Wessel van Rensburg
@wildebees
The digital policy strategist you didn’t know you needed—using terms like 'sovereign data assets' as casually as most would say 'hello'. Also geopolitics, innovation, industrial policy. Location: Den Haag 🇳🇱 From: 🇿🇦
A South African friend sent these photos on WhatsApp. This is at a debate. The second photo is (i think) when he was part of a group who disrupted Mandela giving a speech on campus. I was there.
Nvidia, Alphabet, Google, Meta together would need to earn almost twice as much after-tax profit in 2036 as the entire U.S. corporate sector earned in 2000, (adjusted for inflation to 2026 dollars), to justify their current market cap. If that happens these companies would be behemoths.
Strip out “compute for research,” and OpenAI is actually on track to turn a small pretax operating profit this year, as is Anthropic under its best-case scenario. Add it back in, and OpenAI doesn’t expect to break even until the 2030s. Anthropic forecasts reaching that milestone sooner.
Checking in in on the Network State guys. They are keeping faith, for now it seems.
On my way to Frankfurt where tomorrow I’ll be on a panel at the 14th ILF Conference on the Future of the Financial Sector. My panel’s topic? Stablecoins. 😬
Tether has been struggling to get back to it's peg with the dollar for three days now. stablepulse.raak.work #stablecoin
"Stablecoin" Tether (USDT), has been struggeling to return to the dollar peg for more than a day now. How do I know? I vibecoded this app, have a look for yourself. stablepulse.raak.work
A lot of how her belief coloured her conversion is in the first 5 minutes, so just listen to that and then decide if you want to continue. For me personally the piece is full of little details like this, which said to me, outsider, complex person and conviction politician, it kept me intrigued
Via the international bank correspondence system and dollar dominance the US has chokehold sanctions control on all banks, also European ones. As Lagarde tells Martin Wolf, a Digital Euro can provide European citizens and entities with money services that the US can't sanction. 3/
The US 🇺🇸 brain drain of ethnic Chinese to China 🇨🇳 is gathering pace.
I put it through NanoBana, for a different representation of the same data. Spain not that different from Portugal. Poland not so pro the US as one might expect. The Netherlands most pro a move towards China. Overall, not a massive divergence between these countries.
The crash “was all so spectacular that American Bitcoin quickly became the symbol of not just the crypto market wipeout of late 2025 but also the collapse of the myriad ventures that the Trump family has been promoting”.
DeepSeek in its latest technical report, admits closed source models’ performance are improving faster than open source — also DeepSeek. Proof the chip ban is working? #geopoliticaltech
And US conceptions of speech are perfect. Platforms should carry no liability, (while they destroy rational debate in every public sphere they operate in around the globe). At any rate, you don't need to use European social media, and Europeans not yours.
First here is my view of the problem, a longer way if saying human nature is part the problem. Things to consider: Require a "driver's" license, civic exams (media literacy: concepts like context collapse, how moral outrage is an adaptive trait for small communities etc). (cont)
The UK's Labour Government Policy Spiral. * Sorry, forgot from whom I got this idea.
China’s Tsinghua University (Also Xi's) now outfiles top US schools in AI patents—4,986 since 2005, 900+ in 2024 –– more patents each year than MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard combined.. Quantity is state-backed, strategic. Europe: this is a sovereignty issue, not a league table. 1/x
Lots of 🤯 information and charts in this post Re AI. These are my pick of the lot: The scale of the investment is already historic; 💸 New datacenters built overtaking new offices; 🕋 Energy transition electricity demand dwarfs AI; ⚡️ AI impact on water 💦 www.understandingai.org/p/16-charts-...
2/8 That posture has flipped. Under Trump, the U.S. 🇺🇸 is embracing crypto in finance and geopolitics: touting stablecoins as digital dollars and pitching tokenisation as capital-market modernisation.
This is the essence what we wrote: 1/8 FTX’s 2022 collapse gave regulators a brief ‘told you so.’ DC’s playbook was to let crypto burn—keep banks out, deny legitimacy, and allow failures to clear without rescue.
This week Andrew Bailey, head of the bank of England, ostensibly softened his stance on stablecoins in the FT. Of course he must be under a lot of pressure. But many missed the pertinent question he raised - the question of credit creation.
In other news, the Springboks hand the All Blacks their biggest ever defeat. And in New Zealand. Perhaps the world is not such a bad place after all. #rugby.
It all makes sense, because those that crave peace must prepare for war, am-I-right?
Extreme poverty is way down, other forms of poverty is relatively up
In English. My question. How secure is that security partnership really? Especially in the light of new pressures on European digital regulation?
I find AI chatbots an incredible tool for learning and discovery. So I wondered what educational theory said about that.
The top US models lead the best Chinese models in general Chinese-language capabilities. The top three models are OpenAI’s o3, o4-mini (high), and Google’s Gemini-2.5.-Pro. The top Chinese model is ByteDance’s Doubao-Seed-1.6-thinking.