The newsletter
Risky Tuesday
One risk event from somewhere in the world, classified against the Five Quadrants.
Issues
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Exploding Intelligence
22 researchers, including Hinton and Bengio, warn that AI building the next AI could outrun human oversight. We think the opportunity is bigger than the risk, and that engineering can make it manageable.
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The Great Compute Bet
Concentration may be falling at the model level and rising further down the stack, where every AI application converges on the same chips, data centres and power. Theos Evgeniou on where the bottleneck actually sits, and what a board should stop asking for.
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When Does the Human Cease to Be in Control?
Theos Evgeniou argues that a human in the loop can make a system more dangerous, not less. At Tremau the machine reviews everything first and the person handles only the exceptions. What decides the quadrant is not whether a human is present but whether anyone can still intervene.
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What If AI Works?
Theos Evgeniou has worked on AI for thirty years. He is not worried about the machine that disproved a 1946 conjecture. He is worried about what happens when AI stops being digital and becomes a co-scientist.
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Wine Fraud
Rudy Kurniawan blended fresh California Pinot into faded Burgundy and sold it for millions. A decade on, collectors pay him to do it again, and prefer the fake.
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The Great Nickel Illusion
S$1.46 billion raised to buy nickel from a miner that had never produced an ounce, and sell it to a counterparty that had ceased trading. 947 investors, many of them lawyers and fund managers, checked none of it.
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Greensill and the Art of Risk Creep
A boring, well-diversified lending business that wandered from Q1 to Q4 one decision at a time: a little more concentration, a jet, an invoice for a sale that had not happened, and one indispensable insurer.
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Stuck in the Mud
The Ever Given was an engineering failure with engineering answers. The Strait of Hormuz is not, and no amount of dredging will help.
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Situational Awareness is Not Normal
A $45bn AI fund, 4x leverage and a 67% month, and why concentration, illiquidity and leverage never survive being held together.
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Forests as the Fuel
Europe's 2026 fire season against every year since 1980, and what decides whether a spark stays containable.
The next issue takes a different risk and a different quadrant.