Notes
Short reflections, observations and updates from the EDO team.
Where the Brains Went
Where a country’s best researchers choose to work is one of the more reliable leading indicators of where its capability will be in a decade — more reliable, often, than its defence budget or its diplomatic posture.
The Compute Map
Compute is the axis along which that divergence is now most visible, most measurable, and most contested. The ability to train a frontier artificial-intelligence model is not evenly distributed across the world; it is concentrated in a small number of physical chokepoints.
The AI Pope: Why the Vatican is Racing to Bless the Machine
In recent months, the Vatican has increasingly positioned itself at the frontlines of the global AI ethics debate—hosting conferences, issuing statements, and convening tech elites and moral theologians under frescoed ceilings to discuss the “soul” of the machine age.
"To understand the future, we must first understand the ideas that made the present possible."