Good morning. Andrew here. Yesterday at the United Nations, President Trump declared that official U.S. government documents would rename “artificial intelligence” as “superintelligence,” while dismissing safety concerns as a hoax and vowing not to slow down development. The technology will stay in focus at the U.N. today as Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI are expected to address world leaders, alongside Clément Delangue of Hugging Face. We’ll have a full report tomorrow analyzing the growing divide between the White House’s full-steam-ahead push and the industry’s calls for more guardrails. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Oil diplomacyThe Nasdaq Composite is in record territory again, and the S&P 500 isn’t far behind. The main catalyst? Falling oil prices. Traders are growing more optimistic that world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly this week can find diplomatic solutions to de-escalate wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The hope is that fuel flows can be quickly restored, bringing relief to consumers and businesses. But are investors again getting ahead of themselves? Yesterday, President Trump hailed “very good” talks with Iran, but he also threatened to “annihilate” the country in his speech before the General Assembly. The latest:
Energy and wars have loomed large this week at the U.N. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who is set to speak today, told The Wall Street Journal that he expected Trump to push Kyiv and Moscow to agree to an “energy cease-fire.” Trump has blamed Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure for disrupting global fuel supplies, and for sending diesel prices skyward — an argument that analysts say tells only part of the story.
Meanwhile, at the gas pump: The average price of diesel in the U.S. is $6.52 today, according to AAA, roughly a half-penny below yesterday’s record. Some Republicans, especially those in tight electoral races, have been pushing the Trump administration to ban U.S. exports of diesel to help bring cost relief to farmers and truckers. Trump said yesterday that he was open to that. “I’ve called for it,” the president told reporters. That said, the oil industry and some analysts warn that such a ban could backfire and worsen the global energy crisis. It’s also driving a wedge inside the Republican Party.
DoorDash will pay millions to shortchanged workers. The online delivery company agreed to pay $131.5 million in a settlement with New York City after it underpaid or failed to pay 264,000 delivery workers. (It will also accept closer monitoring of its payment methods.) The deal comes as three mayoral administrations have tried to crack down on delivery firms that city officials have long accused of mistreating workers considered independent contractors. Todd Boehly’s bid to buy Lukoil’s assets reportedly gains powerful allies. America’s international investment arm, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, and the brother of the Emirati president are expected to join the billionaire investor’s consortium, The Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources. The group is trying to supplant a deal with Carlyle, the U.S. private equity group, which agreed to buy most of Lukoil’s international assets in January after the Russian oil company was hit with U.S. sanctions. Questions arise about trading in some Kalshi markets. An analysis of trading data by The Wall Street Journal showed that over a third of trades in a market focused on the price of the ether cryptocurrency showed a series of rapid trades largely at the same price. Observers on social media suggested that the activity resembled “wash trading,” artificial trading that had no economic value; Kalshi said the activity represented normal activity.
Trump’s A.I. rebrandPresident Trump has repeatedly dismissed concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence as “a hoax” — even when they came from within the industry — and said that critics of the technology were shortsighted. He repeated that idea at the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, and suggested that all A.I. needed was a rebrand. “Welcome to the new world of superintelligence — S.I.,” Trump said in his roughly 37-minute address, in his effort to rename what most people still call A.I. Trump added that “all of United States documents” would be changed to refer to superintelligence.
The bigger point: Trump made clear that he doesn’t think the U.S. should slow down A.I. development, as figures like Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX have called for. The president said suggestions by executives and other world leaders to impose more oversight of the technology were “a globalist scheme” to control A.I. that he “totally rejects.” Trump instead emphasized that he believes maintaining American dominance of A.I. is a national security concern: We’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way. We’re going to keep it very, very straight and very strong. I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. What to watch next: what Trump says about A.I. (and other topics) when he meets with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in Washington this week. Also look out for Trump’s reaction to how others respond to his A.I. rebrand. He made the issue a test of his influence on the world stage: “Let’s see if I have any power,” he said yesterday. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.”
Open-weight A.I. models are gaining tractionWashington and Silicon Valley have been wrestling with concerns about U.S. companies embracing Chinese open-weight models. Some worry that these cheaper alternatives to cutting-edge products from Anthropic and OpenAI are a competitive threat and pose potential security risks. But the latest data suggests that enterprise users are embracing open-weight models, if cautiously, Sri Muppidi reports. Businesses are beginning to experiment with open-weight A.I. Data shows that the use of these models — which are publicly available for anyone to use how they wish — has increased markedly lately. The share of enterprise spending on open-weight models has reached roughly 30 percent in recent weeks, according to data from OpenRouter, an A.I. model marketplace, up from around 10 percent at the start of the year.
Making the switch: StackBlitz, which developed the A.I. website builder Bolt.new, is one company turning to open-weight alternatives. “Something on the order of 60 to 80 percent of our inference is done through open-source models, like open-weight models,” Eric Simons, StackBlitz’s C.E.O., told DealBook. (Inference refers to the process of running A.I. models to complete tasks.) “I expect that to get pretty close to 100 percent within the next three to six months.” Open-weight models are good at executing simple tasks. “The lower-complexity workloads can be delivered with open-weight models with maybe 10 percent of the cost of what a higher-end frontier, proprietary model might be,” Patrick Wendell, a founder of Databricks, a big A.I. data analysis company, told DealBook. Adoption could speed up. Wendell told DealBook that it was only a “matter of time” before enterprise customers, who tend to adopt newer technologies more slowly than start-ups, begin to embrace open-weight models.
Will war disrupt F1 and ‘Davos in the Desert’?Soon after the war in Iran began this year, Formula 1 Grand Prix races in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were called off. Now, as the fighting drags on — and there’s renewed conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen — the fate of two upcoming F1 races in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is looking cloudy. Whether they go on as planned could provide a hint of what may happen with other major events in the region, Niko Gallogly reports. The F1 races are scheduled for November (Qatar) and December (Abu Dhabi). Formula One Group, the race’s organizer, is expected to decide whether to hold them by the end of the month. Other racing circuits have already postponed events, citing “uncertainty in the region” or “the current situation in the Middle East”: The F.I.A., the global governing body for motor sports, announced last week that it was moving the final round of its World Rally Championship competition to Italy from Saudi Arabia. And the 24H Series recently announced that it was moving a race scheduled in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to South Africa.
The uncertainty hurts Persian Gulf countries’ tourism revenue. Sporting events are part of a regional push by members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to expand their event and tourism economy.
“There’s no baseline forecasting on where to go from here when it comes to the geopolitical situation,” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington research organization, told DealBook. For now, planners appear hopeful. Last week, Formula One released its 2027 schedule, which includes a full slate of races in the Gulf. What to watch: the annual Future Investment Initiative Institute, called “Davos in the Desert.” It’s scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia at the end of October. Could regional security risks threaten attendance from the typical A-list group of C.E.O.s? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
Deals
Politics, policy and regulation
Best of the rest
|
