'When Sun-Tzu met Clausewitz', a one-act play in the style of Aaron Sorkin, by GPT-3.
The Cuban missile crisis musical.
CASD, by Run DMC.
Jim Hacker & Sir Humphrey on Ukraine.
Note Hofstadter, though. "I would call GPT-3’s answers not just clueless but cluelessly clueless, meaning that GPT-3 has no idea that it has no idea about what it is saying. There are no concepts...there’s just an unimaginably huge amount of absorbed text" economist.com/by-invitation/…
The proposal is nothing short of a very bad joke. I mean, read this:
"$100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;
-- The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture."
The fact that this absurd and unworkable clause is in there is itself a suggestion that the proposal is the basis for further negotiation and not a "take it or leave it"
"military assessments seen by the FT show that Yantar was one of several Russian naval vessels that congregated in UK waters for 13 months of sustained surveillance around nodes of critical infrastructure starting in the autumn of 2023." ft.com/content/0b3510…
"adversaries could interfere with the timing signals in underwater communication cables by altering the frequency of pulses passing through them — causing severe disruption in time-sensitive industries such as high-frequency trading." ft.com/content/0b3510…
AIS/radar analysis "suggests that this vessel [Yantar] was stationary for several hours in a small stretch of sea containing three major cables — the CeltixConnect-2, Geo-Eirgrid and Rockabill—all of which are data connections linking Ireland with the UK." ft.com/content/0b3510…
Some defence stories in this week’s @TheEconomist. First, we looked at Ukraine’s new cruise missile. ‘Production…at least partially carried out abroad, but “over 90%”, the company says, of final assembly is in secret sites dispersed throughout Ukraine’ economist.com/europe/2025/08…
We reported on the Wagner group’s meltdown in Mali. “Murdering ordinary Malians, it turns out, is a bad way to win over ordinary Malians. Informants have dried up.” economist.com/middle-east-an…
We examined the US naval buildup in the Caribbean & whether it’s really for counter-narcotic purposes. ‘This “looks just right to scare the daylights out of Maduro’s supporters”, says Evan Ellis of the US Army War College.’ economist.com/the-americas/2…
🧵 I've been writing something on the intelligence & national-security applications of frontier AI models. This is an experiment in seeing what one of them, OpenAI's o3-pro model, might be able to do in an area relevant to national security.
I fed the model this chart, explaining that it was the manoeuvre history of a satellite (though not sure I even needed to do that). Could it identify the satellite? Yes, after reasoning for 22 minutes and 23 seconds, it could indeed.
o3-pro identified the two large east-west & minimal north-south movements as distinctive signatures of Russia's Luch-5X satellite. It reasoned by elimination: "No other GEO spacecraft executed delta‑V’s of that magnitude (tens of m s‑¹) in exactly those two windows."
Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." cia.gov/resources/csi/…
"The ‘85–86 losses [due to Ames], as they became colloquially known within CIA, also signaled the need for a major KGB undertaking to deceive CIA as to the real reason for these losses. A multichannel KGB disinformation campaign, which operated from at least 1986, was launched" cia.gov/resources/csi/…
"Within the KGB, the Soviet preoccupation with secrecy fostered an institutional bias against release of the sort of valid feed typically required to establish the credibility of a deception channel." cia.gov/resources/csi/…
Important. "The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US [DIA] intelligence assessment" edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…
Wow. 'Two of the people familiar w/ the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” “...the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops”...' edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…
And a caveat. "It is still early for the US to have a comprehensive picture of the impact of the strikes, and none of the sources described how the DIA assessment compares to the view of other agencies in the intelligence community." edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…