A New Year’s interview with Volodymyr Zelensky - The Economist | Welcome to the era of AI nationalism - The Economist | Hollywood studios are finding new ways to bring stories to life - The Economist

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A New Year’s interview with Volodymyr Zelensky - The Economist

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY is angry; not about the successes of his enemies (he sees none) nor even about his own army’s lack of progress on the battlefield. Instead, Ukraine’s president is exasperated by the wobbles of some of his allies as well as the detachment among some of his compatriots. And he wants you to know it.

Hardened by the pressures of war, a year of negative headlines and the failure of a counter-offensive that promised so much at the start of 2023, he has shed the lightness and humour that characterised our earlier meetings with him. Seated in his situation room and speaking to The Economist via Zoom, he punches out his message as if trying to break through the computer screen.

The day after Russia invaded on February 24th 2022, Mr Zelensky galvanised the world and mobilised his country with a 32-second video recorded on his phone in which he said simply: “We are here.” He and his team are still there, in the vast government complex in Kyiv. Russia is still striking at Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odessa and elsewhere, but the world is no longer listening as intently and the master-communicator no longer controls the narrative as he did two years ago. In Ukraine weariness is setting in. In the West headlines ask whether Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has started to win. Aid to Ukrainians has become a subject for political horse-trading in America and Europe.

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Welcome to the era of AI nationalism - The Economist

The hottest technology of 2023 had a busy last few weeks of the year. On November 28th Abu Dhabi launched a new state-backed artificial-intelligence firm, AI71, that will commercialise its leading “large language model” (LLM), Falcon. On December 11th Mistral, a seven-month-old French model-builder, announced a blockbuster $400m funding round, which insiders say will value the firm at over $2bn. Four days later Krutrim, a new Indian startup, unveiled India’s first multilingual LLM, barely a week after Sarvam, a five-month old one, raised $41m to build similar Indian-language models.

Ever since OpenAI, an American firm, launched ChatGPT, its human-like conversationalist, in November 2022, just about every month has brought a flurry of similar news. Against that backdrop, the three latest announcements might look unexceptional. Look closer, though, and they hint at something more profound. The three companies are, in their own distinct ways, vying to become AI national champions. “We want AI71 to compete globally with the likes of OpenAI”, says Faisal al-Bannai of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, the state agency behind the Emirati startup. “Bravo to Mistral, that’s French genius,” crowed Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, recently. ChatGPT and other English-first LLMs “cannot capture our culture, language and ethos”, declared Krutrim’s founder, Bhavish Aggarwal. Sarvam started with Indian languages because, in the words of its co-founder, Vivek Raghavan, “We’re building an Indian company.”

AI is already at the heart of the intensifying technological contest between America and China. Over the past year they have pledged $40bn-50bn apiece for AI investments. Other countries do not want to be left behind—or stuck with a foreign critical technology over which they have little control. In the past year another six particularly AI-ambitious governments around the world—Britain, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—have promised to bankroll AI to the collective tune of around $40bn. Most of this will go towards purchases of graphics-processing units (GPUs, the type of chips that makes AI intelligent) and factories to make such chips, as well as, to a lesser extent, support for AI firms. The nature and degree of state involvement varies from one wannabe AI superpower to another. It is early days, but the contours of new AI-industrial complexes are emerging.

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Hollywood studios are finding new ways to bring stories to life - The Economist

The latest episode in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” saga was released on December 14th, featuring levitating bodies, shrieking monsters and an exploding rat. The reviews were stellar. Yet unlike the previous season of the science-fiction show, which clocked nearly 1bn hours of viewing in its first month, the new instalment has so far been seen by only a few thousand people. That is because Netflix’s latest show is not being streamed down fibre-optic cables to television screens, but performed live on a stage in London.

“Stranger Things: the First Shadow” (pictured), the streamer’s first stab at theatre, is playing at the Phoenix, with hopes for an international run. It is not the only example of Tinseltown invading theatreland. A few streets away at the Theatre Royal, Disney offers a live version of “Frozen”; at the nearby Adelphi there is a musical tribute to “Back to the Future”. In 2025 “Paddington” will join the London line-up. Meanwhile on Broadway, Amazon is getting ready to launch a musical of “Transparent”, a drama that first ran on its Prime Video service.

Hollywood’s turn on the stage is part of a broader shift by the movie business towards live experiences. As attendance at the cinema declines, studios are finding new ways to excite—and monetise—their fans outside their homes. From restaurants and art exhibitions to escape rooms and assault courses, film-makers are concocting novel ways to soak up demand. “There’s this insatiable appetite from those mega-fans,” says Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer. “They want more. They’ll eat up anything you serve them.”

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Is it cheaper to rent or buy property? - The Economist

FOR YEARS new home-buyers in America have enjoyed lower housing payments than renters. Between 2011 and 2020 the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home was 12% lower than the rental cost of a similar property (assuming a deposit of 13%, the current national average). A steady rise in home values, worth roughly 7% per year over the past decade, also ensured buyers built equity in their homes. But, as our maps below show, today the choice between buying and renting looks very different.

Blame high house prices and soaring mortgage rates. Since 2020 nominal house prices have climbed by roughly 40%. In the same period the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose from 3.1% to 7.3%, lifting the mortgage repayments on a typical house by more than 50%. All this means nominal mortgage payments have more than doubled since 2020; rents, by contrast, have risen by roughly 20%. By our calculations, for 89% of Americans renting a two-bedroom dwelling is now cheaper than buying a comparable property. Three years ago the figure was 16%.

Our calculations do not cover long-term potential costs and benefits, such as outlays on maintenance, the asset value of a home once a mortgage has been paid off, or the opportunity cost of investing in a deposit for a house rather than, say, the stock market. But they do show how the relative costs of buying and renting have been upended throughout much of America. To restore the ownership advantage that prevailed in the 2010s would require dramatic shifts in market conditions. By our reckoning, house prices would have to tumble by one-third, average mortgage rates would have to fall to 3.2%, or rental costs would have to rise by at least 50%.

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