📈A New View On The AI Bubble: A viral hypothetical memo from Citrini Research lit a match under already jumpy AI markets. Framed as a June 2028 “scenario”, it argues that AI adoption could succeed so completely that it triggers a self-reinforcing economic collapse. Companies rationally slash white-collar headcount to cut costs, but collectively hollow out the consumer economy that makes up 70% of the US GDP. TLDR; AI could be so bullish that it becomes bearish in the short-run. With sentiments this fragile, the market didn’t wait around to debate and stocks tumbled across the board.

📈Not Impressed: Nvidia released its quarterly earning report this week and the stock dropped by 5% in response. $NVDA ( ▲ 1.16% ) beat expectations by $3 Bn but higher expectations must have been priced in as the stock drew back. On the flip-side, it's possible skepticism on the AI fuelled stock rally also played a part.

📈Stock Picking Is 71% Downloadable: More doom fuel after the Citrini memo: An NBER working paper finds a neural network can predict ~71% of mutual-fund manager’s buy/sell/hold decisions, suggesting that their expert judgement is learnable by machine.

📈The Patch Writes Itself: Anthropic just launched “Claude Code Security”, an AI tool that scans for cybersecurity vulnearabilities in Claude Code but leaves final decisions for human review. Cybersecurity was meant to be the “always-in-demand” winner in a world of vibe-coders but it seems AI could solve that too. Cybersecurity stocks tumbled on the news.

🌎US and Israel Attack Iran: Overnight into Saturday, U.S. and Israeli warplanes launched a major joint assault on Iran, striking targets across Tehran and several other cities including nuclear sacilities and military command sites. Iranian state media has allegedly killed the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several top military officials. Most devastatingly, however, at least 85 students were killed in an air strike near a school. Iran wasted no time retaliating, launching strikes on Israel and Gulf states. This is an extraordinarily fast-moving situation, the information written might not be the most updated by the time this is published.

🌎Trump’s State of the Union Address: In the longest address on record (107 minutes) for his State of the Union address, Trump mentioned tariffs potentially replacing income tax, undocumented immigrants, America's 250th birthday and the Trump accounts. Yet the speech failed to touch on the problems of everyday Americans such as cost-of-living and increasing uncertainty.

🌎Pakistan and Afghanistan Declare Open War: Pakistan’s defence minister declared “open war” on the Afghan Taliban after Pakistani airstrikes and artillery reportedly hit areas including Kabul, Kandahar, and eastern provinces. Both sides are making big claims about casualties and battlefield gains, but independent verification is difficult in real time. Analysts warn that neither side is likely capable of winning the war outright, which makes escalation especially dangerous as civilians will be the ones to carry the burden.

🌎Claude is a Bit Too Good: After a hacker exploited Claude, asking it to act as an elite hacker, it did just that. Over a period of three months Claude found and exploited cybersecurity vulnerabilites in the Mexican equivalent of the IRS and other departments. The hacker eventually stole 150 GB of sensitive data which included 195 million taxpayer and voter records.

👔Paramount Wins!: Paramount Skydance won the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war after WBD’s board preferred Paramount’s $31/share offer over Netflix’s bid for just Warner’s studios + HBO Max. Paramount also offered a USD$7B fee if regulators kill the deal and said it would cover the USD$2.8B breakup fee Warner would owe Netflix for exiting its prior deal. (Do you guys still care about this saga?)

👔Anthropic Wants To Be On The Right Side Of History: Trump ordered every U.S. agency to stop using Anthropic tech within a six-month phase-out period. Also, Hegseth labeled Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk”, which could force DoD vendors to certify they don’t use Anthropic tech either. Ironically, hours later, OpenAI struck a deal to deploy its models on the DoD’s classfied network, with the DoD accepting OpenAI’s similar “red lines” of no domestic mass surveillance and no autonomous weapons. It is unclear why DoD accomodated OpenAI but not Anthropic.

👔Deloitte’s "Sudden Increase in Data Incidents”: In Deloitte Australia’s most recent faux pas, leadership have asked consultants to stop uploading confidential data onto public LLMs such as ChatGPT. Additionally, Partners have been told off for sending client information to their personal emails as “administrative” breaches occur.

👔More Fire to the Circular Financing Criticisms: Meta agreed to buy 6 gigawatts of AI computing power powered by AMD over the next five years, a deal pegged at $100B+ and framed as a big win for AMD in its GPU war with Nvidia. Additional sweetner: AMD is giving Meta warrants for up to 160M shares (roughly ~10% of AMD) at $0.01 each if milestones hit, but Meta only gets the final tranche if AMD’s stock reaches USD$600 (it closed USD$196.60 on Monday).

🤪Australia’s Rising Coke Appetite: Bloomberg dubbed Australia as the “cocaine capital of the world” citing reports from the UN Drug Report which shows some 4.5% of Australians use cocaine each year, which is double the rate reported in the U.S. Moreover ASIC shows that cocain use in Australia jumped 69% to a record in the 12 months ended August 2024.

🤪Menacing El Mencho: Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, otherwise known as El Mencho was the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in Mexico. When the Mexican military sent in 2,000 troops to capture him however, 73 people including him were killed. El Mencho was responsible for large amounts of fentanyl, meth and cocaine smuggled into the US.

🤪Newest Revelation in Epstein Saga: Bill Gates, in an apology to staff at his foundation admitted to having two affairs with russian women throughout the early 2000s. Additional speculation around Gates asking Epstein for help after contracting a sexually transmitted disease from a Russian, has been said to be “absurd” by a spokesman but the facts remain unclear.

🤪Visiting the “Poles of Inaccessibility”: After deciding travelling the world and visiting cool sites like the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall of China was too boring, Chris Brown has decided to travel to the most inaccessible areas in the world. His travel spots are detailed in the above image.