Wessel van Rensburg
@wildebees.bsky.social
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: 🇿🇦
Belgian chemical company Solvay plans to invest an additional €15 to €20 million to "strengthen the capacity" of its French plant in La Rochelle, which it describes as "one of the largest rare earth separation facilities outside of China"
Terres rares : le chimiste Solvay va investir 15 à 20 millions d’euros supplémentaires à La Rochelle
Le chimiste belge Solvay prévoit 15 à 20 millions d'euros d'investissements supplémentaires pour «renforcer les capacités» de son usine française...
lefigaro.fr
VW CEO Oliver Blume has called on EU to quickly impose tariffs on Chinese plug-in hybrid vehicles "We have no time to lose... regulations on BEVs are working. There we are competitive on pricing. Where it's not working is PHEV"
I built Capex Watch — the question: can $3.5–4 trillion in hyperscaler commitments through 2030 ever pay for itself? The arithmetic says no. Breaking even requires ~$1.3 trillion in annual revenue. The entire global enterprise software market is $1.2 trillion. 1/3
The Trillion-Dollar Capex Bet
Capex Watch
capexwatch.raak.work
Probably the best model report this year: multiple infrastructure pieces cohering to fix computation and network to hold 3T parameters.
mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · last wk.You’ve waited long enough, the Kimi K3 open weights & full tech report are here! github.com/MoonshotAI/K...
![K KIMI K3: OPEN FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE
TECHNICAL REPORT OF KIMI K3
Kimi Team
ABSTRACT
parameters, native vision capabilities, and a 1-million-token context window. Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention [63] and Attention Residuals [57], which improve information flow across sequence length and model depth. Together with Stable LatentMoE, which effectively activates 16 of 896 routed experts per token, and refined training and data recipes, these advances yield an proximately 2.5x improvement in overall scaling efficiency over Kimi K2 [581. Post-trainin highlights reinforcement learning across general, agentic, and coding domains and multiple reasoning-effort levels, enabling compositional generalization and robust long-horizon execution. At 2.8T scale, Kimi K3 is supported by infrastructure advances in multiple areas: algorithm-system co-design for KDA, perfectly balanced expert-parallel training with efficient memory management, million-token agentic RL with persistent rollout and sandbox states, and deployment innovations.
Extensive evaluations show that Kimi K3 achieves frontier-level performance across long-horizon coding, agentic, knowledge, reasoning, and vision tasks. While its overall performance still trails the most powerful proprietary models, namely Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3 consistently outperforms other open and proprietary models evaluated in our suite. We release the full Kimi K3 model weights to facilitate future research and accelerate the broader deployment and adoption of frontier intelligence.'](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ckaz32jwl6t2cno6fmuw2nhn/bafkreicrbgvxize5b2uxilew4qvymuq5jvasfva4zp4i4bohjtkvxvvdv4)
The German government is expected to impose conditions on the US takeover of a Frankfurt-area magnet manufacturer, threatening to strain relations between DC and Berlin and complicate US efforts to break supply-chain reliance on China. www.bloomberg.com/ne...
The EU has chickened out of two safeguard probes in the chemicals sector because it doesn't want to jeopardise talks with China, Joanna Sopinska (again!) reports Looks like these probes will be on hold until after October now, despite the industrial emergency
What do people in 7 countries see as the biggest global threats? France: Climate change: 48% UK: Climate change: 35% Canada: Climate change: 31% Poland: Military attack: 43% USA: Political extremism: 39% Germany: Mass migration: 36% Australia: Religious terrorism: 31% yougov.com/en-gb/articl...
Which country do people see as the biggest threat to global peace? Top answer: Russia Poland 59% Germany 42% UK 39% France 33% Top answer: USA Canada 37% Australia: 30% Americans are heavily split, but Iran comes top on 21% yougov.com/en-gb/articl...
Brazil has recalled its ambassador from Argentina after Javier Milei turned up at a rally to support the presidential campaign of the Far Right Flávio Bolsonaro, called Brazilian President Lula a thief and convict and labelled the Brazilian government “thieving socialists”.
Brazil recalls ambassador after Argentina's President Milei insults government officials
Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it has recalled its ambassador to Argentina after President Javier Milei insulted Brazilian officials while in their country.
apnews.com
Yes. This point is not sufficiently recognized in the global imbalances debate. If you think your CA deficit is excessive and caused by factors outside your borders, you should tax or otherwise discourage capital inflows. Tariffs are a very blunt tool at best. +
Michael Pettis@michaelpettis.bsky.social · 2w ago8/9 I agree, and this suggests that rather than encourage capital inflows, economies that want to strengthen their manufacturing and productive sectors and to benefit workers by raising productivity and wages should consider capital controls as a far more effective tool than tariffs.
The first post in this thread accurately describes the situation. The second infers reasoning and, I think, only describes a few loud skeptics. I believe most of the researchers at OAI and close to all at Anthropic are 99% sincere in their concerns. I just don’t believe they’re *correct.*
I think most people, when talking about open weights AI models, don’t deeply believe in the vision of AGI/ASI that lab insiders tend to believe in. Like they don’t expect AI to really present grave semi-autonomous biosecurity or other similar risks. Whether this view is right or not, no one knows
You see everything is connected. The marine heatwaves off the coasts of Europe make heatwaves on land more intense, which in turn dries out vegetation, which then creates perfect fire weather conditions. Brought to you by the world's refusal to drastically reduce the burning of fossil fuels.
Ongoing marine heatwave in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea | EU Space Support Office
In late May 2026, several countries in Western Europe faced above-average temperatures. During the same period, large areas of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea also recorded above-average ...
eu-space.europa.eu
This morning we visited the Lviv military cemetery. It is hard to convey the scale - but it was an untouched field in 2022 and is now filled with thousands of perfectly maintained graves. In amongst it you spotted family members sitting with their lost loved ones.
Trump II is like the horror movie where the protagonists ignore every "Don't do this!" trope the audience recognizes. I wonder what's in this ancient crypt? Hey, this gemstone fits right into the empty slot on this sarcophagus! Can someone read this incantation out loud? Aah! It's a mummy! Run!
That's a lot of uneasiness!
Daniel Drezner@dandrezner.bsky.social · 2w agoQuite the sentence: “Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/u...
Renewables are now the world's largest source of electricity – and the main source of new supplies
Trump on data centers: "You have to convince your communities how great these things are. You can't fight it. You have to go with it."
Bloomberg terminal allows users to see “oil tanker captains sending messages to the Houthis .. basically signaling ‘don't shoot, we're not a target.’” .. Right now two VLCCs are broadcasting that they have Chinese crews and owners.” 👀 @bloomberg.com
Reminder: two of the three fines so far applied under the parallel Digital Services Act have been against Chinese companies, not American
European News@eunews.social · 2w agoEU fines Google €890 million for anti-competitive practices This latest penalty is likely to intensify Washington's anger over European digital regulations, which the Trump administration says target leading American companies unfairly.
Chinese car brands snapped up more than a third of new plug-in hybrid sales in Europe last month Manufacturers including BYD and Chery grabbed a record 34% share of plug-in hybrid deliveries in June, according to data from analysts at Dataforce www.bloomberg.com/ne...
Great news. ASML has been the lead private investor up to now.
Ulrike Franke@rikefranke.bsky.social · 2w ago“Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in the AI start-up Mistral, a move that would bolster the French company’s efforts to become a leading alternative to US technology groups.” 🎁🔗
“While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access…” Yeah, that’s not reassuring at all openai.com/index/huggin...
OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation
OpenAI and Hugging Face share early findings from a security incident during AI model evaluation, highlighting advanced cyber capabilities and lessons for defenders.
openai.com
The Netherlands is behind on schedule to fill up its storage.
Kees van der Leun@sustainable2050.bsky.social · 2w agoThe natural gas price for the EU is up sharply now the Trump-Netanyahu war escalates again. Close to €60/MWh now; that's +100% compared to the price before the war vs 'only' +50% for oil (Brent). Not a good combination with sluggishly filling up our gas storages. I guess we'll notice in winter.
