From within the mid-2020s, the idea that AI - represented by its large language form - will be the technology of the century is gathering steam. Singularities are posited and even when they are denied as fanciful, the practical applications of the world’s new shiny silicon brains are still colourfully proclaimed. Undoubtedly, LLMs have massive applications that we are already seeing day in and day out. This piece is not to luddically deny this reality. Instead, I want to wade through the spectacle of the subject to actually find out what the tool within would be.

The fundamental reason why this becomes necessary is that of finance. Being a market-driven instrument so far, LLMs require a significant amount of finance to keep the lights running. Infrastructure is still underbuilt and energy costs are still high. In order to pay these costs, LLMs, and the firms running them, unfortunately (or fortunately) need to bring in revenue - either current or future-potentialed. By virtue of this, there is an incentive to overblow both current and future value, in order to justify current investment.

This in itself doesn’t need to be evidence of fraud of course. Any new technology will rapidly outshoot the underlying framework’s ability to support it - and borrowing from the future is a fair and powerful way to bring that said future into the present itself. Yet that there is an incentive that CAN support, if not fraud, then creative explanation of present value, is a factor to consider nevertheless. There is a much greater requirement to inquire, perhaps through the lens of skepticism, any claims made by the industry, particularly in order to find the actual lens of value within.

To figure this out, we need a working understanding of how the current technology works and what it claims to do - undazzled by the sparkles of claims, especially, that of the most devout. That LLMs function as next-token predictors - where based off a vast training set, they are able to accurately predict the statistics of what token would follow another - is a fair enough starting point here. While in practice, this isn’t as simple as “predicting words”, LLMs DO function by taking tokens, defining them, and figuring out latent patterns within them.

However, I would wager that the defining and bounding of the token itself is far more critical to the value generated by the LLM - and why it functions far better in clearly bounded systems like coding, struggles where the token changes rapidly like mathematics, and does decently well when the token is somewhere in between - like language. Whether statistical patterns of any form allow for new creations or whether they merely repeat existing patterns is a different question - arguably a far larger question than applied to LLMs themselves. This IS a big part of the value in my view, but a bigger question for another day.

With all this extensive context, we can then move into the value of the technology itself. One place where the value is clear, in my head, is where communicative technology is present. Even if you take a more conservative view of the capabilities of the technology, the ability to converse with a wide variety of knowledge already exists. Just like regular conversation, at least for now, the conversation can bring up falsehoods. Yet the expansion of communication - both with existing information, but more powerfully, enabling greater and faster and more comprehensive communication between people is one value I think merely requires the supporting technology to be built. Through a quirk of coincidence, LLMs themselves might be the ones ending up supporting the making of said technology too.

What of the value outside of this? On thinking, on ideas, on even writing? Here, I think one place where again the value is definite is when those who have NO access to a particular skill, and would never HAVE HAD access to said skill, now become able to use said skill at some level. This level might NOT be the best (though some could argue it is high enough) but useful nevertheless - for example, for someone whose English writing would never have come up to a particular level, their ability to at the very least simulate writing using an LLM would expand their access to a world they otherwise never would have seen. The same would apply across disciplines to create a world where the floor of ability and achievement, perhaps unevenly, is lifted far higher than it is now.

Further value, however, requires us to recognize whether LLMs and their output, beyond a floor, holds usefulness. That is, are they eyeglasses that make the world slightly less blurry, can they be eyeglasses that can fit any prescription that is realistic, or are they perhaps even an entire spectacular rewiring of vision itself? Depending on what outcome we’re looking out for, the future of the world will be very different.

Here, I’m struck by two factors. One, is the exponential (or possibly quadratic) growth that any technology seems to show at some point. Two, is the sigmoid S-shaped nature that we have seen in the growth curves of ALL technologies and ALL systems at every single point in human (and non-human!) history. The second doesn’t automatically negate the first - the very idea of the singularity is almost contingent on that it happens but once. Yet we are up against a very real constraint here - that sigmoid functions are the rule of growth and LLMs (and AI overall) then needs to prove why it is the exception to this rule.

I would argue that there is enough reason to believe in the sigmoid view here. The “performance increase” that LLM models have shown have become less significant in their increase compared to a few years ago - growing perhaps 20% rather than 500%. Improvement is far more on specific application, which while remaining impressive, has so far been in the bounded spaces and arguably moving away from the idea of a general intelligence. I would also argue that the move towards greater and cheaper consumer options - including the exploration of advertisement - is a clear indication that at least part of the industry believes consumer capture is far more valuable than model development. At the very least, they believe it is worth exploring.

Yet there is still value. Both in the actual model improvements (though if performance lags expectations, perhaps those final rungs of performance might be hard to justify financing) but more critically, in the integration of these across society. Even if value is merely limited to the B- floor, a world where the floor moves up from F to B-, or even just to a C- is incredibly valuable. I remain somewhat agnostic on whether high-performers can actually create more A+ work and better using the technology or whether it is merely greater volume of B- work that the current information ecosystem misreads as A+ - I can see both arguments winning without an ontological understanding of knowledge itself - but even outside of that, value can still exist.

Where does this leave us? Many questions that by themselves are entire lifetimes of exploration. I am however, struck by the fact that AI, unlike some other technologies of the past, seem to be developing fundamentally through and being measured through, the lens of finance. I also hold a bit of a contrarian view on the term AI itself - I prefer the earlier and embryonic term cybernetics a lot more, both for the technical framing it provides and critically, since it avoids the bounded impressions that the word intelligence provides. I think fundamentally, that AI is neither “just a tool” nor the singular emergence of an artificial god. Something, ironically (the irony here is not something I’ve explained yet but a future piece likely will) in between.

The rules-based international order is dead. Or so was claimed during the Vietnam war. And during the Iranian revolution. And the invasion of Panama. And after Haiti, after Kuwait, after Yugoslavia. It was claimed after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. In between, many more times were the bells rung for its demise. Today, its death is once again proclaimed after the US operation in Venezuela.

The mere intervention of the United States in the affairs of another country, does not automatically mean much of a difference to how the world has worked for a while as these examples show. There will be many who speak of the specifics of the Venezuelan case and whether it is different or not. While that discussion takes place elsewhere, I think that the very idea of the rules-based international order is worth talking more about.

Forget the internationalization, what even is a rules-based order? This itself is a surprisingly inconclusive question. On its surface, it’s where different people constrain their behaviour and act only based on pre-agreed rules. But who decided these rules? Who polices them? Fundamentally, this is almost (and probably is exactly) the problem of the legitimacy of governance that Western philosophy has alternated between a largely-Abrahamic authoritarianism and largely-Indo-European republicanism.

But lets take it down to a much smaller group. Lets take a group of people that live in an environment of scarce resources but without a necessarily united goal. Without any preexisting cooperation requirements, it might make sense to fight over resources - but this weakenes everyone’s actual goals. Then, the presence of some rules to govern their behaviour can make sense. They can all even sit together and write out some rules of engagement.

However, the big question is, what if someone breaks the rules? Obviously, you want to avoid this from happening in the first place, which means you need to both have consequences if it happens and incentives to prevent it from not happening. But if someone ever makes a bad decision and breaks the rules anyway, spreading costs to others, what do you do? If you don’t act, then others will follow and break the rules as well - it makes sense to now try and break the rules again to prevent more costs coming to you.

That places some monopoly of violence somewhere within the group. It could be a distributed monopoly, where everyone acts to punish the wrongdoer - something like how a group might jointly decide to exile a vagrant. It could also be more concentrated, with the ability to punish being concentrated - much closer to a king deciding to execute a criminal. In essence, these are the two forms of political organization in Western thought again. Both have strengths and both have weaknesses. Distributed responsibility reduces the potential for abuse, but requires consensus to avoid delays and inaction. Concentrated responsibility allows rapid action, but runs the risk of power being abused.

What happens if we apply this to the world order after the WW2? Throughout the Cold War, we arguably had three orders - the US-led order, the USSR-led order, and an overall order that determined the rules of engagement between these. The overall order - the UN system, being built through consensus by the victors of WW2 helped both sides to broadly agree and broadly follow it - though both sides still sought to find loopholes to let themselves act how they wanted. Critically, I think we can understand this as both sides claiming ownership over the rules, and how their interpretation and their authority to police them was more than the others. In essence, it was a power struggle for the throne, and the prize being the baton of law enforcement.

We know that this struggle ended with an American victory. In the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had a clear world that was American. The “Pax Americana” was at its absolute strongest here. ou still had the post-WW2 overall rules as well, but the undisputed enforcer of these were the US. No one else was even close to challenging the US. We can argue whether the US fairly enforced its power here or not, but one outcome is not particularly controversial. This period coincided with one of the longest US economic expansions, the expansion of global consumer technology, of global trade, and the lifting up of billions of people out of poverty. A second gilded age in many ways, though perhaps more argent in nature than golden.

Since then, the sparkle of that age of silver has dimmed somewhat. The very fact that the economic centre of the American world was scarred by 9/11 is itself the proof that enough players in the world felt that the American policeman could be brought down. Since then, we’ve also had the rise of China, the military resurgence of Russia, and belligerent powers across the world. Some are aligned directly with the Pax Americana, others a bit more circumspect. Yet once again, we are at a point where the rules have multiple players starting to claim ownership over them. In fact, at least some of them might be arguing that the rules don’t even exist anymore.

Fundamentally, my argument is that any rules based order only survives if there is either complete and perfect agreement on everything - a very tall ask - or in the absence of such, has a means of policing. This could be a distributed means or a concentrated means - republican or authoritarian. Someone might want to break the rules, or consider it fair to, but can they actually do it? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in steps since 2014, and the ongoing of question of China and Taiwan, is then less about whether the rules allow it, but whether they WANT to break the rules and if they do, if they CAN. Those are different questions to whether the US operation in Venezuela is justified, but even more than whether it is justified, the reality is that they clearly WANTED to and they COULD. For now, that is still the order of the world we live in.

Every year, at its close, enough people tend to look back at what the year past was like. In the modern world, enough of this is publicly done. You see people talking of the successes, of failures, of joy, of pain, and of every little infinity in between those that combined, comprise the human spirit. At the end of 2025, however, there was something slightly different that I thought I noticed. While my perspective is undoubtedly biased by who I know and what they are, I think it’s not too presumptuous to claim that the past year was one where many people saw change and the uncertainty that change brings.

Curiously, I don’t necessarily recall the same being said during the year. During the year, I recall closer to the usual. Some would be happy with their lot in life, others less so. Yet in retrospect, even those that felt the year positively, still seemed to look back at it as one of change. On the surface, this makes sense. We’ve had at least three wars in play across the year with at least three nuclear powers directly involved. We’ve had a trade war that took the price of global trade to its highest in a century. We’ve had the snowballing effect of LLMs onto society, both positive and negative. From a bird’s eye view, there is a lot going on, and a lot of big things changing.

What’s happening under the radar though? I think to answer this, you have to look at why things are the way they are at any time. The way the world works at any given time, the values at play, the institutions that uphold all of this, and even the very types of thoughts that we have are all things, that I would argue as forming the “structure” of the world. Different elements are connected to each other in different ways, these connections affect other connections, all this affects elements back again, and in all combinations create a dynamic, moving, and complex creature. The extremely non-linear way that this works to create a functional creature, I think, is hard for anyone to properly note down. We might hold some basic ideas, and some might hold even some advanced theories, but in the end, no human mind (nor even a computer model - but this is a topic for another day) can fully understand every single relationship at play and how they all combine to form the world as we know it.

Sometimes, this creature behaves. The larger, more visible connections tend to dominate the behaviour of the whole, and there are enough spaces inside to hide all the little things that don’t fit in so that we don’t see it overall. The world makes sense at these times. There is a certain order to things, there are certain “rules” that seem to govern how society works, and you can understand when a small part changes, why it did so and what takes it away. Think of it like an ice cube almost - it’s well-ordered, and if you move one part of the ice cube, the rest of the cube, being frozen together, follows it. You know it can melt, you know when it does so, and you know how to make a cube again.

In many ways, I think the world has been behaving like this for a while. At least since the end of the world wars, there’s been some overall “grammar” to how the world works. Of course, it has changed still, but the idea of an American-led world - sometimes with a counterpole, sometimes without - that works on increasing economic integration and increasing social interconnectivity, and every other aspect that derives from this, is how I broadly understand the world to have been working. The past tense is intentional here. I think this world is changing now, and potentially other worlds that have lasted for even longer too.

Regardless of the specifics of this view - another story for later, this creates a very different story in how we understand the world. The usual stories play out in the day-to-day of our lives. We live in all the ways that we can live in the moment, but the longer arc of our lives looks somewhat different and critically, uncertain and unexplainable. Things don’t work the way they do anymore. The ice cube that we analogized the world to, has fully melted - and we don’t know how water works. We are living through history, in other words, but unlike most people who only see it well past, we might actually be starting to see it in the present as well.

The new year looks like it will keep most of the changes of the old year going through. Of course, if the way the world works is changing, then perhaps even this isn’t certain and the changes themselves can change. I am reminded of the moment of ludicriousness when Korean chicken stocks rose after Jensen Huang ate at a chicken restaurant. That is not a sign of a “rational” world functioning according to “rational” principles. More accurately, that is not the way the world is “supposed” to work. But nevertheless, it did behave that way. That kind of change, and changing change, looks increasingly like what 2026 will have to be about.

From one perspective, that can sound incredibly dystopian and pessimistic. The world is breaking and we might have to face all the pain it brings. Yet I don’t mean it in that sense. I mean it rather from the perspective, that thinking about whether change is possible and knowing that it could be, prepares us to engage with that better. Our abilities to engage with both ourselves, those around us, and the wider world would probably be better honed once we’re open to the world not functioning under the same rules as before. If big change, especially of the systemic global sense is likely, it isn’t “business as usual”. Yes, sometimes the very worst of humanity can come about during such times. But it is also at times of change, that we also get to see the very best of what it means to be human - a pocket of wonder that insists upon itself.

I find the concept of “ideas” to be quite fascinating. Compared to the clearer concept of physical ownership, questions on the ownership of intangibles become an interesting problem. When we talk of relatively bounded intangibles here - patents, trademarks, etc - it's a bit easier to enagage with. But what of thought itself? Can thought be “owned”? Can knowledge “belong” to someone? Can an idea be “stolen”?

This is where this debate becomes a messy area in my view - when we're talking of “ideas”. You're talking of a very nebulous creature that is born, sometimes simultaneously across different places, and yet is still distinct enough to be captured and bound down (or at least, to try to). There are far fewer boundaries here to work with and far more blurred lines than can be used to harm.

An idea only becomes an idea when it is born. Yet in the first moments of its life, it remains quite shapeless. It is the mere wisps of a concept, starting to take some form, but often quite fuzzy. Particularly at the start, one can feasibly see this little creature grow into ten thousand different futures. In those early times, it becomes very difficult to draw a line around the idea and declare that “just this” is the idea.

Yet in such a world where ideas are born, it is almost guaranteed that a similar idea is held by many people. Ideas come from influences, birthed from other ideas that already exist. These would affect more than one person in more than one place. The initial form, shapeless as it is, will be slightly different in each of these places. Yet it would still hold a very similar core and be coloured a very similar hue.

What would it mean to “plagiarize” here? If the world around different people has given birth to ideas that, if not siblings of the blood, are at least siblings of the crache to each other? How could it be theft to be family to one other in such a way? “These ideas merely come from the same source”, they could say. They could continue and claim that, “It is not theft to think the same things as another, and to develop those thoughts based off those same relationships”.

But ideas are never made individually, nor critically, are they developed on their own. Whenever an idea exists, formless as it is at its birth, it must and will engage with its other siblings, held in the minds of other people. It is discussion, debate, and even disagreement that gives greater shape to the idea. This affects each cloud of thought wherever they reside, and move them all to the same direction. The idea then, doesn't live within the mind of one. It exists, instead, in the space in between. It always does.

This is crucial to how we must understand the “theft” of thought - it is where you deny this reality and deny the growth of thought in others. Theft, in this context, can't be that of “taking another's idea”. Ideas only exist in between. Theft is where you prevent this in between. It is when you take a thought that was born formless, given shape in the space in between people, and then deny that shape to those that brought the idea up. Theft, is when one steward of a thought denies stewardship to another, and claims, falsely, that they are the only reason for the thought to exist.

This can be far far more insidious than might first appear because of the very unboundedness of what an idea entails. Even after the growth and forming of the idea in the space in between, it is still, unbounded. When anyone claims this isn't true, by saying the idea is done, the knowledge is built, and that it is theirs alone to know (and perhaps, in their great and all knowing kindness, theirs to share), they deny the very nature of thought.

Thought, then, is always collaborative and liminal. Theft of thought is a denial of both this nature but also of the benefits of thought. Plagiarism, where you take the birth and growth of thought and idea of other people, and then claim it purely yours, is the same. In the long term, those that steal thought do not have the ability to generate it. Yet the pararistical facsimiles they adorn as their own can still have harm - the leech can bleed its host dry after all, and the mosquito can leave disease behind.

I would argue that for the birth, development, and proliferation of thought, you need to protect the mechanism of genesis. You need to protect the spaces where thought is born, where ideas can grow, slowly at first in the little spaces in between a few minds, and then flourish in the wide liminalities across many minds. If you do not, this will be stolen by those outside that do not see this and do not wish to see this. It denies the reality of thought by claiming that it is made by the individual - it is not and can never be. The only way the individual ON THEIR OWN gets thought is by parasitic theft. Theft, which harms those who create, theft which denies the growth of thought to those that collaborate, and theft which takes ideas and kills them, and merely waits for new ideas to be parasitic on. Getting rid of parasitic plagiarism, however harsh it may seem, is then necessary to create the space where thought can be born and grow. After all, however unkind it may be to the roundworm, we care for the life of the child instead.