So long, imagination engine

Recently: A Category Four cyclone rams into one of the emptiest coastlines in Australia—threatening few people but a lot of cattle.

Today: After OpenAI built a deepfake-powered TikTok, it didn’t take long for people to lose interest—and now, it seems, so has Disney. … In Iran, a dead admiral, a rejected ceasefire, and 12-year-olds at the checkpoints. … &c.

For members: Why did the Mexicans kill El Mencho? Benjamin Smith on the state losing control over the cartels. … & Can African citizens stand up to Chinese corporations? Miriam Driessen’s new book, Immunity on Trial.

+ New music from Rostam ...

The side quest

This week, OpenAI shut down Sora—the AI video app it had called “the most powerful imagination engine ever built”—six months after launch, without explanation. The app, the API, and the Sora website will all shut down. A US$1 billion deal with Disney, under which more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars would have appeared in user-generated videos, collapsed with it. No money ever changed hands.

Sora was meant to be AI’s TikTok—a deepfake-powered social network where users could scan their faces and generate hyperrealistic videos of themselves doing anything, anywhere. It hit a million downloads faster than ChatGPT. Then usage cratered. Downloads fell 70 percent from their November peak; daily active users dropped by a third. Users made Mario smoke weed and generated fake videos of Martin Luther King Jr., prompting his daughter to go on Instagram and ask users to stop. OpenAI’s own head of applications told staff this month that the company couldn’t afford to be “distracted by side quests.”

So why did the world’s most valuable AI company just abandon its most ambitious consumer product? The official line—freeing up processing power—points to a gap that may define this phase of the AI industry: between what generative AI can technically produce and what human beings actually want to do with it at scale. OpenAI is now consolidating around enterprise products and coding tools, things people will pay for—and so, that OpenAI can expect will produce direct consumer revenue—along with ads in ChatGPT, something OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, once called a “last resort.”

Meanwhile

• The jury in Santa Fe. A New Mexico jury on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay US$375 million for willfully violating the state’s consumer protection laws—the first time an American state has won a verdict against a major technology company for harming children. Prosecutors argued that Meta knew its platforms enabled child sexual exploitation and lied about it. The same week, a California jury found both Meta and YouTube negligent in a separate addiction trial. Meta plans to appeal.
• Twelve-year-olds at the checkpoints. Israel has killed Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the IRGC’s navy, in an overnight strike on Bandar Abbas—the man who mined the Strait of Hormuz. In the meantime, Iran has rejected Washington’s 15-point ceasefire but is exchanging messages through Pakistan. U.S. President Donald Trump gave Tehran 10 days before the U.S. hits energy sites. According to the Saudi-funded Iran International, the IRGC has lowered its recruitment age to 12. This week’s Economist cover: “Advantage Iran.”
• Just in case. Wall Street has its worst day since the war began—the S&P 500, the American stock market’s benchmark index, fell 1.7 percent; the price of oil crossed $100 a barrel. … The Philippines declares a national energy emergency; it has 45 days of fuel left. … Russia launches nearly 1,000 drones at Ukraine, its largest single-day barrage of the war. … NASA scraps the Lunar Gateway, it’s planned orbital space station, announcing a $20 billion moon base. … & Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signs a friendship treaty with Kim Jong-Un in Pyongyang, giving him the gift of an assault rifle—“just in case enemies appear.”

Feature

Shadow state

Why did the Mexicans kill El Mencho? Benjamin Smith on how the state lost control over the cartels.

In late February, the Mexican military shot and killed the country’s most wanted man—the cartel kingpin known as “El Mencho”—together with six of his henchmen. The U.S. State Department had offered US$15 million for information leading to his capture.

Within hours, the cartel struck back, killing 25 members of the National Guard and one security guard. In El Mencho’s home state of Jalisco, cartel members put up 65 roadblocks, setting fire to cars and buses to create maximum chaos. Across the country, they threw up some 250 more. Mexican security forces killed some 30 cartel operatives in return.

What’s really behind this extraordinary eruption of violence?

Benjamin Smith is a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick and author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. Smith says the raid happened because the CIA figured out where El Mencho was hiding. But the motivation ran deeper. The Americans have been threatening to send in their own military unless Mexico can prove it can take out kingpins on its own. And this summer, Mexico hosts the World Cup—the government wanted to reassure football fans that the country is safe enough to visit.

But Smith figures those were only the proximate reasons. Behind the spectacular violence between state and cartels, he says, is a thoroughgoing merger of the two. Across vast stretches of Mexico, the cartels have formed what he calls shadow states, running or taxing countless illicit and licit industries. The cartels have infiltrated the state at every level; and members of the state have extensive involvement in the cartels. So now, where the one ends and the other begins is less and less clear …

Books

Exit Amhara

Can African citizens stand up to Chinese corporations? Miriam Driessen’s Immunity on Trial.

The Supreme Court of Amhara, Ethiopia, summoned the Chinese national Benli Li in July 2016 to face charges of homicide by severe negligence. Li had served as manager of a large Chinese corporation at a construction site in Ethiopia when he dared a local worker to climb into the bucket of a loader. Li then ignited the engine and, as the worker lost his balance and fell to the ground, ran him over.

But Li never showed up in court, and local police couldn’t find him. As months went by, Ethiopian officers repeatedly sought Li, and he eventually received a sentence in absentia for homicide.

Why, Miriam Driessen asks in Immunity on Trial: Ethiopian Courts, Chinese Corporations, and Contestations over Sovereignty, didn’t Li cooperate with the prosecution? Why was he granted bail, and how did he escape the country?

Why would Chinese corporations start playing by African rules?

New music

‘Like a Spark’

Rostam Batmanglij, who goes these days simply as Rostam, has a new album coming in May. Most famous for his association with Vampire Weekend, he’s one of his generation’s most gifted popular-music producers. Here, backed by buoyant guitars, he sings achingly of “hanging from the ceiling, like a spark.”