My team at Sentinel produces a weekly brief on global risks. Here is the executive summary and forecasts for this weeks:
Key items this week are:
Economy and trade: Trump announced new tariffs. US GDP growth is driven by AI capex spending while labor slumps. In response to an unfavorable labor report, Trump fired the commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Geopolitics: UK, France and Canada announced their intention to recognize a Palestinian state. Hunger is widespread in Gaza and might meet the technical definition of famine later this year, which could serve as a Schelling point for change.
Biorisks: Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever and Chikungunya are spreading. A paper on an AI pipeline for AI-aided discovery of antivirals provides hope for a favorable defense/offense balance change for AI.
AI: Mark Zuckerberg wrote about personal superintelligence, and Google released a variant of an IMO gold medal model.
And more: Drug-cartel operatives volunteered in Ukraine to gain experience with FPV drones, and prisoners in the UK are using drones to smuggle goods into prison.
We updated our forecasting estimates for the following;
Will there be a famine in any part of Gaza by the end of 2025, according to the UN and its Integrated Food Security Phase Classification? In March, our aggregate estimate for this was 18%, it is now 41% (range 25% to 50%).
Will there be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that lasts at least a week, beginning in the next 30 days? We estimated a 44% chance that this would happen a month ago, and it did not. We currently estimate that there is a 17% chance that one will happen in the next 30 days and last at least a week (range 12% to 25%).
Will Israel and Hamas still be fighting at the end of the year? We estimated a 64% chance of this last month; we now estimate a 62% chance (range 35% to 75%).
Will Meta have the most capable general purpose AI system internally, on 31 December 2025? In March, we produced estimates about which AI company this would be, with Meta bucketed under “other” (11%). Our current estimate for Meta achieving this is 8% (range 5% to 18%).
Our status is at green, representing that we aren’t seeing signals of incoming global catastrophic risks over the short-term.
Our status is at green, representing that we aren’t seeing signals of incoming catastrophic risks over the short-term.
You can read the rest of it & sign up here. We also appreciate retweets this week since we changed to this twitter account. Also thanks to 80,000 hours for their mention in their newsletter last week :)
For anyone wondering whether to subscribe, I’ve been subscribed for a month and it’s an excellent newsletter. Once a week email covering things happening in the news with forecasts, reasoning, and aiming to cover what actually matters. It’s great.
My team at Sentinel produces a weekly brief on global risks. Here is the executive summary and forecasts for this weeks:
Our status is at green, representing that we aren’t seeing signals of incoming catastrophic risks over the short-term.
You can read the rest of it & sign up here. We also appreciate retweets this week since we changed to this twitter account. Also thanks to 80,000 hours for their mention in their newsletter last week :)
For anyone wondering whether to subscribe, I’ve been subscribed for a month and it’s an excellent newsletter. Once a week email covering things happening in the news with forecasts, reasoning, and aiming to cover what actually matters. It’s great.