So I was wondering if you zoom out from the daily headlines and the bustle of what's probably going on in your newsroom, what to you feels genuinely different about the AI conversation today compared with, you know, six or twelve months ago?

Yeah.

It's really hard to get away from daily headlines 'cause that's all that we trade in.

But it's a really good question, and it's a really good discipline to try and think back to what we were writing and what we were talking about maybe at the start of twenty twenty-six.

And I will say that what was being predicted then and the things that I was commissioning articles about then was deflation of the AI bubble, whether investors were going to ask harder questions about the returns on their investments.

And maybe this was the moment in time when the mad volume of spending that was being predicted by hyperscalers, whether that had just gone too far, and now we needed to see what AI was actually going to generate in terms of the economy, in terms of companies that were buying these products, these services.

I would say that that seems to have dimmed a little bit because the spending has just carried on.

You know, do you think there's a greater focus on safety that will ultimately strengthen kind of what is the public perception of trust perspective from the boardroom in AI because the risks are being surfaced and addressed, or does it more reinforce the sense that technology's becoming harder to predict, therefore more of a risk than an opportunity?

Have you been surprised at how quickly the tech rose, for want of a better term, got into bed with Trump and how tight they are staying with him?

Not necessarily surprised, but the speed was really remarkable.

So I got out to San Francisco in 2018, and this was in the kind of pretty wishy-washy but still very liberal era of San Francisco, DEI in employment and giving money to Democrats.

The thing that I've been... kind of surprised by is that some of the backing does seem quite ideological.

I think Stephen's right that some of it was some self-interest in there.

And that has gone fantastically well for them because basically M&A is back and this is going to be the year of mega deals and who cares about regulators anymore? Trump is just, he's all in on tech and particularly AI.

So that's worked out very well for them.

What do we think about Chinese tech, Chinese AI in particular, and the ways that the Trump administration is acting as a proxy to Silicon Valley to try and keep China's technological rise down?