“Sentinel minutes for week #52/2024” by NunoSempere

This is a link post. I thought I'd share an edition of the Sentinel minutes with the EA forum. On the one hand, if one cares about existential or global catastrophic risk, one might want to pay attention to possible precursors thereof. On the other hand, some items this week are particularly topical to global health as well: the Nigerian kidnapping estimates or the FEWS.net declaration of famine in Gaza.—Nuño Top items: The CDC found mutations that may enable upper-airway infection and greater transmission in an analysis of H5N1 specimens from the US's first severe case in Louisiana, but the changes would have been more concerning if they were found in animal hosts or in the early stages of infection. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its latest model, which is reportedly competitive with GPT-4o on some metrics and which apparently cost only $5 million to train. A power cable [...] ---Outline:(01:13) Geopolitics(01:16) Eurasia(03:27) Middle East(05:47) Africa(06:44) Asia-Pacific(07:03) Americas(07:58) Biorisk(09:26) Tech(09:28) Semiconductors(09:50) Social media(10:11) AI(12:33) Natural disasters--- First published: December 30th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i735LuBXxoeLGHD2s/sentinel-minutes-for-week-52-2024 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.