E. Richard Gold

Via @FT "The push for tech sovereignty comes amid growing concerns in parts of Europe over the possibility of a “kill switch” scenario...

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

@TheTorontoSun @scottlincicome

Air Transat suspending all flights to U.S. as of this spring torontosun.com/news/local-new…

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position. Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground. This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt. We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning. We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most. I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the…

"As Anderson Chuck, president and CEO of the Canadian Institute for Health Information, says, Canada’s single-payer medicare system, with more than 40 million multicultural participants, means 'we have one of the most valuable data sets on Earth.'"

@EricTopol @JAMA_current I think you made @CaulfieldTim's day!

Coffee and improved cognition, reduced dementia >130,000 people followed 37 years Benefit seen only with caffeinated coffee or tea and most pronounced ~2 cups/day @JAMA_current ☕️☕️jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

Proud to announce my new article, "Hallucinated Cases Are Good Law," forthcoming in the Princeton Law Review.

A new AI model—Open Scholar—built by @AllenInstitute and @UW can synthesize science information and research very accurately, better than many existing LLMs and as well as human experts; open-source @Nature nature.com/articles/s4158…

In 1943, in Nazi-occupied Paris, a teenager named Adolfo Kaminsky discovered that chemistry could be a weapon. He had learned the science of dyes in a small shop, studying how pigments bonded to paper and how solvents could break them apart. That knowledge became the difference between life and death. The Nazis used paperwork as a weapon. On Jewish identity documents, the word JUIF was stamped in permanent blue ink. That single mark meant arrest, deportation, and death. The French Resistance asked Kaminsky if it could be erased. Most attempts ruined the paper. He remembered something else: lactic acid. It dissolved the dye without damaging the fibres. Under a single lamp, he watched the fatal word disappear. But removing ink was only the beginning. He had to recreate entire identities birth certificates, ration cards, transit permits each detail perfect. A wrong shade of ink or a misaligned stamp could expose entire networks and send families to torture or execution. He worked in a hidden attic on the Left Bank, surrounded by chemical fumes that burned his eyes and stained his hands. Requests flooded in. Papers for children escaping to Switzerland. Ration cards for families in hiding. Transit passes for dangerous routes through Spain. Then he made a calculation that would haunt him. Each document took about two minutes. In an hour, he could save thirty people. In an hour of sleep, thirty people could die. So he stopped sleeping. When he learned that three hundred Jewish children in an orphanage were about to be raided, he locked himself in his lab and worked for two days without rest. His vision blurred. His hand cramped. He collapsed for an hour and woke in panic, furious at himself for the lives he imagined lost. He forced himself back to work. The children escaped. It became a quiet war of precision. As Nazi security measures evolved, Kaminsky refined his methods. Success wasn’t measured in territory or headlines, but in families that survived and names that never appeared on transport lists. By the liberation of Paris in 1944, his forged documents had saved an estimated fourteen thousand people. He never charged a cent. To him, putting a price on a life was unthinkable. After the war, he became a photographer and spoke little about what he had done. Even his children did not know for decades. The man who saved thousands disappeared back into ordinary life. Only later did his story emerge, revealing a quieter truth about heroism. Courage does not always carry a weapon or wear a uniform. Sometimes it works under a dim bulb, with stained fingers and relentless focus, fighting an empire with knowledge and refusal to look away. Adolfo Kaminsky died in 2023 at ninety-seven. His legacy is not in monuments or medals. It lives in the generations that exist because a teenager decided sleep could wait. #unknown #heroes #HistoryMakers

Canadian #universities can support #innovation in Canada but have to shift gear to do so. Read more in my piece in @UA_magazine: universityaffairs.ca/opinion/recali… @mcgillu

@MuhammadLila This points to the error of policies aiming to block transfer of #IP to foreign firms. To maximize valuations (and attract investors), firms need to be able to access global market for their IP. To keep firms in Canada, we need to support the ecosystem that sustains them.

100% accurate. Every successful Canadian founder I know: ▻ Turned down by Canadian VCs ▻ Raised from US investors ▻ Accelerated round closing by 4-5x ▻ Got much higher valuations ▻ Received stronger network effects + support ▻ Met with GPs/LPs directly instead of analysts There are obvious tax implications to this, but most Canadian YC founders incorporate in Delaware anyways so this isn't a big shift.

Too many believe that US success in #innovation is due to the government staying out. The truth is the opposite. Significant, sustained, but often time-limited (to encourage experimentation and limit the effect of lobbying) policy interventions are key to #innovation policy.

I enjoyed speaking with @briancrombie to discuss #innovation in Canada, the need for government support in establishing ecosystems, and the importance of harnessing our resources to increase innovation in Canada: youtube.com/watch?v=iUMKUv… @mcgillu @LawMcGill

Thank you @BNNBloomberg for the opportunity to speak today about #innovation in Canada, the weakness of our regional innovation ecosystems, the lack of business investment, & the need for governments to support the creation of ecosystems: bnnbloomberg.ca/video/shows/th… @mcgillu

And the median Canadian is richer still, despite all the nonsense memes about per capita GDP. For more on why those Canada-US GDP comparisons are bunk, see policyoptions.irpp.org/2025/04/numera….

Folks - the Institute for Progress runs a fantastic grad-level online course on the economics of innovation. Amazing group of lecturers for the spring program - definitely apply if this sounds interesting! Due date is Jan 9. Hope to see you there! ifp.org/economics-of-i…

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With my @lawbytespod podcast on a holiday break, this post looks back at the ten most popular episodes of the year. Topping the charts this year was a discussion with Sukesh Kamra on law firm adoption of artificial intelligence and innovative technologies. michaelgeist.ca/2025/12/the-ye…

We're launching a new substack at the Abundance and Growth Fund! I think we've got a pretty amazing team behind this: @aarmlovi, @salonium, @jddwor, @dylanmatt, plus Willow Latham-Proenca and Nisha Austin (more about us in the reply!). abundanceandgrowthblog.substack.com/p/28-thoughts-…

If we have learned nothing else this year, it is that Canada cannot afford to copy US policies & strategies. But that is what we do with #innovation. We must leverage what we have through mission-oriented policies: theglobeandmail.com/business/comme… @mcgillu @LawMcGill