China’s Secret to Controlling the Sky ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ Wealth Redefined

We've got a lot to cover this week, so let's jump in!

Thing 1 - China is controlling the weather - at an incredible scale!
Thing 2 - AI of the week
Thing 3 - The Path to True Wealth: Beyond Money, Toward Freedom

Thing 1 - China is controlling the weather - at an incredible scale!

Their weather modification program is far more advanced than most people realize, and by 2025, they aim to cover 50% of their landmass, and you know 50% of something huge, is huge!

Using cloud seeding technology - which involves injecting silver iodide into clouds - they’ve managed to increase rainfall by 27% in key regions, like in the Northeast.

This extra rain yields millions of additional tons of grain, helping feed tens of millions of people!

So, how do they pull this off?

• Injecting silver iodide into clouds
• Deploying ground-based burners on mountain peaks

This helps them to

• Reduce desertification
• Refill reservoirs, lakes, and wetlands
• Fight wildfires

One surprising application was during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where weather modification improved air quality by clearing pollution.

So what?

While this technology covers almost half of China’s landmass, they aim to minimize any impact on neighboring regions.

There’s ongoing debate about potential ripple effects, but China’s program shows weather manipulation might not need to be a zero-sum game - rain in one place might not mean less elsewhere. This breakthrough deserves more global attention.

(source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

Important development on the side of AI agents. Putting the foundation for 2025 to be the year of scaling AI agents.

What are AI agents, Z?

Think having a virtual robot that lives online. You tell it what to do and it goes out and does it for you.

Here are notable AI things I came across this week:

• ElevenLabs released Voice Design - Describe the age, accent, tone or character and create a new voice in seconds
• CloneRobotics introduced Torso. It has two arms that can move, including working elbows. The neck can turn and bend like a human's. The shoulders are designed to move just like real human shoulders, with all the complex joints we have.

Stuff from nightmares or future Westworld? You decide lol

• Anthropic added a new built-in feature for Claude that enables Claude to write and run JavaScript code. Claude can now process data, conduct analysis, and produce real-time insights. You just need to enable it.
• StabilityAI introduced Stable Diffusion 3.5 - excels in generating high-quality, diverse images with exceptional prompt adherence.
• Microsoft announced new autonomous agent capabilities across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 - automate tasks such as lead prioritization, supplier coordination, financial reconciliation, and customer service
• Anthropic built an API that allows Claude to interact with your computer - agentic - and Replit build a template to let you use that API without coding
• Bee Agent Framework is an open-source framework for building, deploying, and serving powerful agentic workflows at scale from IBM devs
• Anthropic also released a few new models including their new top model, which beats their previous top model, which was the top model for coding across the board.

• Perplexity introduced Reasoning Model, see their example
• Genmo introduced Mochi1 - a research preview of the world's best open video generation model (Apache 2 license)

And many more but this is getting lengthy already 😛

Thing 3 - The Path to True Wealth: Beyond Money, Toward Freedom

The goal isn't money, it's to compound your knowledge, relationships, talents, mental clarity, toughness, it's to get closer to the most confident version of yourself as you get older. You will then sense what true wealth is about: freedom, peace of mind, love beyond yourself.

- Orange Book

I've been thinking about my next thing when I came across this and it resonated.

Cheers, Zvonimir