the semiconductor giant, marking the biggest one-day loss in the history of America’s stockmarket. Think of it as the 21st-century equivalent of a shot from a trebuchet, the medieval contraption capable of reducing castle walls to rubble. Have Nvidia’s defences finally been breached? More

In a flash, euphoria over artificial intelligence (AI) has turned to panic. Since early trading began on January 27th the market value of Nvidia, an AI chipmaking champion, has slumped by 17% at the time of writing. The share prices of Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft—America’s cloud-computing triumvirate—have fallen by 3%, 1% and 3%, respectively. All told, American tech companies have shed around $1trn in value. More

How much do your colleagues get paid? In a few countries, such as Norway, you can take a good guess by looking at public records on individuals’ overall tax payments and income. But in most places, finding out people’s salaries means asking them what they earn. And that is about as socially acceptable as saying “What an ugly baby.” More

Historically Germany has been a world champion of the rights of workers related to their health. In 1883 Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German empire, set up the world’s first statutory health-insurance system with the Health Insurance Act, which included paid sick leave. Bismarck’s Krankenversicherungsgesetz was not motivated by concern for workers’ welfare so much as a strategy to beat socialists at their own game. Yet it laid the foundations of Germany’s welfare state and was followed by laws on accident and disability insurance. More

When President Donald Trump announced a half-trillion-dollar of private-sector investment in American artificial-intelligence (AI) infrastructure on January 21st, his second day in office, he basked in the accolades of the three men backing the “Stargate” project: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech mogul, and Larry Ellison of Oracle, an IT firm. He called it the largest AI investment in history. Then came the kicker. “This is money that normally would have gone to China.” More

WHAT NATION can you fit into the Capitol Rotunda? Answer: somewhere between a Portugal and a Thailand. Each country’s total household net wealth was $1.3trn, give or take, according to the latest available figures from a few years ago. This is around the accumulated fortune of the billionaires who turned up for Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20th. Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, a luxury empire, and Europe’s richest man, represented the old continent’s fat cats. Mukesh Ambani, an Indian industrialist who is Mr Arnault’s Asian opposite number, stood in for the global south’s. More

When OpenAI announced a new generative artificial-intelligence (AI) model, called o3, a few days before Christmas, it aroused both excitement and scepticism. Excitement from those who expected its reasoning capabilities to be a big step towards superhuman intelligence (some reckoned it would be a bigger deal than OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022). Scepticism because OpenAI did not release it to the public and had every incentive to overplay the firm’s pioneering role in AI to curry favour with Donald Trump, the incoming president. More

The campaign to ban TikTok has been going for almost as long as the viral video app has been operating in America. Now, after six years of fending off security investigations, executive orders and legal threats, the Chinese-owned company faces being outlawed within days. On January 17th the Supreme Court upheld a law which prohibits social networks controlled by “foreign adversaries”, singling out TikTok and China. The ban will take effect on January 19th. More