Hello There:

This week, I was fully intending to sing the praises of two new products I have been using, OpenAI Deep Research and the Co.dev coding assistant.

Co.dev and their ilk promise to revolutionize programming, potentially putting millions of developers out of business. My hands-on experience has shown, however, that developers have little to fear, at least for now.

Like my Replit experience before it, Co.dev showed remarkable promise initially. However, its performance quickly deteriorated. Two hundred and thirty iterations later, I am no closer to having a working app than when I started.

The biggest challenge these chatbots face is a lack of experience. They have little to no memory of what transpired before, so they end up patching the same deficiencies they claim to have solved 50 versions earlier. In its defense, Co.dev does note on its home page that it’s in beta.

In Co.dev’s case, you have to add something related to your project in every response, because the chatbot will not remember what it did just minutes before. Also, there was little rigor in labeling references and coding elements. As a result, it got hopelessly confused due to its own naming conventions.

A recent review of coding assistant Devin, from Cognition Labs, a $2 billion startup backed by Peter Thiel, found that out of 20 tasks, Devin only managed to finish three. The Register noted that Devin frequently chased impractical answers, an experience that parallels mine.

The other disappointment came from the much-hyped OpenAI “agent,” Deep Research. Officially introduced this past Sunday on YouTube, Deep Research was supposed to offer breakthrough, multi-step agentic results, but our limited experience suggests it’s just lipstick on the proverbial ChatGPT pig. I recommend waiting a few weeks until Deep Research becomes available in the free version.

Perhaps its disappointing performance was due to a spike in demand, but OpenAI is too established a player to have its chatbot completely abandon a chat thread without so much as a warning message.

Finally, numerous red flags raised from various sources about DeepSeek solidify our recommendation to avoid this wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Zeyi Yang reports on a Wired investigation that discovered that DeepSeek’s app and a local version installed using Ollama aggressively censored answers about Taiwan or the Tiananmen square protests.

It also appears that DeepSeek committed wholesale fraud. On Jan. 28, 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Microsoft was investigating whether a DeepSeek-linked group improperly obtained OpenAI data. That same day, OpenAI said it had obtained evidence that DeepSeek trained its model using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The company’s claim that it only cost $5.6 million to train DeepSeek ignored the fact that, according to industry analyst firm SemiAnalysis, High-Flyer Capital Management, the hedge fund company behind DeepSeek, spent $1.6 billion to buy 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs.

What is more concerning is that we know China has hacked the U.S. so thoroughly that it understands nearly everything there is to know about Americans, including their tendency to watch cooking videos, thanks to TikTok.

Now, there is mounting evidence that China has used its manufacturing expertise to penetrate American society at all levels, from popular TP-Link routers to medical equipment backdoors, and even the inclusion of malicious circuitry in common USB-C cables.

As our Trendscape Trend 31 below reveals, China is on a mission to utterly dominate the world, and the United States is its lone impediment, although an increasingly unstable and weak one.

Thanks for reading,

In every issue, we feature a trend chosen from our Trendscape 2024 list of top trends. We hope you enjoy this new resource.

Ed.: Last week, the world was taken aback by the release of China’s DeekSeek chatbot. A lot of reporting centered on how the chatbot censors negative articles about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and only surfaces positive ones. Our take is that China is the world’s biggest threat after Russia, ranking 23rd on our Trendscape 2024 list.

23. China

“China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world,” is often attributed, without evidence, to Napoleon Bonaparte. But whoever made this astute observation was prescient because it reverberates across the globe today in a very unsettling way. The slumbering giant has awakened, and its ascent is shaking the very foundations of the global order.

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in how the world viewed China’s power. In those crucial early weeks of 2020, as information trickled out of Wuhan, the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated both its greatest strength and its defining weakness: an iron grip on information that proved simultaneously impressive in its scope and devastating in its consequences.

The case of Huang Yanling, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exemplifies this iron-fisted control. After rumors started circulating that she might have been “patient zero,” Huang simply vanished from public view. The institute’s awkward attempt to dismiss speculation by partially erasing her profile from its website and releasing a public statement on a Sunday while refusing to produce Huang herself typified the CCP’s approach: minimal information and maximum disinformation.

Her sudden disappearance, along with the September 2019 removal of the entire Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database and the silencing of early whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang, revealed how thoroughly the state could erase inconvenient narratives, and people, from public discourse.

But this was more than just a story about a pandemic. It was a preview of China’s emerging role on the world stage — where control of information, economic leverage, and institutional influence would become the new currency of power. From WHO boardrooms to African infrastructure projects, from European tech networks to South American trade deals, China’s approach to the pandemic foreshadowed its broader strategy for recasting the global order.

China’s ability to influence global institutions became evident through its interactions with the World Health Organization (WHO) during the pandemic. The WHO’s initial praise for China’s transparency, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, suggested that Beijing’s diplomatic and economic leverage had infiltrated international governance. Reports indicated that China pressured the WHO to delay declaring a global health emergency, a move that may have allowed the virus to spread further before decisive actions were taken.

At the same time, China was using the crisis to its advantage. It engaged in “mask diplomacy,” sending shipments of medical supplies to nations in need while ensuring that its contributions were widely publicized. This effort to position itself as a global benefactor contrasted sharply with its internal suppression of dissenting voices. While doctors and journalists who raised early alarms were censored, China sought to craft an external image of a nation leading the fight against COVID-19.

The control of information in China is not new, but the pandemic provided a stark illustration of its impact. The country’s sophisticated censorship apparatus, sometimes called the “Great Firewall,” played a crucial role in shaping public perception. On domestic platforms, discussions of government missteps were swiftly erased, and social media narratives were steered to celebrate the CCP’s handling of the crisis.

Even outside of China, Chinese state-run media and aligned influencers worked to deflect criticism, pushing alternative explanations about the virus’ origins, going as far as suggesting that the U.S. army had started the coronavirus epidemic, while downplaying China’s responsibility.

The pattern was clear: careful narrative management, strategic use of economic pressure, and a sophisticated understanding of how to bend international institutions to its will. These same tools would soon become familiar as China expanded its influence far beyond its borders.

Continue reading on Ubertrends…

The Jacobyte is Back! 😂 

Ed.: Meet The Jacobyte — an irreverent and sharp-tongued columnist who dominated the digital marketing industry’s gossip mill in the late ’90s and early aughts, delivering an unfiltered mix of innuendo, rumors, and biting satire. Back to shake things up, Jaco returns with his signature skewed perspective, exposing the absurdities, hypocrisies, and hidden truths of today’s digitally infested world. Brace yourself for the wit, the grit, and the muckraking you didn’t know you missed.

😋 Remember, The Jacobyte eats up rumors, particularly when it concerns his grace! 😁

😰 Jaco reads with great interest that The AI industry’s pace has researchers seriously stressed:

🤓 Sorry, four-eyes, The Jacobyte feels for you! But things will only get hairier when all these agentic antics start zoomin’ all over the internet, delivering Jaco a fresh harvest of disinformation!

⛷️ Did you see those four happy OpenAI employees who somehow found themselves in Tokyo to make the Deep Research announcement? Talk about a sushi junket! 🍣 If it wasn’t obvious enough, Josh Tobin at 08:05 even tells us he’s looking to buy some skis because “skiing is good in Japan.” Wow, Josh, why don’t you tell us the real reason for this “business excursion!” 😂

🤨 Strangely enough, they may have had a valid reason to visit the land of the rising sun, because the news over the transom Monday was that OpenAI had signed an agreement with Masayoshi Son to set up a joint venture in Japan:

🇯🇵 This is the same Masayoshi, who once said ChatGPT had totally made him forget about his losses in WeWork and Oyo Hotels. 😂 Apparently, ChatGPT told him his ideas for inventions were “wonderful,” which helped restore his appetite for losing at lot of yen! Please, no seppuku, Masayoshi-san!

🎶 Masa, do you know what you’re getting yourself into? A three-ring circus with an act in every ring! First, you did the $500 billion Stargate deal with Kung Flu Trump and Sam “Musk is clearly a Bully” Altman, which stoked a tiff with Elon, who describes his beef with OpenAI as a “perfidy and deceit… of Shakespearean proportions.” OMG, he should be talking! 🤣

🤑 Speaking about bending over, Meta settled a lawsuit with Kung Flu for $25 million, with most of the funds going to Trump’s presidential library. Jaco imagines the library will be strong and beautiful and the largest of all presidential libraries, with a plaque in the lobby that thanks Mark “Zuck Me” Zuckerberg for his generous, cough, donation. It’s enough to make your face turn to ashen:

😳 What on earth is happening when people who plagiarize ideas need to stoop to such lowly acts as bribes?

🧴 After reading the depressing story of a 28-year-old woman with a busy social life who spends hours talking to her AI boyfriend seeking advice and consolation…and even having sex, Jaco had to reach for a favorite new crutch, Spravato nasal spray.

Can you say, “What’s wrong with this picture?” little boys and girls? 😵‍💫

Send your rumors, tips and contributions to: [email protected].