Yeah, that’s basically it. Take the UAE case — on one side you’ve got the declared stuff, the OPEC exit, the whole diversification push, that’s the policy signal. On the other side you’ve got what was actually happening on the ground, agentic AI getting deployed across the economy around that same time. SBL is just trying to put a number on how far apart those two things actually are.
So it’s not really “the UAE said one thing and did another” in a gotcha sense. More that policy statements and what’s actually deployed tend to move on different clocks, and I think that gap itself might be telling you something useful — where a state’s real operational posture is ahead of or behind what it’s officially saying.
Good question though, means I probably didn’t make that distinction sharp enough in the post itself. Will keep that in mind for the next one.
I am not sure if the OPEC exit is directly connected with the AI stuff. Sure, leaving OPEC might give UAE more cash (because they can now sell more barrels of oil), and they could use some of that money to invest in AI data centers etc. But I really do not think that they left OPEC simply because they needed more money for AI.
Yeah, that’s basically it. Take the UAE case — on one side you’ve got the declared stuff, the OPEC exit, the whole diversification push, that’s the policy signal. On the other side you’ve got what was actually happening on the ground, agentic AI getting deployed across the economy around that same time. SBL is just trying to put a number on how far apart those two things actually are.
So it’s not really “the UAE said one thing and did another” in a gotcha sense. More that policy statements and what’s actually deployed tend to move on different clocks, and I think that gap itself might be telling you something useful — where a state’s real operational posture is ahead of or behind what it’s officially saying.
Good question though, means I probably didn’t make that distinction sharp enough in the post itself. Will keep that in mind for the next one.
I am not sure if the OPEC exit is directly connected with the AI stuff. Sure, leaving OPEC might give UAE more cash (because they can now sell more barrels of oil), and they could use some of that money to invest in AI data centers etc. But I really do not think that they left OPEC simply because they needed more money for AI.