Flagship

Trump demands Intel CEO’s resignation

US President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded Intel’s new CEO resign over alleged ties to China. Lip-Bu Tan was tapped in March to turn around the American company that had fallen far behind in the AI chip race. Washington sees Intel as vital in its efforts to seek a national semiconductor champion to counter China’s technological advances. Tan’s ability to straddle the US-China line, owing to his past leadership of Cadence Design Systems and his “longstanding and prolific investments” in China’s semiconductor industry, was seen as an asset, The Wire China wrote. But those credentials have become a liability after a Republican senator raised concerns this week about purported links between Cadence and the Chinese government and military.

OpenAI makes ‘major upgrade’ to ChatGPT

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT-5, its latest artificial intelligence model powering ChatGPT, marking a major milestone in the hotly contested battle between tech giants and heavily funded startups for AI supremacy. CEO Sam Altman called GPT-5 the best model in the world in key categories like coding, writing, and healthcare knowledge. While GPT-5 does not constitute “artificial general intelligence” — models that can reason as well as or better than humans — Altman called it “a significant step along the path to AGI.” The company said GPT-5 is also less prone to confidently wrong “hallucinations.” The model reflects the acceleration in the AI arms race that has Big Tech on track to spend $344 billion this year, largely on data centers.

Stagflation fears creep up in US

Wall Street strategists see signs of stagflation bubbling up in the US economy as President Donald Trump’s new tariffs go into effect. Data suggests higher inflation and slow growth are both imminent: Companies could soon pass tariffs on to customers, and the job market is teetering. Consumption is increasingly dependent on the top 10% of earners, who drive about half of spending. “These people will determine if the US economy avoids a recession,” one economist wrote. But another analyst argued in Project Syndicate that growth from American technological innovations will outweigh stagflationary policies. Still, it’s unclear if the AI boom propping up the economy is “evidence of the next Industrial Revolution or the next big bubble,” journalist Derek Thompson wrote.

Mixed signals on Europe biz health

A crush of earnings reports offered conflicting messages on how European business is faring in the face of US President Donald Trump’s trade war. Second-quarter earnings were largely weak: “The bar was quite low but… they still missed that bar,” one strategist said. European stocks outperformed their Wall Street counterparts at the start of the year as investors fretted over Trump’s policy swings, but have since lost momentum. Still, the outlook for the European Union’s corporate health improved after its trade deal with Washington, and despite the headwinds, European business has shown surprising resilience, a Financial Times columnist argued. Shares in the biggest banks hit their highest levels since 2008 on the back of higher interest rates.

Eli Lilly shares drop on trial results

Shares in Eli Lilly plunged 15% Thursday after trial results for its weight loss pill — seen as a potential competitor to injectables like Ozempic — failed to satisfy investors. The Mounjaro maker’s oral GLP-1, orforglipron, showed an average 12.4% body-weight loss; analysts expected around 15%. Shares of rival Novo Nordisk jumped Thursday, but the Danish drugmaker has struggled to fend off competition from Eli Lilly in the US. Once Europe’s most valuable company and an undisputed leader in obesity drugs, Novo Nordisk has seen a “stunning reversal” of fortune, The New York Times wrote. A major factor is Eli Lilly accelerating the development of its drug pipeline “in a market that isn’t going to be patient in any way,” an analyst said.

Israeli cabinet meets to discuss Gaza plan

Israeli ministers met Thursday to approve a full military takeover of Gaza despite strong domestic and international opposition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed his intention to occupy Gaza ahead of the meeting, but suggested that Arab states could eventually control the enclave. The plan has faced fierce resistance from the Israeli public and military officials, including the IDF chief; they fear the campaign would endanger Israeli hostages held by Hamas. But “only massive pressure from Washington and other world capitals could save the hostages at this point,” a Haaretz correspondent wrote. Some Gazans told the BBC’s correspondent they fear another displacement order more than occupation: “When people were forced to leave northern Gaza, things got much, much worse,” he wrote.

Putin’s diplomatic blitz

Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a diplomatic blitz ahead of a possible meeting with Donald Trump. Over the last two days, Putin met with Malaysia’s king and the United Arab Emirates’ president. He also met India’s national security adviser, and is expected to visit India later this year, as Trump penalizes New Delhi over its purchases of Russian oil. The meetings signal that Russia is not nearly as diplomatically and economically isolated as the West would like, an expert said, as Washington ratchets up pressure on Moscow to end the Ukraine war. Trump suggested Thursday that he was open to meeting Putin without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s participation, reversing course.

China says meetings, reports are too long

The Chinese government’s latest gripe with its sprawling federal bureaucracy: Meetings and memos are too long. A Communist Party directive issued this week calls on cadres to follow a “short, practical and concise” writing style, limit documents to 5,000 characters, and issue fewer reports, the Financial Times reported. (The directive itself came in at a mere 4,845 characters.) Meetings should also be shortened, the notice said, with speeches capped at one hour. The new rules reflect leader Xi Jinping’s expanding effort to rein in the bureaucracy. Officials have also had to curtail work gatherings and avoid alcohol and lavish meals; the controls have hurt the country’s catering and banquet industries.

The AI note-takers are listening

Artificial intelligence note-takers may be listening to your entire conversation, even parts you mean to keep private. Gemini and other LLMs can be used to transcribe work meetings and provide summaries shared to all participants. But some users have noticed offhand comments being added to the notes, The Wall Street Journal reported, including personal catch-ups, lunch orders (the Zoom AI dutifully noted that the participants “don’t like soup”), and — in one case — a jokey query of whether a potential client was a scammer, which was then shared with said client. “I was very lucky that the person I was working with had a good sense of humor,” the participant said.

Some mathematicians reject infinity

Some mathematicians want to remove the concept of true infinity from math. The idea that you can keep counting indefinitely is uncontroversial: Aristotle called this “potential infinity.” But mathematical theory is underpinned by axioms including the existence of infinite sets, such as the set of natural numbers, or the digits of pi. “Finitists” argue that removing the concept of infinity would also remove some weird results, such as the Banach-Tarski paradox that says you can disassemble a sphere and use it to create two identical spheres the same size as the original. Instead, Scientific American reported, they would treat all infinities as merely potential: You can keep calculating the digits of pi, but there is no “real” infinitely long number.

Aug. 8:

• The World Robot Conference kicks off in Beijing.
• Democracy activist Joshua Wong’s trial on additional charges begins in Hong Kong.
• It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary about the late singer directed by Amy Berg, opens in US theaters.

A New York retrospective showcases an artist with a “knack for existential dread,” a reviewer wrote. Hosted at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Source Notes is the first exhibition to feature works spanning the full career of Lorna Simpson, a conceptual photographer-turned-multimedia-artist who sourced graphics for her screen-printed collages from magazines Jet and Ebony, as well as the archives of the Associated Press and the Library of Congress. Simpson “deploys found images for maximal psychic impact yet keeps herself at a remove,” the Financial Times wrote. “Lushly executed” and “psychologically unnerving,” a pair of 2015 paintings demonstrate the “abrupt departure” of Simpson’s later work, which “viewers can’t always make sense of but can feel in their bones.”