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Being an optimist, I always think the future is bright – is it orange or yellow and blue? – yet, when looking back into the past, almost every year has something happening somewhere that moves the world’s axis.
It’s like my favourite quote from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who, after the Russian Revolution in 1918, said that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” (although Lenin never actually said it). I like this quote because it illustrates pockets of change around the world, some of which are localised and some are global. Local pockets of change are illustrated by what is happening in Gaza and the Ukraine. Global pockets of change are illustrated by the 2008 financial crisis and the AI revolution of the past year.
None of us can have missed the impact of DeepSeek, the new Chinese ChatGPT:
Tuesday briefing: How an unknown Chinese startup wiped $593bn from the value of an AI giant
A small Chinese rival has emerged that appears to match what OpenAI and the other US giants can do at a much lower cost. The result was a stunning collapse in the value of Big Tech stocks yesterday – and a $593bn fall in the value of Nvidia, the biggest in the US stock market’s history.
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The reason for its impact is that it does what ChatGPT does for a fraction of the cost and is open sourced. Without needing expensive chips (Nvidia) or proprietary large language models (ChatGPT), anyone can just integrate AI for almost no cost. That’s a seismic event.
It’s interesting in that we often talk about seismic events these days. People referred to Donald Trump’s re-election as a seismic event; the wildfires in Los Angeles are a seismic event; that the global economy is going through a seismic event; that the Moon regularly goes through seismic events; and more.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
But then it struck me, reading about turning points in history, that we encounter these seismic events almost weekly. It’s not decades where nothing happens. Something is happening somewhere every single day.
“In two minutes the work of centuries was overturned,” the French revolutionary Louis-Sébastien Mercer wrote back in 1789.
In 1919, at the height of a global crisis that resulted from the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, the devastation of the first world war, and the collapse of Europe’s great continental empires, Irish writer William Butler Yeats penned his famed warning to humanity, mourning the end of the old world: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall was called the “end of history”.
In 2001, the airplanes smashing into the World Trade Twin Towers was a landmark. “For America, 9/11 was more than a tragedy,” George Bush remarked. “It changed the way we look at the world.”
As David Motadel, Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, notes in his lengthy piece in the Guardian:
The major transformations and changes in history are always processes which evolve over decades and then become visible through certain events, or turning points.
Seismic moments. Inflexion points. Or are they? Many of them build up through time and are predictable. For example, Fernand Braudel coined the term “structural history” on the basis of three levels of change, each of which can be tracked and traced:
- The natural environment – geographical and geological conditions – which barely change over time;
- The social, economic and political structures, which slowly evolve, shaped by the natural environment; and
- The events caused by human action, shaped by the conditions created by the first two levels.
It is that third level that creates the seismic moments and inflexion points and, as a strategist, we can track and trace these developments through an understanding of PEST: Political, Economic, Social and Technological forces for change.
The thing for me that creates the most disruptive change – the seismic moments and inflexion points – are driven by technological change. The inventions. Everything from vaccinations to airplanes or from the internet to the nuclear bomb are things that we could see coming if we knew where to look, and AI is the same thing. The AI revolution we are going through is nothing new. It’s been brewing for years (Alan Turing predicted this back in 1949). It’s just that it’s finally here and now that we’re all talking about it. In other words, we can easily see the future if we know where to look.
Oh and meantime, if you really want to understand the DeepSeek vs ChatGPT challenge, I can thoroughly recommend this book by Kai-Fu Lee, which coined the term that Google’s AI beating the world’s greatest Go champion was a Sputnik moment.