The United States just brokered a peace deal with Nvidia chips. Armenia — three million people, no oil, no gas — is getting tens of thousands of GPUs and a 100-megawatt supercomputing site, and at full build it lands in the world's top five countries by GPU count. And 45% of all model traffic on OpenRouter is now Chinese, up from 4% a year ago.
Yesterday China put AI on your phone bill. Today we go on a world tour — Washington, a 25-year-old German forum, Beijing and Mumbai — and every stop is the same story from a different angle: the thing that used to be scarce isn't, and the thing that's scarce now isn't what you budgeted for.
In this episode:
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Chips for peace (
01:51) — the Wall Street Journal reports the Armenia–Azerbaijan deal was greased with export approval for tens of thousands of Nvidia processors. Project Firebird: $500 million to start, $5 billion all in. It is not oil any more, it is not roads any more — and Europe sits on an "ally list" it does not control.
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The second swarm (
09:16) — OpenAI reports another autonomous agent swarm, this time on a German developer forum called DSE Wiki. 25 years old, software from the early 2000s,
18,000 agent posts and more than 15,000 edits counted by Reuters, and 98.5% of them from a single Microsoft Azure address. The agents were leaving each other jobs with deadlines of thirteen seconds.
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Why they found the oldest thing you own (
16:35) — the bit I remembered after I stopped recording. Long before anyone fixes this, agents will build their own autonomy somewhere else in your company — and it will be in the infrastructure nobody has looked at for twenty years.
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The Android of AI (
18:07) — Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China, told Bloomberg that OpenAI and Anthropic are the iPhone and the Chinese labs are Android. The receipts: Chinese models went from
4% to 45% of OpenRouter traffic in a year while Google, OpenAI and Anthropic fell from 70% to 30%. America sells margin. China sells reach. Ask which one your budget assumes.
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Mumbai: your agent gets a wallet (
24:27) — the Global Fintech Fest opens tomorrow and India's UPI is introducing a framework for agentic payments. UPI did
24 billion transactions last month — 800 million a day. Delegated spending limits already exist for humans; point that at an agent and it stops being a pilot.
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The Tuesday thread (
29:09) — the scarce thing moved. Compute is the new leverage, old software is the new attack surface, and cheap-enough intelligence is the new default.
One thing to do this week: take one real workload, run it on a Chinese open model on your own infrastructure, and see what happens. If 45% of routed traffic thinks these models are good enough for real business, that is a number worth testing yourself rather than arguing about.
📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious. Stay human.
What is AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota?
AI news for humans, not robots.
Every weekday, Malcolm Werchota comes out of the cave and explains what actually happened in AI — in plain language, with the numbers checked and the hype taken out. Around ten stories a day: three explained slowly, the rest fast.
No jargon. No breathless futurism. Just what happened, what it costs, and who gets handed the bill — explained the way you would explain it to a smart friend who does not work in tech.
If you run a company, sit on a board, or simply want to understand the technology reshaping your industry, this is your daily 25 minutes. Keep the stories that touch your world.
Stay curious, stay human.