AI may well be a stock investment bubble, but the AI arms race is a hell-for-leather battle where the winner takes it all

With AI development on an exponential curve towards self improving models, the nation that gets "there" first may get access to their adversaries encryption codes, crack their firewalls, hack their software, design the better drones, anti-missile weaponry,  cure diseases and own the patents the world wants, or create the bioweapons that sabotage crops, generate fuel, or kill or cripple millions of people. That's assuming AI doesn't conquer us first. This is why data centres are appearing everywhere and the "clean energy" revolution got left by the wayside.

As Scott Bessent said today "There is no day after tomorrow if we lose" 

"Beating China—there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this," Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News's "State of the Economy" event in Washington. "If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters."

— Arthur Zhang,  The Epoch Times

Bessent was answering questions about the rising opposition to datacenters in the USA and also thousands of hostile attacks on American AI trying to copy and steal capability. China would be very happy with any protests. Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder was approached by someone wanting to pay her to tell us AI will kill us all. (And maybe it will). But there is one main beneficiary of anti AI sentiment in the West and that's China. Given the existential battle, China would be crazy if they weren't pumping money into grassroots protests about AI datacentres in the US.

China, though, hardly needs to bother whipping up angst in Australia where our electricity grid has been sold out to the Weather Gods and is cripplingly expensive and underpowered. A few days ago Transgrid, Australia's largest electricity company wrote to data center management to say the NSW grid was nearly full. There was barely 1.5GW to spare in Sydney. We could have led the world when we had a coal fired grid with spare capacity. Nevermind. The race is here and we're not in it. China has nearly twice the capacity of coal fired plants that it needs, and we barely have enough.

Last month a team created 16 entirely new viruses with the help of AI
These are not viruses you and I could catch, they only infect a bacteria called E.Coli. But if they wanted to make a virus that could infect humans, it could soon be a lot easier and faster than it would have been back in the prehistoric era of say, 2019. This should make anyone sit up and pay attention.

A virus that infects bacteria is called a bacteriophage. It's a tiny molecular-machine in the order of 200nm in length that replicates. Once inside a hapless E.Coli, it commandeers the cells machinery to produce hundreds of clones of itself. This one pictured here is one of the 16 new types of virions. It's a ball of interlocking proteins that protect the DNA in the centre. Figure K (right) that looks like a bowl of spaghetti exploding, shows just one of the interlocking shell proteins up close. Those are a particular string of amino acids that always fold in this exact convoluted shape. AI can predict the shape of the spaghetti lattice from the DNA code. The shape is determined by things like disulphide and hydrogen bonds, and electrical charges.