Philippa Kaur

AFTER SAM ALTMAN was sacked from OpenAI in November of 2023, a meme went viral among artificial-intelligence (AI) types on social media. “What did Ilya see?” it asked, referring to Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of the startup who triggered the coup. Some believed a rumoured new breakthrough at the company that gave the world ChatGPT had spooked Mr Sutskever.Although Mr Altman was back in charge within days, and Mr Sutskever said he regretted his move, whatever Ilya saw appears to have stuck in his craw. In May he left OpenAI. And on June 19th he launched Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new startup dedicated to building a superhuman AI. The outfit, whose other co-founders are Daniel Gross, a venture capitalist, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher, does not plan to offer any actual products. It has not divulged the names of its investors. More

LAWYERS ARE often seen as the most tedious of professionals. And the most derided (“What do you know when you find a lawyer up to his neck in concrete? Someone ran out of concrete”). Yet that damning reputation is undeserved: lawyers are in fact role models. The method and meticulousness entrenched in the legal style of thought has something to teach other knowledge workers and their managers.In “One L”, a book about his first year at Harvard Law School, Scott Turow describes the slow, arduous progress of going over his first case as “stirring concrete with his eyelashes”. But legal education is not about specific cases or statutes. It is, as Mr Turow later understands, about processing a mountain of information and exercising judgment. It teaches how to infer rules from patterns, use analogies, anticipate what might happen next, accept ambiguity and be ready to question everything. More

BP AND SHELL, two British oil giants, have long sunk cash into solar and wind farms. Their rivals elsewhere have mostly stuck to their drilling. Investors have rewarded single-mindedness. ExxonMobil, an American firm unapologetically wedded to the black stuff, is worth $510bn, half as much again as the British duo combined. Its share price is up by 50% in the past five years, compared with a rise of 10% for Shell and a fall of 13% for BP. That is not to say ExxonMobil has no interest in renewables. But rather than getting into generation, it is placing an indirect bet on the energy transition. On June 25th it signed a preliminary agreement to supply lithium to SK On, a South Korean manufacturer whose lithium-ion batteries will power electric Fords and Hyundais. This follows an announcement in November that it was drilling its first lithium well in Arkansas. A “material” part of its $20bn in low-carbon investments between 2022 and 2027 will go to lithium, says Dan Holton, in charge of these projects. By 2030 the company hopes to produce enough lithium to supply 1m electric vehicles (EVs) a year. Darren Woods, its boss, sees lithium as a “high-return” opportunity. More

Volatile weather is a peril of the high seas. Volatile markets are similarly treacherous for the container-ship industry, which carries 80% of the volume of internationally traded goods. A global pandemic, which kept people at home with little else to do but buy, buy, buy, sent container rates sky-high. In 2022 shipping lines’ return on capital exceeded 40%; the biggest earned profits that were three times the total for the previous two decades combined. Rates and returns tumbled as demand waned and shipping companies started to receive the new vessels ordered during the boom. Then attacks by Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea all but closed the Suez Canal. The disruption has sent rates back to records surpassed only during the pandemic. How long will the good times last this time?On the surface, the answer should be: not long at all. Historically, value destruction has been the industry norm. Bernstein, a broker, reckons that between 2002 and 2019 shipping firms’ average return on capital of 4.7% trailed in the wake of its cost of capital, which averaged 10% or so. New ships take a couple of years to build. According to bimco, an industry association, in 2023 the global fleet added capacity of around 2.3m 20-foot equivalent units (the standard measure of container size), surpassing the previous annual record by 37%. Another 1m arrived in the first four months of 2024. In February worries about overcapacity led A.P Moller-Maersk, the world’s second-largest shipping line, to warn it could lose up to $5bn this year. More

THE ROLE of Kweichow Moutai in Chinese society is complex. The state-owned company’s fiery, translucent baijiu is by far China’s favourite booze. It is one of the country’s oldest brands—a rare corporate survivor of the worst days of Maoism. Vintage cases fetch tens of thousands of dollars. In 2021 it was briefly worth a throat-scorching $500bn and in 2022 it eclipsed Tencent, a digital giant, to become for a time the most valuable Chinese listed company.Today its market capitalisation is half that. Some of the decline has to do with President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on graft, before which prized bottles of the sorghum-based firewater would often change hands in place of cash. When in 2020 state TV accused Moutai of benefiting from bribery, $25bn instantly evaporated from its market capitalisation. More

In recent years Paris has undergone an astonishing revival. Global businessmen, financiers and techies casually drop into conversation that they are spending more time in the City of Light. Wall Street banks have expanded their offices there; venture capitalists are signing more cheques for French startups. An annual investment summit, held in May at the Palace of Versailles, has become a fixture in chief executives’ calendars. This year, as they sipped champagne with President Emmanuel Macron, company bosses pledged investment projects worth €15bn ($16bn).The renaissance is part of Mr Macron’s ambition to make France more innovative and business-friendly. But the project is now in danger. After his centrist party suffered a drubbing in the elections to the European Parliament, Mr Macron called a snap national parliamentary election, the first round of which is due to be held on June 30th. Hard-right and hard-left parties are polling well ahead of Mr Macron’s group. Both have unsustainable spending plans that are spooking investors and are far from friendly to global business. Only a few weeks ago Paris, which is also due to host the 2024 Summer Olympics in July, was basking in the limelight. Now a cloud of uncertainty hangs over its great commercial revival. More

When ChatGPT took everyone by storm in November 2022, it was OpenAI, the startup behind it, that seized the business world’s attention. But, as usual, big tech is back on the front foot. Nvidia, maker of accelerator chips that are at the core of generative artificial intelligence (AI), is now duelling with Microsoft, a tech giant of longer standing, to be the world’s most valuable company. Like Microsoft, it is investing in a diverse ecosystem of startups that it hopes will strengthen its lead. Predictably, given the “techlash” mindset of the regulatory authorities, both firms are high on the watch list of antitrust agencies.Don’t roll your eyes. The trustbusters may have infamously overreached in recent years in their attempts to cut big firms down to size. Yet for years big-tech incumbents in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have shown just as infamous a tendency to strut imperiously across their digital domains. What is intriguing is the speed at which the antitrust authorities are operating. Historically, such investigations have tended to be labyrinthine. It took 40 years for the Supreme Court to order E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, a large American chemical firm, to divest its anticompetitive stake in General Motors, which it first started to acquire in 1917 when GM was a fledgling carmaker. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an American antitrust agency, is still embroiled in a battle with Meta, a social-media giant, to unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, done 12 and ten years ago, respectively. More

Drive a few hours from Lisbon towards Spain, past the olive farms, and you will arrive at Europe’s largest artificial lake, at the Portuguese town of Alqueva. The first thing that catches the eye is the large hydroelectric dam. But look closer and you will also spot a bright patch of floating glass. It is the floating solar-power plant built by EDP, a Portuguese utility that is one of the world’s biggest developers of renewable energy. Critics have long dismissed such projects as a costly and trouble-prone experiment. The technology, however, is now ready to shine.In this first phase of the project at Alqueva, engineers have stationed some 12,000 photovoltaic (PV) modules on floating pontoons made from partially recycled plastic and locally sourced cork. These are connected to an energy-storage system incorporating lithium-ion batteries and integrated with the hydroelectric dam’s power station. More