Lugh

China has now surpassed the US for the number of clinical trials per year, and they're 50-100% faster there, too. U.S. and other Western pharmaceutical firms increasingly license innovative drugs from China; In 2025, deals valued from China accounted for about one-third of big pharma licensing agreements.

The U.S. biotech ecosystem has long been driven by NIH-backed R&D, but that has recently been radically cut. Will this be another case where Trump delivers a win for China? Destroying something at home for right-wing ideological reasons, just to let China swoop in to collect the prize. In this case becoming number 1 in global pharmaceuticals?

Outside America, the rest of the world is a winner here. Chinese industrialisation is driving global deflation and cheaper goods in transport, energy, and computing. It will be great if we can add biotech and pharmaceuticals to that list.

China’s Biotech Is Cheaper and Faster

Africa is the big loser in the current system, as the Mercator map makes it look far smaller than it really is. Europe and Russia would look far smaller (their true size) in a corrected map. Brazil is also a beneficiary with a corrected map; it looks far bigger in reality than the Mercator map represents it.

The campaign seems to be going places. The World Bank says it is phasing out the use of the Mercator map, and various UN bodies are looking at doing the same.

African Union joins calls to end use of Mercator map that shrinks continent’s size

It's worth remembering that 20 years ago in 2005, renewables were just 1% of global electricity capacity. Interesting that coal will finally start declining, but gas hasn't yet. Even though coal power use will increase in the US, its decline in China & the EU is bigger, so coal declines overall.

The IEA forecast renewables to be 50% of global capacity by 2030, but they have always underestimated and been too conservative with predictions, so that may happen sooner. There are still huge economies-of-scale price decreases ahead for renewables. By 2030-35 as renewables approaches 80% will anybody be building new power plants of any other type?

IEA: Renewables will be world’s top power source ‘by 2026’

"is designed with a focus on companionship, according to EngineAI. Equipped with a large language model, it supports intelligent interaction and includes high-fidelity speakers and dual high-definition cameras for voice conversation and gesture recognition."

EngineAI's SA02 is much like a dozen or more 2025 humanoid robots currently being developed around the world. It's mastered moving around with agility, and you can talk to it via an LLM AI. Can it do much more? We'll see. Most 2025 humanoid robots are still taking baby steps when it comes to being useful workers, that can do simple tasks like folding laundry.

But has EngineAI spotted a gap in the market by focusing on companionship? Hundreds of thousands of people already have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. This will provide the identical AI, while also giving those AI friends real 3D bodies. Question - if you're truly in love with your AI boy/girlfriend, would you spend the extra money to give them a body?

Video of the robot

EngineAI to launch SA02, a $5,500 humanoid robot aimed at young people

"The project promotes a soil management strategy(opens in new window) that includes prebiotics (compounds that nourish beneficial microbes), probiotics (live beneficial microorganisms) and postbiotics (beneficial microbial by-products). “These practices contribute to sustainable agriculture by promoting a healthy soil microbiome, reducing reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and enhancing plant resilience to environmental stresses,"

The EU is made up of so many countries with proportional representation, it is one of the few areas in the world where, via coalitions, the Green Party regularly get in power. This has very real effects on EU policy and direction. E.g. It's why the EU is so quickly transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables. But there are numerous other Green Party initiatives. These often go under-reported, but they'll eventually change the world, and this strikes me as one of them.

Transforming sustainable agriculture through microbial innovation

The dream that LLM AIs might lead to AGI seems finally to be over. The idea's supporters said that with enough training and computation, independent reasoning would arise in LLMs. It never has. This week, OpenAI, the company that seeks a $500 billion stock market valuation, finally burst the bubble. It's long-awaited Chat-GPT 5, touted as 'near AGI', still makes all the basic errors in math and logic that an average 10-year-old wouldn't. Even Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, hoped by some to be an intermediary step, is a failure, too.

But LLM AIs aren't useless - in fact, the opposite. They've delivered Level 4 self-driving, are advancing general-purpose robotics, and excel at a wide variety of brain-work, even without AGI. That is enough to make them economically transformative.

But the US stock market seems bored with that. Instead, investors wanted to chase the possibility of a 'unicorn' - getting in early on a company that would achieve AGI, dominate like the other Big Tech giants, and earn trillions. That isn't going to happen any time soon.

China's economic system seems better at being pragmatic about AI. Most of their efforts seem geared towards useful real-world uses for AI, and much less about AGI. AGI will no doubt happen one day - who knows when? It will probably need fundamental breakthroughs developed by humans. Meanwhile, the real 2020s AI revolution is integrating AI into everyday life, not AGI.

A familiar 2020s story seems to be playing out here. The Chinese system of state capitalism seems to have grasped what matters when it comes to meaningful economic success, while the western system, driven by the super-rich becoming ever richer, seems bloated, inefficient, and unable to allocate capital & investment to what matters for society.