“I thought I did something wrong to upset people in France, but it turns out the French are impolite shitbags. No AC, terrible economy, horrible quality of living. I’d be pissed too.” So tweeted the bone-smashing, looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular. The social media star, who grew to fame through a series of drastic steps to change his appearance, is visiting France but failing miserably at what his brand is built on: successfully approaching and picking up girls merely based on his looks and fame.

It turns out that in Paris, unlike in South Florida, few care about Clav’s pick-up artistry. The women that he has approached on the streets have broadly rejected his appeals. In one instance, Clavicular approaches two girls sitting by the side of a road. “You look very beautiful. What are you guys up to later tonight?” When one of the girls replies that they’re going to a restaurant, Clav responds, “A restaurant? You don’t want to spice it up a little bit and hit the club or something?” The other girl curtly responds: “Not tonight.” The whole embarrassing endeavour shows a stark disconnect in America and Europe’s attitudes towards fame and dating, exposing the former’s vapidity in all its sordid glory.

Though Miami may be an extreme case, given its materialistic culture and status as America’s OnlyFans capital, the US as a whole is becoming more parasocial — and, arguably, porn-addled. Last year, the US had the most traffic on Pornhub, while the country also accounted for just shy of half of OnlyFans traffic. According to the Washington Examiner’s 2023 investigation, 2% of American women aged 18 to 45 are on the platform, and 67% of the platform’s revenue goes to Americans. The bottom line is: women making money being naked online is very, very big stateside.

That’s the thing, though. Clav seems, fundamentally, to respond to incentives. And if in Paris, the incentives mean that he must be able to hold a normal conversation with a normal adult female human being, then so be it. That’s the best possible outcome, at least. “Trying to conversationmax so I can be well rounded,” he tweeted, introspectively.

Ultimately, Clav’s latest virality is not important because of how much he hates France and how little Parisian girls are (rightly) paying attention to him, but because it’s a reminder to us Americans of what a normal country looks like. In a normal country, and France, like any nation, of course, has its flaws, people aren’t obsessing over someone who hits themselves in the head with a hammer. In a normal country, the sexes can interact properly and converse about something other than sex. Clav, in other words, got mogged by the French. And that is a beautiful thing.

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Nikos Mohammadi is a student at Columbia University.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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