States of disarray: the UN at 80

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1:05The Economist

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:26So much of the buzz around artificial intelligence has been based on computationally intensive, large language models. Our correspondent looks at a shrinking trend. Much of the AI future might instead be based on nimbler, small language models. And London's famed black cabs have had a tough few years in the age of ride-hailing services and ubiquitous sat-nav technology. Yet quite a few people still want the gig. We meet the brave souls doing the grueling test known as the knowledge.

2:04First up, though.

2:12Today, world leaders are gathering for the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. But before that full meeting of the 193 Country Club, several member states had an announcement to make. I declare that France recognizes the State of Palestine today.

2:36Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that France would formally recognize the state of Palestine. And he wasn't alone. Belgium is giving out a strong political and diplomatic signal to the world. Luxembourg formally recognizes the state of Palestine. The Republic of Malta is proud to confirm our official recognition of Palestinian statehood. This is a big rhetorical step for these countries, even if a tactically questionable one in the push for a two-state solution. It's also a reminder of what the UN is supposed to be about, countries presenting a united front and making their voices heard on the biggest diplomatic stage there is.

3:19Delegates might have hoped for this to be a time to celebrate the club's strength, to shore up the camaraderie of nations. But it's complicated. The United Nations, which is celebrating its 80th birthday, has gone through many crises, but this one feels like the worst. Anton LaGuardia is our diplomatic editor. And that is mainly because America, which created and upheld the system, may be about to destroy it, whether out of neglect or out of hostility. And the two main concerns are that it is starving the UN and of the humanitarian enterprise in general of funds. And also it is increasingly questioning the core values of the UN, namely the sanctity of borders.

4:06Now, Anton, before we dig into what you've just said there, what's been making news is Emmanuel Macron and France recognizing the Palestinian state following in the footsteps of other countries in the past few days. Talk me through that. The UN is, if nothing else, still a platform for this kind of thing. What do you make of those announcements? Well, for the United Nations, the question of Palestine is the great, outstanding, unresolved colonial question. And for America and Israel, the UN's obsession with Israel is a sign of rampant anti-Semitism within the organization. But the fact that key members of the UN are moving to recognize a Palestinian state, led by France, but Britain, Australia, Canada, and several other countries have done so in recent days, is a symbolic boost to the cause of Palestine at a time when things look especially desperate.

5:00Nobody expects this will make a huge difference to Israel, which will carry on regardless, because it feels it still has the backing of the United States. And within Israeli politics, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu depends on support from the far right, which is intent on pushing out some or all Palestinians from Gaza and annexing that territory. And coming back to the ills of the UN that you laid out at the start there, on the matter of funding, America is indeed visibly vocally cutting its funding, but it is just one of 193 states. It is also the biggest contributor to the UN, both in terms of the core UN budget and also, until recently, of the voluntary contributions which are directed mainly at humanitarian efforts.

5:50So it has been a big loss and the UN and its many branches are busy cutting budgets, some of them by up to a third, to try and cope with the cash squeeze. The problem is that nobody really knows where the United States wants to go. It hasn't issued its review of its policy towards multilateral institutions. And then all of that is a separate expression from the gradual destruction of the core belief in the inviolability of the borders that were set up after the Second World War, partly because Russia has invaded Ukraine, but partly also because Donald Trump quite loosely talks of annexing Greenland and absorbing Canada as its 51st state.

6:35So it does raise many questions about the future of the UN, which is impossible to predict at this date, but there are several scenarios. Go on. What are the scenarios? We have classified the scenarios in three broad buckets. One is a more independent, even rogue UN. The second is a decaying UN. And the third is a Trumpified MAGA-ish UN. And let me start with the rogue version, which is that there is increasing separation of ways. The US under the Trump administration is already half out of the door. It's left various bodies of UN, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and so on. And it's also absented itself from discussions on key proposals for new conventions and regulations, for example, on responding to future pandemics.

7:24and it is possible that there is a crisis that blows up the whole relationship, which is very extremely tense. One of them is that at some point, U.S. contributions or arrears to contributions will be so large that it will trigger the possibility of denying America its vote in the General Assembly. That could cause a sort of humiliation and a bust-up that leads ultimately to some kind of American abandonment. And the other is the continuing row over Palestine. and you can see that also snowballing. Before we look at the other potential routes here, I'm interested to know what you think the UN looks like without America, if the UN leaves America behind or vice versa.

8:05It's difficult to tell because it will depend on the attitude of the United States towards the UN if that happens. I think the likelier thing is that there's a growing parting of ways. And the big fear for the people who believe that America should remain involved in the UN is that it's creating a vacuum that will let Russia, and especially China, increasingly dominate global diplomacy, set rules on things such as artificial intelligence or the role of the big IT firms, and that that world becomes more hostile and unfriendly to the United States. And so let's talk about the other two routes that you mentioned, the way things could go from here.

8:44One of decay, you said, or one of Trumpification, MAGAfication. Well, the decay route is actually the more likely one because probably the United States won't pull out entirely from the UN. It will retain some kind of presence, but neglected, and there will be a lot less money around. So a shrunken UN that does less of everything, but nothing changes very fundamentally. The structures, all the 140-odd bodies and agencies continue to survive because it's so hard to abolish and rationalize the system because of both vested interests bureaucratically and generally the interests of different countries, which may not align.

9:22And the third thing is some kind of magification of the UN. And there are things that the US might find useful in the UN. For example, its work on refugees, it might decide that actually this helps people stay away from America's borders and so is worth supporting. And Donald Trump, of course, is a great dealmaker as he sees himself and may want to strike some big showy deals at the UN to show that he is indeed a leader. I suppose at its 80th birthday, you paint a not very rosy picture, yet at a time of such change, you hint there about the possibility of reform. Is there a chance that it comes through this dark period for the better, that the reforms come simply because people realize they need to?

10:05There is some precedent for Donald Trump obsessing things so much that good things happen. At NATO, he seemed ready to walk out of the alliance. Now he is claiming credit for getting the allies to spend more on defense. So it is possible that if he can achieve enough, he will claim a great victory. What that something might be is a problem. I don't think the sorts of things that UN-type people are thinking about, simplifying the sustainable development goals or amalgamating agencies, will be enough for Donald Trump to say he's had a great achievement. Perhaps something like reforming the Security Council would be an achievement because that resets global power.

10:48But the turkeys don't vote for Christmas. So can he get other veto-wielding members to agree to this? Who knows? But he is trying to improve relations with Russia, and he seems to be having, at the moment, a somewhat less antagonistic geopolitical relationship with China. So it is possible that there are deals. There may be smaller deals to do. For example, the U.S. and Russia seem to be more or less on the same page on Syria at the moment, having been on different sides of the war. And there are lots of unsung heroes of the system that make the world work. The International Civil Aviation Authority keeps aviation safe.

11:23International Atomic Energy Agency keeps civil nuclear power safe. So it may well be that simply at a technical level, things go on and continue to function because they must. But there's also a warning in that, which is that the League of Nations, now defunct, also did lots of good technical work and it ultimately failed. So just because an organization does useful work doesn't mean it will necessarily survive unless its members want it to survive. Anton, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason.

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13:22When ChatGPT came out in 2022, it seemed about as revolutionary as the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Chat GPT, the new language model developed by OpenAI with the ability to generate human-like text and hold natural conversations. But more recent advances in artificial intelligence have started to look like your average software upgrade rather than genuine breakthroughs. Henry Trix is our U.S. technology editor. The recent release of GPT-5, OpenAI's latest family of large language models, or LLMs, generated less excitement even than Apple's new iPhone 17. LLMs are no longer living up to the hype that they used to generate in the early days after ChatGPT.

14:13And one reason for that is that SLMs, that is, small language models, are beginning to steal a march. So let's start with definitions here. What is it that makes a small language model small? Large language models are supposed to be this all-purpose, all-knowing model that is trained on a vast corpora of data using massive amounts of compute, whereas the small language models, you'll be surprised to hear, are smaller and more nimble alternatives. You can look at it in terms of the number of parameters. That is the kind of thinking cogs in a model's brain that are used in the running of the models.

15:02So an LLM has hundreds of billions of parameters, whereas a small model may be trained on 40 billion parameters or fewer, down to tiny ones, which may be even less than a billion parameters. And you say that these SLMs are stealing a march. Under what conditions? When do you want one? When do you prefer one to a large language model? Sometimes these large language models' godlike intelligence is a bit superfluous. For example, I spoke to one executive who said to me, an HR chatbot doesn't need to know advanced physics. They are used by corporations partly because they can be trained on the company's own data.

15:50A lot of these small models are open source, so they're easier to manipulate. And unlike large language models, which tend to run on the cloud, they are much easier for companies to run on their own IT systems, which makes them potentially more secure and more manageable. That actually means also that SLMs are well suited to things like smartphones, self-driving cars, robots, that sort of thing, where you need less latency, more speed, more energy efficiency. And there is a possibility that when it comes to the building of AI agents, which will be very important within corporations, small language models will possibly work better in enabling these agents to work alongside humans.

16:38So basically, SLMs are good for fast, cheap, nimble, but specific purposes. And you don't lose anything by using a smaller one for those specific purposes. They are smaller, they are weaker in some ways, but there have been improvements recently in the way that SLMs are trained that makes their capabilities really good enough for many corporations. And the reason for those improvements, it basically is that they're increasingly being taught by large language models themselves, rather than learning from their own perusal of vast corpora of data. They're then fine-tuned for specific tasks. And in some cases, even relatively tiny models have the capacity of much larger equivalents.

17:31So the catch-up is happening. And people say that the capabilities of last year's large language models are now easily achievable by small language models a year later. I mean, the way you describe it, it's hard to imagine an application, a need where all of the firepower, the godlike intelligence, I think you said, of an LLM is really strictly necessary? Isn't the world of the future then built up just of SLMs or stacked up Lego-like SLMs? I had a conversation with an NVIDIA executive about whether SLMs are the future of agentic AI. And she was quite clear that that is not NVIDIA's strategy. And that actually, for the time being, NVIDIA thinks that it will take models of all shapes and sizes to handle our workflows.

18:21And you can sort of see this in the latest model from OpenAI in GPT-5, which for all the disappointment that it generated, it is an interesting kind of mix of different types of models for different types of tasks. So the industry itself is moving in a more bifurcated kind of direction. So in thinking about all of the attention and all the money that has been spent on LLMs so far, that's not to your mind misplaced. There just needs to be, will be some room, lots of room for SLMs in due course. Well, it's true that LLMs will still be necessary in order to train the SLMs. But I think it is worth thinking about whether there is a bit of a monomaniacal obsession with LLMs.

19:14I mean, the vast sums of money that have been poured into data centres, etc., have been predicated on the idea that LLMs are going to get ever more intelligent, reaching artificial general intelligence or super intelligence for that all-knowing kind of model. And if businesses find that sort of intelligence a bit superfluous and want something that is more discreet and more manageable, then it may suggest that the companies that are making those massive data center investments, etc., may need to rethink their strategy a bit because running SLMs is going to be a lot cheaper in the future than running LLMs.

20:04Henry, thanks very much for joining us. Great talking to you, Jason.

20:10In the latest episode of The Weekend Intelligence, our subscriber-only edition that comes out every Saturday, we took a wider view of AI. Not how people in businesses are actually crunching the numbers, but what AI is doing to the people and the business of education. A look at how students are taking shortcuts with it and how professors are chasing the cheating raises a big and urgent question for the whole enterprise. What exactly is higher education for? Check out The Weekend Intelligence just a short scroll back in the feed.

20:51The Okay guys, are we ready? Yeah. Welcome back, it's Tuesday, special session. The students of the Knowledge Point Taxi School are settling into their wooden chairs. Andrew Rummer writes about Britain for The Economist. They're studying for their black cab license, and tonight they're working on guild halls in the City of London. Guys, today, city livery halls. Examiners can refer to city livery halls as worshipful companies. A lucky few students get selected to come to the front of the room. Over their shoulder, a projector shows a map of London. But just that of frame is a conundrum. Their instructor, Gert Kretov, quizzes them on how to get from point A to point B.

21:38Leave on the left, the vision square. Left, culture, forward, what can't, lane, right. Brook Lane? What road? It's Stoney. Stone Lane, sorry. It's kind of rock, yeah. Stone Lane. There were about a dozen people in the room and a few more joining over Zoom. This is all to pass the knowledge of London, a 160-year-old test that involves memorising more than 6 ,000 streets and points of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, which is a point at the centre of London. So it's all about repetition, repeating things you've seen, you've done, and that's what helps you stay on top of it. Mr Django from Merchant Taylor's Hall, take us to Cleopatra's Needle, please.

22:23Leave on left turn needle set. As the students call their route, left Loseberry. Gert is playing the role of the examiner. He's listening for a couple of things. Is this the most direct route in terms of distance and where are they dropping people off on the side of the street? I think we shouldn't go there. It's a car park. Imagine if you're taking an official, somebody wearing full cloak, maybe a lady wearing an evening dress, and you stop at Chavsbury Place. For me, it's a back entrance. And did they break any laws together? Black Abbey's obeyed all the posted laws. Right upper time street for Black Friday's underpass for Victoria Street.

23:04Lovely, lovely. Two illegal manoeuvres. Where? Where? You tell me. You're the taxi driver. Completing the knowledge can take three to four years. Marlon Aljanabi is originally from Iraq, but has lived in London for 18 years. He says he can never really count on GPS and wants to rely on himself. You see, knowledge is not only to know the road. It's a way of life. It's education. You see, education is a lovely thing. Education makes your life better because you know how to deal with stuff. Okay, guys, next question. Guys, Montague College, where is that? So who's taking the knowledge these days?

23:43There's actually been an increase over the past few years. There's more than 1 ,100 students currently sitting for the knowledge. That's up from just over 750 in 2022. Unlike the existing drivers who are generally male, white and pushing 60, there's a much more ethnically mixed cohort of drivers coming through. The Knowledge Point School, a lot of the people from Afghanistan, East Africa, Iraq, all sorts of places all over the world. Students at the Knowledge Point School complain that apps like Uber can pay as little as£1 a mile, and a typical black cab fare might be five or six times that amount.

24:19I would be more independent, you know? Syed used to drive an Uber, but for the past nine months, he's been studying for the knowledge full-time. It's really tough. I actually graduate biomedical science. I study many things, and this is in other level. So data from Transport for London shows that since 2017, the number of black cab drivers has fallen from about 25 ,000 to barely 16 ,500. Plenty retired during COVID and never came back. I think it's fair to say that taxi drivers have had a tough few years. Who was doing Terringes Avenue? One five. In addition to the ride-hailing apps disrupting the market, there's a new challenge that's coming in the rearview mirrors.

25:03from next spring, the government is going to allow pilots of totally driverless autonomous taxis on the streets of England without any human oversight. This is going to bring the country into line with China and some American states, including California and Texas. I got to have a ride in one of the 15 or so autonomous Ford Mustangs run by Wave. This is a British tech company that last year raised about a billion dollars from Japan's SoftBank and others. I got a ride from their King's Cross heads quarters going around the street. There was a human safety driver there just in case, but he didn't have to do anything as far as I could tell.

25:43And I was really quite impressed with how it all worked. There were indecisive pedestrians kind of coming up to zebra crossings and looking like they might want to cross and then turning their back and walking your way. It's a situation I think most humans are juggling that judgment and this autonomous vehicle handled all of that with aplomb. All of that impressive technology, the people at the Knowledge Point School are very sceptical that these autonomous vehicles will ever work, particularly in central London. I just can't see how it'll cope with it. Clive Richardson is an electrician by day and studying for his cab licence at night.