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OPINION / China, Rusia y el camino hacia una orden democrático multipolar

a more democratic multipolar world order.

Rusia amenaza con ampliar unilateralmente sus fronteras marítimas con Finlandia y Lituania
Los planes del Kremlin de redibujar sus límites en el Báltico inquieta a los aliados de la OTAN, que lo denuncian como una nueva “operación híbrida” tras el aumento de los sabotajes
Tras las campañas de desinformación y propaganda para socavar la unidad de la UE y los intentos de sabotaje en varios Estados miembros, llega un nuevo movimiento del Kremlin, esta vez, a cuenta de sus fronteras marítimas. El Gobierno ruso amaga con ampliar la extensión de sus aguas territoriales en el mar Báltico, próximas a Finlandia y Lituania —dos aliados de la OTAN—. La propuesta del Ministerio de Defensa para redibujar las coordenadas de sus límites marítimos y declarar aguas marinas interiores —es decir, territorio nacional— una parte ubicada al este del golfo de Finlandia y otra zona próxima a dos ciudades del enclave de Kaliningrado han elevado la inquietud de los aliados de la Alianza Atlántica. Cuando pasan ya más de dos años de la invasión de Ucrania a gran escala, Lituania ha denunciado el movimiento como “otra operación híbrida” de Rusia.

El plan ruso, que se publicó en el portal jurídico del Ministerio de Defensa el martes por la noche y se eliminó sin dar explicaciones a primera hora de la tarde del miércoles, ha suscitado la dura condena de Estonia, Finlandia, Lituania y Letonia. La iniciativa llega semanas después de que varios aliados de la OTAN acusaran a Moscú de interferir los GPS de las aerolíneas sobre el mar Báltico. De llevarse a cabo, Moscú podría amenazar con interceptar a partir de ahora las embarcaciones y aviones de terceros países que crucen las zonas que considere suyas.

Moscú alega en el documento que las coordenadas de sus fronteras marítimas actuales, establecidas en 1985, “no se corresponden completamente con la situación geográfica actual” porque, según la versión del Kremlin, fueron elaboradas con cartas de navegación a pequeña escala del siglo XX que “no permiten determinar el límite externo de las aguas del mar interno”.

En los últimos meses, mientras incrementa su empuje en Ucrania, donde está tratando de abrir un nuevo frente en el este, Rusia ha incrementado sus sabotajes, ciberataques y operaciones híbridas, según fuentes de inteligencia occidental, en un esfuerzo por desestabilizar Europa en un superaño electoral (los comicios europeos son del 6 al 9 de junio y varios países pasan por las urnas este año).

Xi added, “China and Russia believe that the Ukraine crisis must be resolved by political means… This approach aims to shape a new balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture.”

Putin responded that Moscow positively evaluates the Chinese plan. He told Xinhua news agency in aaa interview that Beijing is well aware of the root causes and global geopolitical significance of this conflict. And the ideas and proposals recorded in the document testify to the “sincere desire of our Chinese friends to help stabilise the situation,” Putin said.

The mutual trust and confidence is such that the current Russian offensive in Kharkov began on May 10 just six days before Putin’s trip to China. Beijing knows it is a defining moment in the war — Moscow is only 3-4 minutes away in a missile strike if NATO gains access to the city.

Notably, the joint statement issued after Putin’s visit affirms that for “a sustainable settlement of the Ukrainian crisis, it is necessary to eliminate its root causes.” Going beyond the vexed issue of NATO expansion, the 7000-word document for the first time attacked the demolition of monuments to the Red Army in Ukraine and across Europe and the rehabilitation of fascism.   

Beijing senses that Russia has gained the upper hand in the war. Indeed, if the NATO were to suffer defeat in Ukraine, it would have profound consequences for the transatlantic system and the US’ inclination to risk yet another confrontation in the Asia-Pacific. (Interestingly, Taiwan’s outgoing foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said in an interview with Associated Press that Putin’s visit to China testified to Russia and China “helping each other expand their territorial reach”.) 

China is mindful of the fault lines in the Euro-Atlantic alliance and is purposively developing close relationship with parts of continental Europe. This was the leitmotif of Xi’s recent tour of France, Serbia and Hungary, as evident from the nervous reaction in Washington and London. 

Unlike Russia, China carries no baggage in its relations with Europe. And European priorities do not lie in getting entangled in a US-China confrontation, either. European elites are not considering any new policy yet but this is likely to change after the elections to the European Parliament (June 6-8) as they are pushed to find a compromise with Russia stemming out of the rising economic costs associated with defence spending, deepening concern about the prospect of a direct conflict with Russia amidst the growing realisation that Russia cannot be defeated, and an awakening of public opinion that European spending on Ukraine in effect is financing the US military-industrial complex.

China expects all this to have a salutary effect on international security in a near term. The bottom line is that China has high stakes in a harmonious relationship with Europe, which is a crucial economic partner, second only to ASEAN. As a Russian pundit wrote last week, “China sincerely believes that economics play a central role in world politics. Despite its ancient roots, Chinese foreign policy culture is also a product of Marxist thinking, in which the economic base is vital in relation to the political superstructure.”

Simply put, Beijing is counting that the deepening of its economic ties with the EU is the surest way to encourage the leading European powers to rein in the US’ adventurist, unilateral interventionist strategies in world politics.

Time is on Russia and China’s side. The gravitas in their alliance is already infectious, as far-flung countries in the global south flock to them. A strong Russian presence along west Africa’s Atlantic coast is now only a matter of time. The intensifying foreign policy coordination between Moscow and Beijing means that they are moving in tandem while also pursuing independent foreign policies and allowing space for them to leverage specific interests.

Xi stated in his media statement that China and Russia are committed to strategic coordination as an underpinning of relations, and steer global governance in the right direction. On this part, Putin highlighted that the two big powers have maintained close coordination on the international stage and are jointly committed to promoting the establishment of a more democratic multipolar world order.

About Me (M. K. BHADRAKUMAR)

I was a career diplomat by profession. For someone growing up in the 1960s in a remote town at the southern tip of India, diplomacy was an improbable profession. My passion was for the world of literature, writing and politics – roughly in that order. [...]

Roughly half of the 3 decades of my diplomatic career was devoted to assignments on the territories of the former Soviet Union and to Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Other overseas postings included South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, and Turkey. I write mainly on Indian foreign policy and the affairs of the Middle East, Eurasia, Central Asia, South Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

El Sáhara Español no era una colonia. Creo que era una provincia Española y tenían ciudadanía Española como cualquier peninsular.

Saludos.

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Meta AI chief says large language models will not reach human intelligence

Yann LeCun argues current AI methods are flawed as he pushes for ‘world modelling’ vision for superintelligence

Meta’s artificial intelligence chief said the large language models that power generative AI products such as ChatGPT would never achieve the ability to reason and plan like humans, as he focused instead on a radical alternative approach to create “superintelligence” in machines.

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, said LLMs had “very limited understanding of logic . . . do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot plan . . . hierarchically”.

In an interview with the Financial Times, he argued against relying on advancing LLMs in the quest to make human-level intelligence, as these models can only answer prompts accurately if they have been fed the right training data and are, therefore, “intrinsically unsafe”.

Instead, he is working to develop an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, although he said this vision could take 10 years to achieve.

Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into developing its own LLMs as generative AI has exploded, aiming to catch up with rival tech groups, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google.

LeCun runs a team of about 500 staff at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (Fair) lab. They are working towards creating AI that can develop common sense and learn how the world works in similar ways to humans, in an approach known as “world modelling”.

The Meta AI chief’s experimental vision is a potentially risky and costly gamble for the social media group at a time when investors are itching to see quick returns on AI investments.

Last month, Meta lost nearly $200bn in value when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg vowed to increase spending and turn the social media group into “the leading AI company in the world”, spooking Wall Street investors concerned about rising costs with little immediate revenue potential.

“We are at the point where we think we are on the cusp of maybe the next generation AI systems,” LeCun said.

LeCun’s comments come as Meta and its rivals push forward with ever more enhanced LLMs. Figures such as OpenAI chief Sam Altman believe they provide a vital step towards creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the point when machines have greater cognitive capabilities than humans.

OpenAI last week released its new faster GPT-4o model, and Google unveiled a new “multimodal” artificial intelligence agent that can answer real-time queries across video, audio and text called Project Astra, powered by an upgraded version of its Gemini model.

Meta also launched its new Llama 3 model last month. The company’s global affairs head Sir Nick Clegg said its latest LLM had “vastly improved capabilities like reasoning” — the ability to apply logic to queries. For example, the system would surmise that a person suffering from a headache, sore throat and runny nose had a cold, but could also recognise that allergies might be causing the symptoms.

However, LeCun said this evolution of LLMs was superficial and limited, with the models learning only when human engineers intervene to train it on that information, rather than AI coming to a conclusion organically like people.

“It certainly appears to most people as reasoning — but mostly it’s exploiting accumulated knowledge from lots of training data,” LeCun said, but added: “[LLMs] are very useful despite their limitations.”

Google DeepMind has also spent several years pursuing alternative methods to building AGI, including methods such as reinforcement learning, where AI agents learn from their surroundings in a game-like virtual environment.

At an event in London on Tuesday, DeepMind’s chief Sir Demis Hassabis said what was missing from language models was “they didn’t understand the spatial context you’re in . . . so that limits their usefulness in the end”.

Meta set up its Fair lab in 2013 to pioneer AI research, hiring leading academics in the space.

However, in early 2023, Meta created a new GenAI team, headed by chief product officer Chris Cox. It poached many AI researchers and engineers from Fair, and led the work on Llama 3 and integrated it into products, such as its new AI assistants and image-generation tools.

The creation of the GenAI team came as some insiders argued that an academic culture within the Fair lab was partly to blame for Meta’s late arrival to the generative AI boom. Zuckerberg has pushed for more commercial applications of AI under pressure from investors.

However, LeCun has remained one of Zuckerberg’s core advisers, according to people close to the company, due to his record and reputation as one of the founding fathers of AI, winning a Turing Award for his work on neural networks.

“We’ve refocused Fair towards the longer-term goal of human-level AI, essentially because GenAI now is focused on the stuff that we have a clear path towards,” LeCun said.

“[Achieving AGI] not a product design problem, it’s not even a technology development problem, it’s very much a scientific problem,” he added.

LeCun first published a paper on his world modelling vision in 2022 and Meta has since released two research models based on the approach.

Today, he said Fair was testing different ideas to achieve human-level intelligence because “there’s a lot of uncertainty and exploration in this, [so] we can’t tell which one will succeed or end up being picked up”.

Among these, LeCun’s team is feeding systems with hours of video and deliberately leaving out frames, then getting the AI to predict what will happen next. This is to mimic how children learn from passively observing the world around them.

He also said Fair was exploring building “a universal text encoding system” that would allow a system to process abstract representations of knowledge in text, which can then be applied to video and audio.

Some experts are doubtful of whether LeCun’s vision is viable.

Aron Culotta, associate professor of computer science at Tulane University, said common sense had long been “a thorn in the side of AI”, and that it was challenging to teach models causality, leaving them “susceptible to these unexpected failures”.

One former Meta AI employee described the world modelling push as “vague fluff”, adding: “It feels like a lot of flag planting.”

Another current employee said Fair had yet to prove itself as a true rival to research groups such as DeepMind.

In the longer term, LeCun believes the technology will power AI agents that users can interact with through wearable technology, including augmented reality or “smart” glasses, and electromyography (EMG) “bracelets”.

“[For AI agents] to be really useful, they need to have something akin to human-level intelligence,” he said.