🔮 Genome architects; Chinese cables; sun & the data centre; rising rivals; hair juche & Schrodinger’s AI cat ++ #480

Hi all, welcome to the last Sunday edition of this month.

I spent the week in NYC, where I had a number of meetings and speaking engagements. On the back of last week’s Sunday edition (which got picked up by Elon on X…) about the collapse of traditional news outlets, I had a number of conversations with some of the leading figures of New York & British media on AI and the changes to that industry. It’s got me thinking, which will get me writing on this soon enough.

This week we also saw Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas be selected for one of the top jobs in the EU. Her worldview is very much shaped by the Soviet occupation of Estonia, the struggles to win back independence and build a resilient modern society. To understand where the EU’s new foreign policy chief comes from and how she thinks about the future, see my conversation with Kallas from last year: