AIQ

[chris macrae]

Politicians and teachers need to pass minimum updating AIQ Test if nation not to fail children of AI era

Lets pilot this. We will catalogue updates

by 4P & 5L Playgrounds

4P - different data mediation needed for earth science ai, space ai, humanoid ai, agentic human brains ai

5L =Energy*Chips*AI Sovereign*AI Modlke*Community action apps

12race - scsp.ai tracks race between us and china on 12 variables - to be frank intelligence leaps such as health and education tracked for 76 years by our von neumann alumni requited open ai colllaborations but scsp.ai is extremely helpful in mediating how the race is seen out of DC

as well as integrate other data context crises as these are clarified

Our main weekly source 

we will also review india ai summit and geneva ai summit 2027 if this is announced at India Feb 20-

since 1865 switzerland has mediate tech standaeds of telecoms , electricity and multilateral understanding ITU plenipotentiary 2026 wiil be sponsored by UAE; world economic forum 26-27 can help too?

Help welcomed in integrating other sources  = [e-mail] washington dc region

4:10 Hi, welcome to the very first episode of the president's tech brief. I'm your 4:16 host Mr. Ylli Bajraktari ( President and CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project)  , and I'm joined  Marjn Rasser (VP Tec Lead), The name of this show is a nod to the PDB, the President's Daily Brief. That briefing is the gold standard of intelligence, summarizing the most critical threats and developments for the president of the United States. Having spent some time in the White House, I've seen that  process firsthand. I know how vital that flow information is, but I've also seen  the gaps. The traditional brief often struggles to keep pace with the sheer speed of emerging technology and how it's reshaping our national power. Martjn," that's right Ylli". And coming  from the intelligence analysis side of the house, I've seen firsthand how difficult it is to connect this type of insight to actionable policies. And that's exactly why we're doing this show.  So, as you know, Martjn, every day we're shocked by how fast things are moving in the AI space. We see amazing investments/models being released almost daily.

L3 We just saw yesterday you know Claude and open AI  going out publicly with  another set of models. Ultimately we see how it's shaping the society and ultimately geopolitical order. So we 5:33 wanted to move these conversations from our conference rooms  and directly you know to the audience by bridging the gap  between innovation and policy in real time. So, what you'll see is every Friday at 11:00 a.m. you will expect the following. We will be breaking down the silos, translating policy for the technologists and technology for the DC  makers - plus the latest on the high stake tech race with China. And I have David Lin (Platforms Senior Director) with me here today to talk about  - you will also notice some of the things happening on the screen. So, I'll turn it over to Martin to  explain what to expect there.

Absolutely. So what you see on the left side of the screen is our tech 6:11 scorecard. So this is how we capture visually the analytic outputs of our gaps analysis. So basically how the US 6:18 and China stack up against each other in various tech domains. Below that we 6:23 highlight some of the key tweets from the administration on tech. And we also  have a news ticker  that we built in-house using artificial intelligence 6:34 to give you the most pertinent tech news. And finally, we want to hear from you. We have a signal handle that is  open for any questions that you may have. So, please drop us a line at  SCSP.250, or you can leave us a comment on 6:53 YouTube.

Ylli: we've got a lot to cover gentlemen today. Let's start the President's Trump phone call with XiinpingI - my colleague David Lin here who spent years in the IC has tried to make sense of that call. Then Martin and I will talk about the  latest ministerial that state department convened on the critical minerals this week. Then we'll talk about what happened on the tech side last week and this week the  like the social media platform for the agent AI and then my colleague  Caleb Barnes will join me to talk about Chinese latest tech breakthrough which involveds solar output .

David, we saw on Wednesday, President Trump had a call with Xi Jinping.. President  issued a statement via social media and so what's  your take on the call, David?

Yeah, thank thanks Ylli., It's an exciting time in 8:04 USChina bilateral relations. So I think it's important to kind of back up a little bit and put this all in context, 8:11 right? So, u Trump had a call with Xi Jinping in the leadup to his state visit, in April, and the two heads  of state lined out a series of bilateral visits over the course of this year as a way to try to stabilize bilateral relationships, which have been very tense over the past decade It's also interesting to think about this call and upcoming presidential visit from the China perspective. So 8earlier this year we had the Canadian prime minister, the Korean PM, , the UK prime minister all making visits to Beijing to visit Xi. We have the president's visit in April next month: domestically inside of China, Xi Jinping will be rolling out China's 15th 5-year plan which is their marquee  socioeconomic, political, industrial policy that will really set  the tone for China's technoeconomic development over the next 5 years.

And so it's a really strategic important time for all of this to be happening right now. And we saw from Trump's post on Truth Social  the wide range of topics that are  important to him, important to China that they talked about ranging from  aircraft engines to soybean sales to Taiwan, Ukraine, Russia. . So you see just the whole waterfront of issues that they talked about. But what I think is really interesting too is looking at after these kinds of calls is t6 pour over what the US press release says and  compare it and contrast it with what the Chinese press release says. And so if we can cue up the Chinese government 9:59  readout from the call, you notice that it's all about,  https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyxw/202602/t20260205_11851262.html

you know, while Trump talks about a whole range of topics, the Chinese press releases on one issue and it's Taiwan, right? 10:11 And it really just speaks to uh what they want to get out of uh this broader 10:16 bilateral engagement. And one of the central core issues to them is is Taiwan. And of course uh the US made  this arm sales  to Taiwan one of the largest in regional history which was  alarming to Beijing. More than likely was one of the  reasons why XI wanted to make this center theme of of the call. S, David, you have some other headlines: Kier Starmer that the UK prime minister just visited  Beijing  later reporting confirmed  the approval of the mega embassy in London was contingent on 1that summit actually going through.

Do you think Xi is going to do the same with President Trump and try and forestall that arms deal in order to make that summit happen? I think that's definitely going to be a goal of Xi going into this bilateral meeting and or ahead of Trump's visit  and it'll be really interesting to see what kinds of deals and what kinds of announcements come out  and whether or not they're proportional to one another. Right? Going back to the UK Starmer's visit, it looked a little disproportionate in terms of the announcements coming out. There was a visa waiver  on the UK side,  a whiskey tax reduction. Then in terms of what 1 China was getting, it looked like that some uh British pharmaceutical companies  were making major multi-billion dollar investments  (eg Astra Zeneca 15 bn dollars) in China.

. But regarding USA:  Taiwan will certainly  be on the table as  Trump laid out soybeans, aircraft engines, and perhaps  even NVidia H200s chips. We've been seeing a lot of mixed reporting in the press 12:14 recently about whether or not that sale is going to go through or whether or not China will let it  go through. 12:21 Ylli "David, just one more question on this topic. I was at the White House when President Trump visited Beijing the 1 first time. It was a historical visit. I think if you remember like it was a unheard of  privileged treatment he got. Do you think between now and the visit could be some of the winds that  can push the president to have you know that kind of a level impact like last 12:45 time he had in Beijing?" David:  I mean, both heads of state are trying to appeal to their domestic audiences, right? So I think for for Trump, one of his key demographics, maybe the agriculture 12:57 industry and soybeans, the getting soybean sales to China is is probably, 13:03 as he's laid out in his in his tweet, one of his top priorities. And so that would be uh at least for for him for the 13:10 domestic constituency, one of his big wins if if China comes through with it. Right.

Ylli to Martin, should we move to the  next topic: we had a big week here in DC at the state department  the vice president and the secretary of state convened, you know, more than 50 countries  to talk about critical 13:28 minerals at the ministerial level. What do you think were some of the key decisions? Why was it so important to bring all these  countries here in DC? Martin. Well, for one, it shows how important this issue is for this  administration. We have to get greater resilience and security in these critical supply chains. You know  foreign ministers coming to Washington to discuss these issues. This is a big deal. There were  11 bilateral frameworks that were signed and you know stuff is really happening 1-finally after15 years of people just beating the drum of how  vulnerable we are when it comes to rare earths and critical minerals., China controls not just a lot of the mining, but most critically the processing and that's what this ministerial was all about is to set up a framework for how we can diversify that supply chain.

So there's this Forge coalition coming out of this. I see 14:27 tremendous opportunity for that coalition of Forge to align with PAX SILICA

14:34 That's under Secretary Hellberg's initiative. So a lot of good momentum there. Oh the flip side is um what was announced in the executive order the  day before: Project Vault. And we have a graphic of that 

This entails is a $10 billion loan from the export import bank as well  as a commitment of $2 billion worth of invest  investment out of the private sector. This is really meant to jumpstart a strategic stockpile of critical minerals and rare earths in the United States. A lot of details still need to be worked out um in terms of who actually manages the stockpile, how much of each material will be stored 15:30 in that stockpile, what's the ratio of raw material versus processed materials. 15:35 But again, good step in the right direction. No, [clears throat] David, do you want to add? And it was actually, you know, Beijing's threats of export control over critical minerals that really pushed the US.  There's been momentum going in this direction for a while  but I think as far as USChina tech tensions  and trade tensions came, iit really took export 16:01 controls on China's side to accelerate the movement for the US to get its house in order.

Ylli: I 16:09 would agree with you Martin. I think there there have been numerous initiatives  - pax silica the presidential EEO on this and now this convening but I think the devil will be in the implementation: 1 who will take the lead on how fast we can do this? I mean obviously there's capital now and I think I remember an executive order that has private capital mentioned also alongside government agencies providing : in this case I think is the XM bank and so there is a momentum I would argue but it's still like we'll  need to see how  fast we can move. it's 2026. We should have done this probably 10 years ago, I would argue, but here we are. , Hopefully this time it's the last time that we push this and we succeed.

. And just to underscore, I mean, this is again an example of an a new form of industrial policy that this country is doing,? And we're also talking offtake agreements, price floors for these materials. So it's very much um a departure from classic free market capitalism. But again, we're dealing with Chinese mercantalism and particularly in this critical minerals realm which is very much a boom or bust cycle. It's the  necessary steps in order to make it economically viable for any new entrance.

Moving on to our third topic.  a big item on the tech space this week was um the release of cloudbot 17:35 and moldbook.

Enormous attention online.  break it down -What does it mean?  There are two things that have happened at the same time here. Number one is a guy called Peter Steinberger created a cloud bot which is basically an agentic AI that can take over your computer and can start slacking messaging everything on your behalf and so like you know serve as your personal secretary 1But then another individual Matt Schlit created  moldbook which is basically a social media platform for all these digital AI to meet. When this first started happening, you had hundreds of thousands of people joining  as humans in an observer role, but then came a lot of screenshots of like agentics,talking to each other/.  What did you make of this? I think it leveled off over the over time. I  think the hype really leveled off and people started seeing more realistically what this is,: a one time viral story? Yeah. Well, you know, Open Claw itself may be an interesting development, right?  What I like about it, it's open- source innovation. It  may help us to anticipate the opportunities and threats of agentic world in our everyday lives. It may introduce a nightmare security scenario. There could be an absolute disaster if these agents have access to anything, and operate autonomously. Privacy wakeup call:. We need to build in security features in order to protect our data. Um yeah, Moldbook was fascinating to see that unfold  reaction in social media. There was a lot of nonsense, these bots are not sentient beings. Let's make that clear. 19:21 So there was a lot of of hype, a lot of misinformation, just  misunderstanding what was actually taking place. But it just does go to show how excited people are about these types of developments. So it's it's good that we're having this conversation at a minimum.

David, any observations from you? 19:41 Just putting a pin in Martin's point about the security aspects of it. You know, if anything, I think the whole instance kind of example shows you the the capabilities of Agentic AI, but hopefully the security conversation will 19:53 catch up to the capabilities conversation and we'll and hopefully everyone starts to realize that, wow,  this is a really cool technology. But yeah, we should probably put some guard rails on it just so that agentic agents  don't just take our personal emails and start blasting it out to the world and and sharing it with other agents. 

DEMOCRATISING HOW AI & AGENTIC AI changes everyone's world on the brink of really agentic AI or 20:37 AI taking over some kind of human decision or human behavior But then I think over time we saw how 20:43 the conversation  normalized. I would argue analysis became much more clear. You even saw that in some instances agentic AI exaggerations were intentionally pushed by humans. Yeah. To react and chat in certain ways. But I just thought maybe in 2026 this was the first instance where we saw this kind of a behavior and the overreaction was I thought a little bit 21:06 you know over the top right.

So, right uh our next topic uh and I have my  colleague here Caleb Barnes (Fusion Associate Director) is for the first time China installed solar capacity that 21:20 officially surpassed its coal-generated capacity. So, this is a major moment in China. Caleb, you have watched this space for a 21:27 long time. What does it mean?

Midong - solar installation -200,000 acres of gobi desert 

It's quite impressive. And I think we've got a video clip here that we want to play about a specific solar field that 21:34 they installed and then we can talk a little more in detail about it. 21:39 are cars. These cars, like most everything else in Ramchi, China, exist 21:44 to build and service energy infrastructure. In this case, it's a solar field called 21:49 Madong. A big one. A really big one. It's kind of beautiful. These black bars 21:56 on sand like redactions on paper. And for 200,000 acres of the Gobi Desert, 22:02 that's all you'll see. It's part of a dedicated Chinese energy strategy. Produce power in the bearing west and 22:08 send it through hundreds of miles of transmission lines to the industrial east. And what does it power? 22:15 Everything. Data centers, manufacturing, ship building, mining. 22:22 China is banking on energy infrastructure, defining the winner of the 21st century. They've built what 22:28 they need to make it happen. 22:44

Yeah. So, so overall now China's [sn peak solar capacity and their coal capacity are both around 1300  gigawatt. That's a lot. So that that solar field that we just saw, that's about 3 and a half gigawatt,  So 200,000 acres in the middle of the Gobi Desert is just a small fraction of what they've installed and a lot of it has come very  recently. They installed over 300  gigawatts of solar capacity just in last year or so. Um Caleb my question to you is is this a  win for the environment you know meaning the China solar dominance or a loss for  the American manufacturing? Well it can be both. Yeah. so overall,  it is it is a win for the 23:25 environment, right? There is a big problem with an energy system that requires continually digging up things  to burn them and that's historically what everything has been. And so there is a big advantage to digging up something once and then you've got 25 to 40 years of use out of it. So it's an advantage um and it's something that  could end up being an advantage for American manufacturing if we buy and use these panels. And some of them are 2 produced here. The top Chinese  solar company, Jenko, has a US branch and they produce some 2solar panels in Jacksonville, Florida. So it's something that we can use.  24:00 and the fact that these panels are incredibly cheap, that the cost of of solar is now basically the cost of  installation -this is a really impressive thing for energy. Right. Hey Caleb, we have a question  from one of our viewers here. Um so they were interested in understanding what  the cost of the construction of that solar field was you know maintenance and 2 ultimately the lifespan like how long are these solar panels uh viable. 24:27 Yeah particularly in the desert. So maintenance is one of the things where solar really shinesthere are no moving parts so you don't have to maintain  them. You can do it in a field where the panels themselves rotate to match the sun. and that may be the case in Madong  because there's a lot of space between them. but generally the case is once you install solar, it's good for 25 to 30 years. Most panels are warrantied for 25 years. Um, but the panels that we installed 25 years ago 24:58 are still working um with, you know, not the same efficiency but around 80% efficiency. David, I want your take on 2 this because you have followed this issue of USChina tech competition. You have seen the episodes when you know 2something starts small in China and then through you know mercantalistic policies, top down investments and you  know deployments across the world they really crush the competitor. Yeah. What's your take on this?  And Caleb correct me if I'm wrong. I think solar PV technology was essentially invented in the US uh and  then largely scaled in China and for a while that was geopolitically fine and I  think we're just seeing this is just the latest case of China's scale and industrial manufacturing base on  steroids and like what like how amazing is that footage of like rows and rows as far as the I can see of solar panels in this in the desert. And I guess another thing to point it in  context too is this idea and I think you mentioned this in the video Caleb of how this energy generation in  the west is ultimately or at least some of that power goes back to the east coastYeah it's it's  city  there's not going there's not that much going on in the 26west of China so most of  the manufacturing the data centers etc happen in the east um and so it does 2 take a lot of transmission infrastructure to get it done and they've been able to build that very very quickly it's really difficult to 26:32 build transmission infrastructure in the US um part of that is the fact that we don't have a command economy that most 26:38 of the time the government doesn't just say all right this land is ours now I mean we can do that in cases but 26:43 generally don't for transmission infrastructure in China it's it's much easier to build things out for hundreds 26:48 of miles in a straight line

yeah you raised a point yesterday when we were talking uh and this was a fact 26:53 that I wasn't actually aware of but uh just the inefficiency of of energy transmission in the United States. Can 27:00 you uh highlight that? Yeah. Yeah. So u this is just a problem with using copper wires so resistance. 27:05 Um so you lose about 20% of the electricity that you push through a transmission line um just due to 27:13 dissipating due to heat. Um and it's tough. So if you can find a way to get around that then it's basically the same 27:20 as if you added 20% more power plants if you upgraded every power plant by 20%. 27:26 And there is a way to do it and that is superconductors. Um so with a superconductor you have a wire with no 27:32 resistance. Um which is really really impressive. Um and there are a couple companies that are developing high 27:38 temperature superconducting technology for transmission cables. Um, and if that 27:43 goes through, then you can get maybe up to 10 times as much power to get pushed through a line with no losses due to uh 27:50 resistance. Amazing. Caleb, thank you so much. Uh, we'll have you back probably in the next show too to talk about other events, but 27:57 thank you so much. Um, thanks for having me, Martin. I think what we were trying to do here every week is really showcasing 28:02 how we use AI for any given thing. And so, I think this week we have our colleague Brandon. We have a video 28:10 uh that he will showcase. What did he do with AI this week to make his life easier 28:17 on the hill? I've seen my fair share of 3,100page bill drops. My first instinct 28:22 used to be just to start scrolling, hit F, simply hope for the best. These days, 28:27 my approach is very different. I let AI do the initial heavy lifting. So, let's jump in. First, I'll paste in the text 28:34 and give it two simple commands. something like identify the major AI provisions and new authorities created 28:41 in this bill. And there we go. Perfect. That's actually what I needed. So now I'm going to go for a little deeper. 28:47 Something like now summarize each as a five bulleted brief in plain English and 28:54 cite each section and hit enter. And what I get back here is a quick, 28:59 detailed, and concise summary for an email or a memo. It saves me an incredible amount of time. My name is 29:05 Brandon McKe and I'm SCSP's senior director for government affairs. We believe that everyone can benefit from 29:10 tools like this, which is why we partnered with Corsera for a free course to get you started. Enroll free today. 29:20 Um, and we're going to do this every week. We're going to showcase how each of uses AI for either private or 29:26 professional, you know, uh, assistance. David, anything special you did with AI this week that really opened your eye? 29:33 So there was well I guess I'll share with the world now [laughter] that we had a water leak in our house right 29:39 and I was trying to figure out like what our home insurance like deductible was and you know the home insurance has 29:45 gives you like a 50page explanation of benefits. You you figure out where the most important line is. Yeah, 29:50 that's right. And so just attached the the explanation of benefits into attach and was like 29:56 just tell me like what's the threshold? Is this covered by insurance? Uh what 30:01 should I do next? should I have the repair man come first and then file the claim and get chat GPT's or you know the 30:07 chatbots advice on how to approach this problem. So that was my uh use case for it like 30:14 yesterday. Literally yesterday you guys saw the the release of plugins for claude this week made a huge um you 30:20 know news with like the future of legal professions and everything else. They worked very well. I actually used 30:27 that to uh review some legal documents that I needed to sign. Um so it pointed out some areas that needed to be 30:34 tweaked. I went to my dad who's a lawyer and just asked him to review. He pointed 30:40 out the exact same things. Um, took him took him 24 hours. Yeah. You know, unfortunately now my dad 30:45 I don't need to have on a retainer. So related, but you know, imagine if you have to engage with a a real life 30:52 lawyer. It starts to get expensive. But he, you know, I was able to use the uh 30:57 the AI model to find the the same issues. I just hope our lawyers are not watching this episode. 31:03 Caleb, anything you want to share from what you did this week? So, one of the things that I think language models are 31:08 really impressive at is finding novel sources. Um, so when I'm trying to do original in-depth research, um, I can 31:16 find, uh, using a GPT or a Gemini that that is trying to give me sources, it 31:22 can find things that that I cannot Google, things that are on foreign languages that are just not easy to 31:27 access on this internet. And so, I've been able to find some interesting things that I would never have seen otherwise. 31:33 I'll admit guys, I'm becoming a musician because I did the intro music for our live show through the large language 31:39 model. So, you know, now I think it's time to change the profession, move on and become a musician. Yeah. 31:44 Yeah. Uh anyway, um I want to thank everybody for tuning in. Martin, thank you so much for hosting. David as always for 31:51 outstanding analysis and Caleb, uh as a thank you for for the audience for tuning in. We're sharing our expo 31:57 registration link for the first time in the comments section below. Please join us May 7th through 9 in Washington DC. 32:05 Uh come experience AI Plus Expo. It's our third AI Plus Expo. Last year we had 32:10 15,000 people that joined us at the convention center. So it's going to be massive. It's going to be bigger than 32:16 and better than last two years. So Martin, I'm really excited about this. Oh, it's going to be good. We just uh 32:22 got confirmation from a very special guest. Uh so I'm looking forward to Excited for that announcement, Martin. 32:28 That was a big win. Thank you for that. Um, this has been our first episode of the president's tech brief. Tune in next 32:35 week as Martin and I will call in directly from Munich Security Conference and David and Joe uh will co-host the 32:41 show for us. And Martin, I'm really excited uh to go with you to the Mun Security Conference. We have a lot of 32:46 Can't wait. We've got a ton of events uh some great meetings set up. So, it's going to be a good week. 32:51 Thank you all for joining us. Please provide feedback through Signal or YouTube comments. Uh we think this is 32:58 the best briefing you can get weekly from Washington on tech and national security and we'll see you next week. 33:07 [music] 33:15 [music]