Author: lethuphuong

📌 The strategy relying on AI and high-tech helps China build a long-term foundation but lacks sufficient power to pull the economy in the short term. The real estate slump, job losses due to automation, and increasing reliance on exports make the 5% growth target difficult to achieve, as new sectors would need to expand 7-fold in the next 5 years to meet this level. Automation and robotization could eliminate up to 100 million jobs over a decade, while urban unemployment exceeds 5% and youth unemployment is roughly three times higher.

📌 Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, admits the company is hiring many employees without bachelor’s degrees because they “tinker and solve problems from very strange angles.” This trend is not unique to Google but has spread to Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. This reflects a strong shift towards skills-based hiring in the AI era. As technology changes the nature of entry-level work, a degree is no longer the sole reliable metric. This opens up huge opportunities for self-taught Gen Z while placing pressure on universities to redefine their value in the new labor market.

📌 Microsoft’s report indicates that generative AI is spreading rapidly but unevenly. The global generative AI adoption rate in the second half of 2025 reached 16.3%, an increase of 1.2 percentage points compared to the first half; equivalent to about 1/6th of the world’s population having used AI for learning, work, and problem-solving. Vietnam recorded positive progress: the AI usage rate increased from 21.2% to 23.5%, higher than the global average and surpassing many developing economies, but a significant gap remains compared to leading ASEAN nations.

📌 After 2 years, Malaysia’s Ministry of Digital has transcended a symbolic role to become the true architect of the national AI future. With fortified foundations in governance, law, and trust, along with its leadership role in ASEAN and the clear AI Nation 2030 goal, Malaysia is shifting from “digital transformation” to “smart nation building.” The focus is not just on technology, but on ethics, governance, and sustainable competitiveness in the AI era.

📌 UAE AI Minister Omar Sultan Al Olama argues that the 40–60 age group holds a unique advantage in the AI era thanks to experiencing both the pre-Internet world and the digital age. He warns that hyper-specialisation makes humans easily surpassed by AI, whereas “broad intelligence” – based on experience, interdisciplinary understanding, and practicality – is a sustainable capability. With AI becoming increasingly powerful, synthetic thinking may be more important than narrow expertise.

📌 Nearly 95% of students in Seoul, South Korea, have been exposed to generative AI, mainly for learning purposes, especially in language subjects. Meanwhile, over 90% of teachers are concerned about student dependency, plagiarism, and declining critical thinking. The paradox lies in the fact that less than half of teachers provide guidance on AI usage, even though the majority of them have applied AI to assessment, grading, and classroom management, revealing a significant gap in formal AI education.

📌 New research from Stanford and Yale shows that large language models are not merely “learning” but storing and reproducing book content verbatim. This finding shakes the theoretical foundation of the generative AI industry. Instead of “learning” like humans, models operate by compressing and retrieving data, leading to a risk of copyright infringement on a massive scale. If courts deem AI models to be illegal copies, the industry could face billions of dollars in fines and be forced to restructure the entire way AI is developed in the future.

📌 AI has established a strong presence in life, but the benefits are tilting toward those who dare to experiment early and persist. With usage rates reaching 62% in the US and the ability to create new value from everyday users, AI is driving unprecedented productivity growth. However, “capability overhang” (AI’s latent potential not yet fully exploited) also means that opportunities and risks are unevenly distributed, causing some sectors to break through quickly while others lag behind.

📌 AI Tower Residences @ i-City in Selangor, Malaysia, is introduced as the world’s first residential project designed from the outset for living with AI and robots. AI Tower demonstrates how housing can evolve alongside AI and robots, where technology becomes a living foundation rather than an add-on utility. With 500 units, a robot rental model, AI-native design, and a 20–30 year operational goal, the project bets on a future where humans and machines collaborate daily. Notably, this ambition is realized without pushing home prices to “sci-fi” levels.

📌 The strategy to expand west-to-east power transmission shows that China is preparing large-scale energy infrastructure to serve a new wave of growth led by AI and high-tech manufacturing. With targets of over 420 GW in transmission, 900 GW in renewable energy, and tens of millions of charging stations, Beijing is pursuing both energy security and a green transition. This reflects the deepening dependence of technological ambitions on a stable and modern power foundation.