AI Watch, Monday 12 October 2026Markets start doubting how AI is funded

Le Monde documents the inner workings of "Géopolitique profonde", one of the major sites of the French conspiracy sphere: writers based in Madagascar copy articles found online, then hand them to an artificial intelligence tasked with giving them a tone that is "rather pro-right, pro-Trump, pro-Putin, anti-EU". The chain combines plagiarism, low-cost outsourcing and automated rewriting, an assembly that industrialises propaganda for a few euros.

At the Assises de la cybersécurité, held from 7 to 9 October in Monaco, the chief information security officers in attendance say they have finally opened up about leaks. Their current worry: AI speeds up and equips attacks such as data exfiltration, and moves the risk dial well ahead of the distant scenarios.

The new Copilot app will carry all the functions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users will be able to create and edit their documents directly from the assistant, without opening the classic software. One more step towards an office suite where text, spreadsheet and presentation all run through the model.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, says she is alarmed by AI's effect on the labour market and on tax revenue, and is pressing public officials to rethink education and act now to help society adapt. The warning lands during the IMF meeting in Bangkok, where inflation, AI and climate open the discussions. The phrase "slow-moving tsunami" says the essential: the wave is slow, so it is underestimated, but it is coming.

According to the Wall Street Journal, cited by Bloomberg, Amazon is discussing the acquisition of AI startup Decart, in a deal that could reach $7 billion. The information remains at the negotiation stage, with no confirmation from the parties, but the sum places Decart among the most expensive targets of the year for a cloud giant.

After the presidential announcement of renaming artificial intelligence as "super intelligence", several influential tech figures are picking up the term, while the general public keeps saying "AI". The episode even triggered a rush on .si domain names. A shift in vocabulary that says a lot about part of the sector falling into line with Washington.

The Taiwanese foundry, which makes the chips for NVIDIA and Apple, is expected to announce a record third-quarter profit on Thursday, driven by demand for AI chips. Investors are also waiting for details on a possible expansion of its capacity in Texas.

Zhou Yuxiang, head of Black Lake, a Chinese supplier of cloud AI tools for industry, describes a leap over the usual steps: "Just as China skipped the bank card to go straight to mobile payment, many factories are skipping classic digitisation to go straight to AI agents." These agents, programs that carry out tasks end to end without intervention at each step, are settling into production, then exporting to global supply chains. The account warrants caution, since it comes from a seller of the technology, but it points to a real trajectory: China is industrialising the agent rather than testing it.

Researchers at ByteDance, with co-authors from Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley, published work in late September that points to a possible flaw in the memory-saving technique at the heart of DeepSeek's models. This compression, which cuts the memory used during inference (the cost of running a model once it is trained), could degrade the accuracy of answers. The stakes go beyond one lab: it is precisely this frugal approach that let China's DeepSeek close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic at lower cost. Criticism remains rare for a method that has become a reference.