Source item

What I Read This Week... 1) On Monday, JPMorgan Chase announced a sweeping plan to deploy $1.5 trillion in financing over the next decade toward what it calls “security and resiliency”. The categories are a blend of industrial strategy, national defense, and infrastructure modernization. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing – all of which are essential for our national security… It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way: excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock, and an education system not aligned to the skills we need.” - Jamie Dimon. JPMorganChase plans to focus on the following four key areas: 1. Supply Chain and Advanced Manufacturing: Critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors and robotics 2. Defense and Aerospace: Defense technology, autonomous systems, drones, next-gen connectivity and secure communications 3. Energy Independence and Resilience: Battery storage, grid resilience and distributed energy 4. Frontier and Strategic Technologies: AI, cybersecurity and quantum computing Dimon concluded, “Hopefully, once again, as America has in the past, we will all come together to address these immense challenges. We need to act now.” 2) The Dutch government’s decision to seize control of Nexperia, a semiconductor firm owned by China’s Wingtech, marks a watershed moment in Europe’s industrial policy. The official reason was “recent and acute signals of serious governance shortcomings and actions within Nexperia” under former CEO Zhang Xuezheng. This move hopes to safeguard crucial technological knowledge and capabilities that could pose a risk to Dutch and European economic security. This intervention is rippling through the European corporate supply chain as China continues to tighten rare earth exports while the U.S. responds with further tariffs. 3) Google DeepMind’s latest research marks a profound turning point for AI. On Wednesday, Sundar Pichai announced that their model generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior that was validated by scientists in living cells. The task they gave was for the model to find a drug that acts as a conditional amplifier. The model generated an unexpected insight into how tumors evade immune detection by suggesting a way to transform “cold” (invisible to the body’s immune system) tumors, which resisted treatment, into “hot” ones that respond to immunotherapy. The hypothesis was then tested in the lab and remarkably resulted in a roughly 50% increase in antigen presentation, which would make the tumor more visible to the immune system. “We can finally begin to simulate how real human cells behave—in context, in silico. This is where AI stops being just an analysis tool and starts becoming a model system for biology itself.” - David van Dijk, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Yale If results continue to hold, this represents one of the first instances where an AI system not only mapped biological correlations but helped discover new biology. DeepMind also just announced a new partnership with fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems, using AI models to accelerate plasma simulation and reactor optimization. If they succeed this will make SPARC the first magnetic fusion machine in history to generate net fusion energy. Links to sources and other articles/X I read are on substack: https://t.co/VfDJBFJFsU