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China Has Officially Overtaken Tesla In The Global EV Race

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China Has Officially Overtaken Tesla In The Global EV Race

Chinese automakers, led by BYD, are rapidly reshaping the global electric-vehicle market and challenging long-established brands such as Volkswagen, Toyota, BMW—and even Tesla, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Once dismissed by Western buyers, Chinese EVs are now gaining wide acceptance. “These Chinese cars look fantastic,” one shopper said while browsing a BYD model in London, reflecting a broader shift in perception.

BYD has emerged as the most powerful symbol of China’s rise in electric vehicles. The company replaced Tesla as the world’s biggest EV seller and delivered more than one million vehicles outside China in 2025—more than double the previous year. China, meanwhile, surpassed Japan in 2023 to become the world’s largest auto exporter, shipping more than seven million vehicles last year.

“BYD wants to become one of the most relevant players in Europe, and in a very short period,” said Alfredo Altavilla, an industry veteran advising the company.

Chinese brands now hold about 7% of Western Europe’s auto market, selling more than 500,000 vehicles in the first three quarters of 2025. Their growing presence is putting pressure on European leaders such as Volkswagen, which has already lost ground to Chinese competitors in China and now faces them on its home turf. VW said it had “confidence in our products and our ability to innovate.”

China’s dominance is fueled by massive manufacturing capacity. The country can produce more than 46 million vehicles annually, far more than domestic demand. “You need to go global,” said Klaus Zyciora. “If you are not a manufacturer that is able to bring five million units annually to the market, you will have a hard time.”

The WSJ writes that exports have become essential to absorbing this overcapacity. BYD is expanding aggressively, aiming for 2,000 European dealerships by 2026 and opening or planning factories in countries including Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia. The company raised $5.6 billion to support its global push.

Political barriers remain one of the biggest obstacles. Chinese EVs face steep tariffs in the U.S., the European Union, and Mexico. In Europe, BYD vehicles are subject to duties of up to 27%. In the U.S., restrictions on Chinese software and national security concerns have effectively blocked imports.

Still, some governments are easing resistance. In Canada, officials recently reduced tariffs on Chinese EVs as part of a broader partnership with Beijing. In the U.S., President Trump signaled openness to Chinese automakers that produce locally, saying, “Let China come in.”

To bypass trade barriers, Chinese companies are increasingly building vehicles abroad. This strategy allows them to preserve access to major markets while maintaining cost advantages.

BYD’s rise has been driven not only by scale but also by strategy. After a slow start in Europe, the company shifted from premium pricing to more affordable models and recruited experienced Western executives. Local hiring and market-specific products helped accelerate growth.

“If we focus our strategy on EVs only, we will become another Tesla, with all the bumps, the ups and downs,” Altavilla said.

Chinese manufacturers are also moving upmarket. “They will learn to upgrade, and then they will come in there as well,” said Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson, warning that premium brands may soon face intensified competition.

In emerging markets such as Mexico, Chinese automakers have become major players by offering feature-rich, low-cost vehicles. Analysts say they are expanding demand for electric cars in regions where affordable EVs barely existed before. “They are creating a market for affordable EVs that didn’t exist,” said Justin Fischer.

BYD’s overseas growth has helped offset intense competition at home, even as profit margins fluctuate. Despite selling more than 4.6 million vehicles globally last year, the company faces pressure from rivals inside China and slowing domestic demand.

Yet the broader trend remains clear: Chinese automakers are no longer niche exporters. With scale, cost advantages, government backing, and improving technology, they are positioning themselves as global leaders.

As Altavilla put it, BYD aims to become “a real European automaker.” More broadly, China is positioning itself to dominate the next phase of the global auto industry—putting Tesla and traditional Western manufacturers under sustained pressure.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 21:20

‘Saving The Family’ Should Start With Sound Money

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‘Saving The Family’ Should Start With Sound Money

Authored by Jeffery L. Degner and Thomas Savidge via TheDailyEconomy.org,

In the opening week of 2026, several scholars at the Heritage Foundation published a special report titled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” This 168-page document covers myriad policies that negatively impact the American family and proposes solutions to those problems. Some, largely the solutions that propose repealing and reforming existing systems, can help families. But the calls to subsidize traditional family life will come with a host of unintended consequences.

The nation is indeed facing a demographic crisis, and some of Heritage’s proposals deserve praise, while others deserve criticism. One proposed reform is mentioned but given barely any attention: a return to sound money.

Helping the American family (broadly understood) is a laudable goal, but the patterns of later and fewer marriages, later and less-frequent reproduction, and a host of other family pathologies are themselves the result of a mountain of interventions.

The American family must be saved from government, not by government.

America’s Demographic Squeeze: Fewer Births, More Dependents

The demographic decline facing the US is less sudden than often claimed, but no less consequential. As the Heritage report notes, fertility has remained below replacement rates for years, ensuring that natural population growth is weak. In the absence of sustained immigration, population growth is likely to become population contraction.

Simultaneously, the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation is steadily increasing the share of the population outside of the labor force, raising the dependency burden borne by working-age Americans and taxpayers.

These trends are already becoming visible. Slower growth or even shrinkage in the working-age population, absent significant immigration, constrains labor supply and limit economic growth potential. Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare (the two largest expenditures in the federal budget) face rising expenditures precisely as the tax base supporting them grows more slowly. Additionally, the rise of the welfare state has greatly hampered family formation, especially among low-income families.

These changes underscore the need to remove institutional barriers to family formation and reform policies that underlie present challenges.

Remove Barriers Before Adding Benefits

Several laudable elements in the Heritage report shouldn’t be overlooked. First, it acknowledges that many policies favor traditional families. While there are indeed over 1,000 forms of federal privilege granted to married couples, these have been in place throughout the period when both marriage and fertility rates are falling. This raises the question: Why are these so-called “pro-family” or “pro-natal” policies failing to achieve their stated goals? Perhaps it’s because other measures on the books outweigh them, and actually short-circuit family formation.

The report’s authors call for a repeal of multiple policies that have been shown to deter and delay marriage, alter planned fertility, and even divorce patterns. Among them are “credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers,” and the structure and incentives from the Earned Income Tax Credit, which “strongly favors single parenthood over marriage.” The report also demands the elimination of “needless occupational licensure laws” that block young and lower-income earners from the labor force, undermining the early wealth-building that encourages marriage. Further, it seeks the easing of local zoning and construction regulations that make home affordability more difficult for younger, poorer households.

Heritage’s report frames the Israeli case as a model for what must be done to increase marriage and fertility rates. But the main reasons cited for (slightly) above-replacement fertility rates in Israel are religiosity, nationalism, and “Jewish communal life in exile,” all of which are summarized later as “culture, faith, and national purpose to family formation.” These specific pressures can’t, and shouldn’t, be replicated in modern, pluralistic societies. Further, the report rightfully admits, “While other nations have tried to reverse declining birthrates through financially generous family policies, none has succeeded in restoring fertility to replacement levels. This demonstrates that government spending alone does not ensure demographic success.”

Turning to Eastern Europe, the report looks to Hungary for policy solutions, interventions, and expenditures that have a more positive track record in increasing marriage and fertility. Indeed, Budapest began offering eligible brides interest-free loans, equating to over $30,000 for saying “I do” back in 2019. Moreover, the debt may be forgiven if the couple had three or more children. The report belies an important fact, however: the increase in the marriage rate is largely due to formerly cohabiting couples tying the knot. One would expect that once this initial wave of marriages has passed, the impact would be negated by other factors. In fact, just four years after the policy was introduced, the marriage rate began to fall back toward EU norms. The high cost of taxpayer-subsidized loans for cohabiting couples to make it official has had only temporary effects, and may prove, in the long run, to have produced marriages that are more apt to divorce, especially when the money runs out.

The Heritage Report correctly marks some of the causes of family disintegration: marriage penalties embedded in both welfare and fiscal interventions, especially for low-income households. The authors rightly call for their repeal. At the same time, the models they point to as ideal national cases for cultural and policy reform either can’t be replicated or are short on results. Worse still, the report’s greatest shortcoming is found in a drive-by mention of the single, foundational intervention that may actually be undermining all of traditional family life.

The Best “Pro-Family” Policy Is Price Stability

Buried within the report is a brief aside discussing the pressure a fiat monetary system and the resulting inflation has placed on families. The authors state:

High inflation can not only devastate the economy but also make it harder for families to form and grow. The US abandoned the gold standard in 1971, and the lack of convertibility of dollars to gold since then has facilitated reckless money printing and irresponsible federal spending, leading to bouts of high inflation in the 1970s, early 1980s, and the 2020s. Families rely on the dollar as a store of wealth, so the Federal Reserve must restore sound money and price stability. While many monetary rules have been proposed, the system with a proven record track record of success and stable prices is full convertibility to gold.

This passage, and its recommendation to return to full convertibility, are worth their weight in gold.

A few economists have pointed to the connection between increasing real prices in healthcare, education, and housing as key contributors to delays in marriage and lowered fertility rates.

Outside factors like regulatory pressure and geopolitical forces have doubtless contributed to rising real prices in these categories. But among these, the ongoing loss of purchasing power due to the loose money policies of the Federal Reserve and its member banks has received too little attention.  

Even less attention is paid to the rise of what some have called the inflation culture. The Heritage report hints at this reality, but chalks it up to a loss of religiosity. But the decay of religious and civic life in the West has an undetected, underlying culprit. Because of the redistributive and impoverishing effects of easy money, a once-entrepreneurial and optimistic American culture has given way to a litany of social pathologies:

All are impacting family formation and family cohesion. All have their roots in the demoralization of persistent, slow-burning inflation, eating away the value of money. Younger generations hoping to live comfortably can reasonably ask: ‘Who has time for marriage and family?’ The answer: a lot fewer people than in generations past.

The damage done to the American family is likely reversible, but the Heritage Foundation’s report misses the root cause: inflation may be the most corrosive anti-family force of all. Policymakers who want to revive marriage rates and fertility should examine existing, counterproductive incentives, including new money creation and Congressional overspending. What they shouldn’t do is continue layering new interventions onto old ones, creating more bureaucracy and higher costs — but fewer weddings and babies.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 20:55

The EU-US $800BN Postwar Ukraine ‘Prosperity’ Plan Which Should Outrage MAGA

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The EU-US $800BN Postwar Ukraine ‘Prosperity’ Plan Which Should Outrage MAGA

Ukraine is now begging the EU and US for $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years at a moment its prospects on the battlefield look no better than a year ago. This reportedly includes an ask of $800 billion for “reconstruction” and $700 billion for “military purposes”.

Politico is reporting Friday that EU leadership has circulated a confidential document to European heads of state outlining Ukraine’s financial needs for the initial $800 billion for rebuilding the country – a figure which Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said would be comparable to “the detonation of an atomic bomb.” Orbán made the remarks Friday following an emergency EU summit in Brussels.

“The 18-page document outlines a 10-year plan to guarantee Ukraine’s recovery with a fast-tracked path toward EU membership,” Politico writes after obtaining the document. “The European Commission circulated the plans with EU capitals ahead of the leaders’ summit Thursday evening where the document, dated Jan. 22, was addressed, according to three EU officials and diplomats who were granted anonymity to talk about the sensitive topic.”

According to further details, “The funding strategy stretches until 2040 alongside an immediate 100-day operational plan to get the project off the ground. But the prosperity plan will struggle to attract outside investment if the conflict rumbles on, according to the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, which is advising on the reconstruction plan in a pro-bono capacity.”

via BBC

Various institutions alongside the US and EU government plan to contribute according to these broad milestones envisioned in the document:

  • Over the next ten, the EU, US, and major international lenders — including the IMF and World Bank — are lining up roughly $500 billion in combined public and private funding for Ukraine, according to the document.

  • The European Commission plans to commit another €100 billion in taxpayer-backed funds via budget support and investment guarantees under the EU’s next seven-year budget starting in 2028.

  • Brussels claims that this €100 billion outlay would “unlock” as much as €207 billion in additional investment 

  • Washington, for its part, says it will mobilize capital through a bespoke US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund, notably without attaching a price tag.

  • The US also signaled plans to funnel investment into Ukraine’s critical minerals, infrastructure, energy, and technology sectors, aligning reconstruction with long-term strategic and resource interests – an earlier theme sounded by the Trump administration.

Naturally, neither Politico nor much of the mainstream media have commented on how deeply unpopular all this will be for domestic populations, and especially MAGA in the US will likely greet this as merely setting up for another theft of taxpayer funds for corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. 

And ironically this document for long-term funding is being revealed less than 24 hours after President Zelensky got up before the WEF audience in Davos and positively scolded EU governments for supposed ‘inaction’ and for being ‘fragmented’ and weak…

Biting the hand that feeds you… or also humiliating the EU while the bloc shovels billions in cash your way.

And: this speech is not gonna go down well. Europeans just approved a 90 billion euro package – fresh cash, not Russian assets – certainly not insignificant.

But Politico does inject a little realism at least, in quoting a BlackRock executive at Davos:

“Think about it. If you’re a pension fund, you’re fiduciary towards your clients, your pensioners. It’s nearly impossible to invest into a war zone,” BlackRock’s vice chairman, Philipp Hildebrand, said Wednesday in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I think it has to be sequenced and that’s going to take some time.”

In the meantime, over in Moscow President Putin just made clear to the US delegation led by Steve Witkoff that the question of territory remains a red line. Russia has further signaled Ukraine is not going to look the same in any post-conflict scenario, especially in terms of geographic boundaries.

This unprecedented proposed long-term funding plan should infuriate American taxpayers…

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov made clear Friday that the military will continue to consistently pursue the objectives … on the battlefield, where the Russian armed forces hold the strategic initiative.” This means, as BlackRock’s Hildebrand acknowledged, the conflict which is about to enter its fifth year is going to drag on.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 20:30

AI-Induced Cultural Stagnation Is No Longer Speculation − It’s Already Happening

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AI-Induced Cultural Stagnation Is No Longer Speculation − It’s Already Happening

Authored by Ahmed Elgammal, via The Conversation

Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans.

But scientists and critics have wondered what would happen once AI became widely adopted and started training on its outputs.

A new study points to some answers.

In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously – generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention.

The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate – image, caption, image, caption – over and over and over.

Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts were – and regardless of how much randomness the systems were allowed – the outputs quickly converged onto a narrow set of generic, familiar visual themes: atmospheric cityscapes, grandiose buildings and pastoral landscapes. Even more striking, the system quickly “forgot” its starting prompt.

The researchers called the outcomes “visual elevator music” – pleasant and polished, yet devoid of any real meaning.

For example, they started with the image prompt, “The Prime Minister pored over strategy documents, trying to sell the public on a fragile peace deal while juggling the weight of his job amidst impending military action.” The resulting image was then captioned by AI. This caption was used as a prompt to generate the next image.

After repeating this loop, the researchers ended up with a bland image of a formal interior space – no people, no drama, no real sense of time and place.

A prompt that begins with a prime minister under stress ends with an image of an empty room with fancy furnishings. Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau, CC BY

As a computer scientist who studies generative models and creativity, I see the findings from this study as an important piece of the debate over whether AI will lead to cultural stagnation.

The results show that generative AI systems themselves tend toward homogenization when used autonomously and repeatedly. They even suggest that AI systems are currently operating in this way by default.

The Familiar Is the Default

This experiment may appear beside the point: Most people don’t ask AI systems to endlessly describe and regenerate their own images. The convergence to a set of bland, stock images happened without retraining. No new data was added. Nothing was learned. The collapse emerged purely from repeated use.

But I think the setup of the experiment can be thought of as a diagnostic tool. It reveals what generative systems preserve when no one intervenes.

Pretty … boring. Chris McLoughlin/Moment via Getty Images

This has broader implications, because modern culture is increasingly influenced by exactly these kinds of pipelines. Images are summarized into text. Text is turned into images. Content is ranked, filtered and regenerated as it moves between words, images and videos. New articles on the web are now more likely to be written by AI than humans. Even when humans remain in the loop, they are often choosing from AI-generated options rather than starting from scratch.

The findings of this recent study show that the default behavior of these systems is to compress meaning toward what is most familiar, recognizable and easy to regenerate.

Cultural Stagnation or Acceleration?

For the past few years, skeptics have warned that generative AI could lead to cultural stagnation by flooding the web with synthetic content that future AI systems then train on. Over time, the argument goes, this recursive loop would narrow diversity and innovation.

Champions of the technology have pushed back, pointing out that fears of cultural decline accompany every new technology. Humans, they argue, will always be the final arbiter of creative decisions.

What has been missing from this debate is empirical evidence showing where homogenization actually begins.

The new study does not test retraining on AI-generated data. Instead, it shows something more fundamental: Homogenization happens before retraining even enters the picture. The content that generative AI systems naturally produce – when used autonomously and repeatedly – is already compressed and generic.

This reframes the stagnation argument. The risk is not only that future models might train on AI-generated content, but that AI-mediated culture is already being filtered in ways that favor the familiar, the describable and the conventional.

Retraining would amplify this effect. But it is not its source.

This Is No Moral Panic

Skeptics are right about one thing: Culture has always adapted to new technologies. Photography did not kill painting. Film did not kill theater. Digital tools have enabled new forms of expression.

But those earlier technologies never forced culture to be endlessly reshaped across various mediums at a global scale. They did not summarize, regenerate and rank cultural products – news stories, songs, memes, academic papers, photographs or social media posts – millions of times per day, guided by the same built-in assumptions about what is “typical.”

The study shows that when meaning is forced through such pipelines repeatedly, diversity collapses not because of bad intentions, malicious design or corporate negligence, but because only certain kinds of meaning survive the text-to-image-to-text repeated conversions.

This does not mean cultural stagnation is inevitable. Human creativity is resilient. Institutions, subcultures and artists have always found ways to resist homogenization. But in my view, the findings of the study show that stagnation is a real risk – not a speculative fear – if generative systems are left to operate in their current iteration.

They also help clarify a common misconception about AI creativity: Producing endless variations is not the same as producing innovation. A system can generate millions of images while exploring only a tiny corner of cultural space.

In my own research on creative AI, I found that novelty requires designing AI systems with incentives to deviate from the norms. Without it, systems optimize for familiarity because familiarity is what they have learned best. The study reinforces this point empirically. Autonomy alone does not guarantee exploration. In some cases, it accelerates convergence.

This pattern already emerged in the real world: One study found that AI-generated lesson plans featured the same drifttoward conventional, uninspiring content, underscoring that AI systems converge toward what’s typical rather than what’s unique or creative.

AI’s outputs are familiar because they revert to average displays of human creativity. Bulgac/iStock via Getty Images

Lost in Translation

Whenever you write a caption for an image, details will be lost. Likewise for generating an image from text. And this happens whether it’s being performed by a human or a machine.

In that sense, the convergence that took place is not a failure that’s unique to AI. It reflects a deeper property of bouncing from one medium to another. When meaning passes repeatedly through two different formats, only the most stable elements persist.

But by highlighting what survives during repeated translations between text and images, the authors are able to show that meaning is processed inside generative systems with a quiet pull toward the generic.

The implication is sobering: Even with human guidance – whether that means writing prompts, selecting outputs or refining results – these systems are still stripping away some details and amplifying others in ways that are oriented toward what’s “average.”

If generative AI is to enrich culture rather than flatten it, I think systems need to be designed in ways that resist convergence toward statistically average outputs. There can be rewards for deviation and support for less common and less mainstream forms of expression.

The study makes one thing clear: Absent these interventions, generative AI will continue to drift toward mediocre and uninspired content.

Cultural stagnation is no longer speculation. It’s already happening.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 20:05

The Case Against Declaring Artificial General Intelligence

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The Case Against Declaring Artificial General Intelligence

Authored by Lewis Liu via CityAM.com,

  • Today’s AI systems fail badly in out-of-distribution scenarios, as shown by their inability to interpret real-world geopolitical crises.

  • Large language models reflect the ideological biases of their creators, undermining claims of neutral “general” intelligence.

  • The real economic opportunity lies in tightly governed artificial narrow intelligence, not in premature claims of AGI.

“AGI is here, now.”

That’s Sequoia Capital this week, one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary venture firms and a major OpenAI investor, declaring we’ve crossed the threshold into artificial general intelligence.

Their post also proclaims, in big bold letters, that they are “Blissfully Unencumbered by the Details”. When Sequoia speaks, the tech world listens. This post has dominated conversations across the AI builder community for days.

As a builder, venture investor, and AI scientist myself, I find their proclamation both deeply useful and profoundly dangerous.

Here’s what’s useful

Sequoia offers a functional definition of AGI: “the ability to figure things out. That’s it”. AI can now crawl through information, determine a path forward, and execute. The key shift, as they frame it, is AI moving from “talking” to “doing”. Harvey and Legora “function as associates,” Juicebox “functions as a recruiter,” OpenEvidence’s Deep Consult “functions as a specialist.” Those are their exact phrases, and I’m skeptical of the framing, but we’ll get to that.

They’re throwing down the gauntlet for builders, and this matters. AI systems can actually redline contracts now, genuinely reach out to prospects today. It’s a reminder to think bigger about what’s possible and that the horizon has expanded dramatically in just the last year.

I sent this post to my own co-founders, not to debate the philosophy, but I wanted to push us on Sequoia’s “doing” versus “talking” framework. We need to rise to this challenge ourselves.

However, calling these systems “AGI” is profoundly damaging, both to the credibility of the AI revolution and to its safe deployment. It obscures what AI agents can actually do today (hint: not general superintelligence) and offers zero guidance on how humans should interact with them (hint: don’t trust them blindly).

Let me give three examples that expose these systems’ real limitations.

1. AI systems cannot handle out-of-distribution situations

I wrote about this in my last column, but the Greenland crisis offers a live, unfolding example. I tested how GenAI tools, such as ChatGPT 5.2 with maximum “thinking and research” mode, would analyze the situation. Could these supposedly AGI systems help me understand a fast-moving geopolitical event?

They couldn’t even conceive of it happening.

I shared a screenshot of the Wikipedia page documenting the crisis. Every model told me it was fabricated, “bullshit”, impossible. When I pushed further, citing real news sources, ChatGPT kept telling me to “relax” – insisting “this is not a real crisis”.  The models are so anchored in the traditional norms of the Western Alliance, the system simply cannot output context that contradicts its training data, even when confronted with primary sources.

AI “thinking” fails when the situation sits outside its training distribution: gaslighting users instead of escalating uncertainty, refuses humility and keeps “reasoning” even when it’s wrong. If policymakers or politicians are using these tools to understand Greenland right now, that’s genuinely dangerous. 

2. AI systems reflect the beliefs of their builders

A Nature article published two weeks ago showed exactly this. Researchers found that LLMs reflected the ideology of their creators. Mainland Chinese models were extremely favorable toward the PRC; Western models were deeply unfavorable.

Even within Western LLMs, the bias is stark. Grok (Elon Musk’s XAI model) showed negative bias toward the EU and multiculturalism, reflecting a right-wing agenda. Google’s Gemini, perceived as more liberal, was more favorable toward both.

The AI community now accepts this as fact: LLMs mirror the ideology of their labs. So how can we trust an AI agent has a “blank slate” to “figure something out”? Especially when it must trawl through vast, nuanced data?

Claims of AGI assume neutrality; or at least it should. The evidence says otherwise.

3. Deterministic versus non-deterministic systems

GenAI is deeply non-deterministic. The same prompt can produce slightly different outputs or vastly different ones.

Humans intuitively understand what should be fixed versus creative. My shirt size when ordering online? Deterministic. The pattern I choose today? Creative preference. Even the latest, most powerful models blur this line constantly. You’ve seen it: GenAI treating deterministic facts as speculative, creative inputs. 

This reveals a critical gap in meta-cognition – awareness of the thinking process itself. Without distinguishing what’s fixed from what’s generative, AI cannot reliably “figure things out”.

So what do we do?

We have tools at our disposal.

First, choose narrower use cases where bias and out-of-distribution events are less likely.

Second, ensure AI has full, personalised context anchored in reality – not agents running wild without grounding. As I’ve written before, context is king when it comes to AI agents. This also clarifies what should be deterministic versus generative.

Third, deploy rules-based filters and observer agents that trigger human review when needed.

Finally, accept a fundamental truth: LLMs will always reflect their training data and their creators’ ideology.  LLMs (and their creators) are political actors, whether they want to be or not. As such, AI should be controlled by individual human users, not a system done to humans. Provenance matters – tracing every decision back to a human, no matter how many steps removed, is essential for governance and safety.

At the end of the day, I don’t care what we call it – just not AGI. What we have right now is generationally powerful: AI that can talk and act efficiently within narrow, well-defined frameworks. Guided by critical guardrails, deterministic filters, and human-in-the-loop processes, these systems will add trillions of dollars of value to our global economy.

Call it Artificial Narrow Intelligence. That’s the trillion-dollar opportunity available today.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 17:40

“Sleeping On The Job”: DC Opens Medicaid Investigation Following Nurse And Aide Neglect Claims

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“Sleeping On The Job”: DC Opens Medicaid Investigation Following Nurse And Aide Neglect Claims

D.C.’s inspector general has opened an investigation after complaints surfaced about home health nurses and aides allegedly sleeping while on duty, following a News4 I-Team report that included hours of video showing caregivers appearing to sleep overnight, according to NBC.

The investigation stems from the account of Damon Brooks, a D.C. resident who shared his experience publicly in December. His story, viewed by more than half a million people online, described repeated instances where he said caregivers failed to respond when he needed assistance.

NBC writes that Brooks, a paraplegic sports journalist, relies on in-home care through the District’s Elderly and Persons with Physical Disabilities waiver program, which is funded by Medicaid. He said he struggled for years with aides who could not be awakened at night, even as he worried that speaking out could jeopardize his care. “Sadly, like, I’ve had large gaps in my schedule. Sometimes I get people, sometimes I don’t,” Brooks said.

After the story aired, Brooks said investigators from the Office of the Inspector General contacted him. “They explained to me that some of the things that I’ve been subjected to were not right. They were deemed fraudulent, and that they’re opening an investigation to see how they could possibly assist me with hopefully rectifying the issue,” he said. He added that since the report, he has not seen aides sleeping on the job.

“I don’t want anybody to be a casualty or anybody to lose the quality of life due to somebody’s negligence,” Brooks said.

The report also renewed scrutiny of broader staffing challenges in the program. D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson, who chairs the health committee, said the issue extends beyond the District. “It’s a complicated issue, but it’s certainly not an issue that is unique to the District,” she said. Henderson noted that over four years, D.C. has lost about 13% of licensed health aides and 28% of certified nursing assistants.

Henderson said better pay is critical to retention, estimating it would take more than $89 million over four years to raise wages. “It’s hard to recruit someone who could be making more at Starbucks or another retail job and it be less labor-intensive work than what they’re currently providing,” she said. “I think it pushes us to think about priorities, right? To think about what is super, super important to us and to try to become creative with that.”

The Department of Health Care Finance, which oversees the waiver program, said in a statement it investigated the complaints and took corrective action but did not specify details. The Office of the Inspector General’s inquiry into Brooks’ case is ongoing, as the District pursues measures to expand and stabilize the caregiving workforce.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 17:20

DHS Says Mahmoud Khalil May Be Sent To Algeria

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DHS Says Mahmoud Khalil May Be Sent To Algeria

Authored by Arjun Singh via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said on Jan. 21 that Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist at the center of the Trump administration’s deportation battles, may be removed to Algeria.

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who leads the department’s Office of Public Affairs, made the announcement during an appearance on the NewsNation show “Katie Pavlich Tonight” in response to a question about Khalil.

“It looks like he’ll go to Algeria. That’s what the thought is right now,” McLaughlin said. “It’s a reminder for those who are in this country on a visa or on a green card. You are a guest in this country—act like it.”

Khalil, who is a green card holder and thus a permanent resident, has been the subject of a longstanding legal controversy ever since he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on March 8, 2025. He was involved in protests against Israel for actions during its war with Hamas in Gaza, which began after the terrorist group attacked the country on Oct. 7, 2023.

The Trump administration sought to remove Khalil from the country based on his activism at Columbia University, citing a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that permits the removal of foreign nationals whose presence may have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States.

The administration later added another charge of deportability, arguing in an immigration court that in his application to adjust status and become a lawful permanent resident, Khalil willfully misrepresented a material fact. Namely, he allegedly failed to disclose his affiliation with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an organization that opposes the Israeli government.

On these charges, Khalil was issued an order of removal on Sept. 12, 2025, by an immigration judge, sending him to Algeria, and in the alternative, to Syria. Khalil later filed a petition for release from ICE custody, seeking a writ of habeas corpus from federal district court, which was initially granted but later reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, allowing for his re-arrest.

The government successfully argued before the court of appeals that Khalil could not be granted relief from a federal district court until he had been issued a “final order of removal,” that is, at the conclusion of his deportation proceedings. Khalil’s attorneys, by contrast, argued that his continued detention was a violation of his constitutional rights.

Khalil has not exhausted all of his legal options to remain in the United States. He could petition for a rehearing of the case by the full appeals court. If a rehearing is denied, he could also petition for a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Additionally, Khalil could appeal the immigration judge’s removal order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which specifically hears appeals from immigration courts. Thereafter, if the board denies him relief, he could appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as the judge’s decision was issued in La Salle, Louisiana, which lies within their jurisdiction.

Khalil is a citizen of Algeria and was born in Syria in 1995. His wife, Noor Abdalla, a dentist and pro-Palestinian activist, as well as his minor son, are both U.S. citizens. His detention and removal proceedings have been highly criticized by free speech activist groups and some Democratic officials, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Khalil’s attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union did not respond to The Epoch Times’ repeated requests for comment.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 17:00

Watch: Convicted Minnesota Scammer Says Walz, Ellison Were Aware Of $250M Fraud

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Watch: Convicted Minnesota Scammer Says Walz, Ellison Were Aware Of $250M Fraud

The media has been giving quite a lot of attention to Aimee Bock, the head of a Minnesota nonprofit at the center of the largest pandemic relief fraud in the nation’s history – which she now says Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison had to have known about.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, June 12, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

To review; Bock’s organization, Feeding Our Future, fraudulently signed off on $250 million in federal funds meant to feed underprivileged children in Minnesota roughly 125 million nonexistent meals. According to prosecutors, as little as 3% of the funds were actually used to feed children. Bock, 45, was charged with signing off on reimbursement claims for the unserved meals, as well as collecting bribes. She maintains her innocence, while one Somali community leader told a local reporter that Bock was “a modern-day Robin Hood.”

Feeding Our Future was a “sponsoring organization,” meaning it approved meal sites, approved meal counts, and distributed the reimbursements to hundreds of sponsored food sites across the state which were mostly operated by Somalians that submitted fraudulent claims. However, in exchange for Bock’s sponsorship and approvals (she sued the state for discrimination in November 2020, claiming the Department of Education was unfairly targeting minority-led programs), the Somalians paid kickbacks to Bock and other Feeding Our Future employees, prosecutors said. 

So far, 98 people have been charged in the fraud, 85 of whom are Somalians – unlike Bock, who is white. Hence the media focus on her. Over 64 of those charged have either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. 

Karen Undone

Bock, who’s awaiting sentencing and faces up to 33 years in prison, is now giving jailhouse interviews to mainstream outlets – telling CBS News that she wishes she could “go back and do things differently, stop things, catch things.” 

She claims she was doing everything in her power to root out fraud, and terminated agreements with dozens of entities she believed were cheating the system.

“I was the only one that stopped a claim and said, this is fraudulent,” she said. “There are tens of millions of dollars in claims that we did not pay, that we refused.”

Feeding Our Future notably submitted $3.4 million worth of meal claims in 2019 – a figure which exploded to nearly $200 million in 2021, which Bock attributed to looser guidelines during the pandemic that allowed parents to pick up meals and bring them home.

Walz Knew?

Bock blames Minnesota officials for not catching the fraud, telling CBS: “We relied on the state,” adding that local officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, would often visit the meal sites. “We told the state, this site is going to operate at this address, this time, and this number of children. The state would then tell us that’s approved.”

A split image shows the defendant in the Feeding Our Future fraud case, left, and a separate photo introduced as evidence during the trial depicting luxury spending tied to people in her network, right. (Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office; Department of Justice via Fox News)

Now, Bock says there’s no way Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison weren’t aware of the fraud. 

“I have to believe that the governor’s office and Keith Ellison’s office were aware of this. They’ve said they were involved in helping the FBI. They’ve said they were made aware, but apparently I’m scary, so they couldn’t do anything,” Bock told Fox News. “I honestly believe Keith Ellison and Gov. Walz need to be held accountable. There needs to be an investigation done. If they weren’t aware, that’s concerning.”

Ellison’s office told the outlet that Bock lacks credibility, pointing to her conviction. 

“She is a liar, fraudster, and manipulator of the highest order who has never acknowledged or accepted her guilt. Now, she’s on a media tour to deflect her guilt onto others instead of finally taking responsibility for the fraud scheme she ran,” said a spokesperson. 

“Federal and state investigators meticulously examined the crimes Bock and her accomplices committed,” the Ellison spokesperson continued. “Bock alone is responsible for her own actions, which was proven in court beyond a shadow of a doubt, and her claim about Attorney General Ellison is a lie without a shred of evidence behind it.”

According to the House Oversight Committee’s James Comer (R-KY), the DOJ has issued over 1,750 subpoenas, executed over 130 search warrants, and conducted over 1,000 witness interviews in a sweeping federal probe. Comer says federal prosecutors believe at least $9 billion has been stolen across multiple fraud schemes in Minnesota.

“The breadth and depth of this fraud is breathtaking. And I fear it is just the tip of the iceberg. Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota’s Democratic leadership have either been asleep at the wheel or complicit in these crimes,” he said. “They failed Minnesotans and all Americans, handing millions of taxpayers’ money to fraudsters.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 16:40

Davos Is Dead: Western Civ Has Suffered Enough…

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Davos Is Dead: Western Civ Has Suffered Enough…

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Up In Smoke

“This is how tyranny looks in the modern world. It arrives dressed as dialogue, consensus, and expertise. It is imposed by people who sincerely believe they are doing nothing at all.”

– DataRepublican

Davos — The World Economic Forum (WEF)— is toast. Trump, Bessent, and Lutnick exposed the wretched org of overcompensated squishes to too much light and heat and it flared into such a pathetic little smoldering cinder that its spoxpersons said the meeting might get moved out of Davos altogether next year to Dublin or Detroit. Closer to the people, you understand (except there are hardly any people left in Detroit, thanks to the fifty years of WEF influence on manufacturing policy and the people of Dublin are now Nigerians, Somalis, and Congolese, thanks to the WEF’s retarded migration doctrine).

All of which means that its trademark, WEF Globalism, is dead, too. No more aspirations of One World Government (as if Earth was the Planet Krypton). . . no more You will have nothing, be happy, and eat bugs. . . no more green energy gaslight. . . no more all women are women, including men pretending to be women. . . no more wide-open borders. . . no more of their preposterous elitist armchair totalitarianism. In fact, if anything, the WEF had terminal boundary problems, much like the Cluster-B personalities that infest the upper echelons of the NGO alternative universe that carried out the WEF’s dastardly programming for them. They didn’t know when to stop.

Before he got washed-up in a slop of sexual accusation and embezzlement, WEF-Fuhrer Klaus Schwab used to brag about plugging his Young Global Leaders into top government jobs all over the place (e.g., the disastrous Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland in Canada). That’s over. Western Civ has suffered enough. One by one, the Big Dawgs of the EU are quietly backing-off of their insane migrant importation policies.

Border control is nature’s way of fixing boundary problems of-the-mind.

No one personifies the problem more than Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, the archetypal Cluster-B “devouring mother” costumed as a harmless finishing school headmistress. She is the unelected (appointed by committee) President of the European Commission who has been telling the elected squish leaders of France, Germany and elsewhere what to do — and, remarkably, they did exactly what they were told! Invite the Third World for an overnight and see what happens. . . ditch your nuclear power plants. . . ruin your farmers. . . laugh and clap when the Nord Stream pipeline blows up and your citizens must freeze in the dark.

“Europe stood firm and united in full solidarity with Greenland & the Kingdom of Denmark,” Ursula tweeted the other day.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

That’s rich. (And fake.)

What really happened at Davos this week is uproariously simple.

Mr. Trump just notified the parties involved that an agreement dating from 1951 gives the USA “unrestricted access” to Greenland, for the excellent reason that the US military prevented the Nazis from seizing it during World War Two, with all that implies. Fait accompli. The USA will now do what it requires in Greenland — with all that implies about updated geo-realpolitik of 2026.

The dirty secret about political reality in Europe now is that the masterplan to bankrupt, ruin, and break up Russia has completely backfired.

Europe is now ruined. Voila!

Ironically, it has been the UK (a.k.a. Great Britain) that led the way in this quixotic fiasco — you might recall that they actually voted to quit the EU in 2016. And yet, the UK has managed to engineer NATO’s idiotic program to keep the War in Ukraine going as long as possible. Recall, also, PM Boris Johnson’s 2022 mission to scuttle the Istanbul Communiqué involving Ukrainian neutrality that might have prevented the war from getting out-of-hand.

The payoff for Great Britain: Keir Starmer becomes the actual Big Brother depicted by George Orwell with all the trappings of despotism and economic decline that goes with that. Britain is left destitute, cultureless, and raped at will by its own houseguests. Meanwhile, France is dissolving in an acid bath of Islamic turbo-birthrates, and Germany under the feckless Olaf Scholz and now Friedrich Merz gets a one-way ticket to the Palookaville of neo-medievalism. Good show, boys!

And meanwhile, as I have informed you previously, Mr. Putin is methodically rolling up the unfortunate business in Ukraine as Mr. Zelenskyy’s long-running NATO-subsidized misadventure dwindles to its ignominious close. Yes, you are seeing boundaries reestablished. Mr. Putin is not one of your junior high school mean-girls or a deluded finishing school headmistress. He’s an able, masculine manager of his own sovereign polity and he is reestablishing Russia’s age-old sphere of influence in the ambiguous frontier region of Ukraine. The world will be better off when this is settled.

And Mr. Trump emerges from the Davos miasma with a geopolitical plan to defend Western Civ and to re-prioritize business in the USA so that Americans can once again make a living and lead purposeful lives. The Cluster-B mean-girls hate this. They want the men of America to fail better, as they had been failing until Mr. Trump came back on the scene.

Anyway, it was minus-20 degrees in Minneapolis this morning — not very good weather for blowing your whistle at US immigration agents — so don’t expect a whole lot of excitement out of that place for at least another week.

Do keep an eye on Virginia, where new Governor Abigail Spanberger, meanest of all mean-girls, is fixing to wreck the state.

Prediction: Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will shortly be all over that deranged bitch like white on rice. Wait for it.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 16:20

Trump Says US ‘Armada’ Moving Towards Iran

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Trump Says US ‘Armada’ Moving Towards Iran

Via Middle East Eye

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is sending an “armada” towards Iran, threatening Tehran against resuming its nuclear program.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One after returning from meetings with world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said Washington was closely monitoring Iran as US naval assets moved into the region. “We have a lot of ships going that direction, just in case,” Trump said. “I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely.”

Source: @CopernicusEU satellite imagery

He added: “We have an armada heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it.”

US officials, speaking anonymously to Reuters, said the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers were expected to arrive in the Middle East in the coming days.

One official said Washington was also considering deploying additional air defense systems to protect US bases from potential Iranian retaliation in the event of an American strike.

The deployments expand Trump’s military options and follow a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. The summer strikes were widely seen as a violation of international law.

The warships began moving from the Asia-Pacific last week as tensions rose following a crackdown on protests across Iran. Tehran has accused Washington of encouraging the unrest.

Trump has repeatedly threatened intervention warning Iran against killing protesters, but in the end US strikes were called off. Demonstrations appeared to ease last week.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “”several thousand” people were killed during weeks of nationwide protests.

Trump claimed on Thursday that Iran had cancelled nearly 840 executions after US warnings. “I said, ‘If you hang those people, you’re going to be hit harder than you’ve ever been hit,’” Trump said. “It’ll make what we did to your nuclear program look like peanuts.”

He said the executions were cancelled an hour before they were due to take place, calling it “a good sign”.

Iran’s top prosecutor Mohammad Movahedi, however on Friday dismissed Trump’s claim suggesting the judiciary had authorised mass executions, calling the allegations baseless.

Speaking in comments carried by the judiciary’s Mizan News Agency, Movahedi said “this claim is completely false; no such number exists, nor has the judiciary made any such decision”.

Trump also repeated his warning that the US would strike again if Iran restarted its nuclear program. “If they try to do it again, they have to go to another area. We’ll hit them there too, just as easily,” he said.

Protests in Iran began on December 28 with demonstrations over economic hardship in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar before spreading nationwide. An Iranian official told Reuters that the confirmed death toll had exceeded 5,000, including 500 members of the security forces.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/23/2026 – 15:40

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