8.22.2025 - Edubot Naija, Conscious AI, Loopholes, the next OS, Inflation 2.0
Financially empowered customers are better for long term ROI than customers who have had their financial futures stolen through predatory policies.
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Top lessons & insights of the week in 30 seconds
- 🌍 Change Leadership in Action — Bold innovators are unlocking education by tackling systemic language gaps head-on.
- 🧠 Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) — Mustafa Suleyman warns of AI that “triggers human empathy circuits,” raising ethical and mental health risks for society.
- 🤖 Robots on a Joystick — FieldAI’s backpack kit transforms existing machines into remotely operated workers for dirty, dull, and dangerous tasks.
- 💸 Signals in the AI Market — Meta freezes hiring, investors eye a possible AI data center bubble, and micro-agents like Tinyfish quietly gather data power.
- 📉 Inflation 2.0 — Powell’s final Jackson Hole address comes amid softening jobs, surging bankruptcies, and political pressure for rate cuts despite inflation stuck above 2%.
- 🏛️ America’s Next Operating System — Peter Leyden: populists tear down, progressives build up; AI, clean energy, and biotech will underpin the fourth U.S. reinvention.
- 🏦 Banking’s Tug of War — Banks lobby Congress to block stablecoin yields, fearing deposit flight—but this collides with U.S. Treasury’s need for stablecoin reserves to fund debt.
- ⚡ Leadership Imperative — From classrooms in Nigeria to Wall Street, the lesson is clear: change leaders don’t just adapt—they architect the next system while others cling to the old. Don’t wait for perfect conditions—create new systems that serve citizens, not custodians.
Edubot Naija
Great example of change leadership in action
Using AI to unlock education opportunities in low-resource languages
The Edubot Naija initiative is helping to close education gaps in Nigeria by making learning materials available in local languages that have not traditionally been the focus of targeted education efforts.
In Nigeria as well as other areas of the world, a significant portion of the population may speak a dominant language like English, but their best fluency and learning happens in their own local language. Unfortunately, education materials and teachers are not available in these local languages. In fact most EdTech platforms are English-only.
Context on Dominant languages vs Low resources languages:
- Dominant languages (like English, Mandarin, French, German) have high numbers of speakers, are used commonly in business and education and have highly available education resources and opportunities for literacy, backed by deep academic research and infrastructure (libraries, universities, software, digital resources, online courses etc).
- Low resource languages do not have these same kinds of support. The community of speakers may be limited to a few thousand to a few million. The individuals in this community may have limited opportunities to learn other languages or move to other locations with greater education and economic opportunities. A relatively small number of individuals are fluent in this language as well as dominant languages, of these an even smaller number may have knowledge of technology or other modern domains of expertise.
So thankfully, innovative change leaders - including some in the S3T community - have taken action to launch African language initiatives such as Edubot Naija, as well as others like SERENGETI and AfroLID, and YorubaGPT. All are building AI tools and data sets to address the challenges of "low-resource" languages.
The following links below provide deeper dive into how these solutions work.
Further Reading and Learning:
YorubaGPT - a ChatGPT style agent that can respond to prompts written in the Yoruba language and provide outputs in Yoruba as well. Try it out here: https://yorubagpt.com/
SERENGETI - A massively multilingual language model for African languages. Its details are available in a research paper and on platforms that host AI models.
- Research paper: https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.97/
- Model page: https://dataloop.ai/library/model/ubc-nlp_serengeti/
AfroLID - A neural language identification toolkit that supports hundreds of African languages. It is often cited alongside the SERENGETI project.
- Project documentation: https://afrolid.readthedocs.io/
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/afrolid
- Research paper: https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.128/
👉 Further below we'll learn about Peter Leyden's leadership concept of serving "citizens not custodians." Edubot Naija and its peer projects are all great examples of harnessing technology to create systems that enrich the citizens of a region, vs just enriching those who own and operate those systems.
[emerging tech]
Seemingly Conscious AI
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and one of the minds behind Microsoft's Copilot, raises concerns about Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) and its impacts to human mental stability. SCAI might "trigger human empathy circuits" and endear itself in highly compelling ways to vulnerable individuals. Thought provoking reading for anyone developing or investing in AI technology.
Related: WhenAIseemsConcious.org is a guide created by researchers to help people understand and be aware of the human tendency to humanize other things including AI. Highly recommended awareness for mental health professionals and AI ethics and governance practitioners.
Remote control kit for Robots
FieldAI creates backpack that can be added to existing robots to make them controllable via a joystick. A remote worker can "drive" the robot remotely to perform tasks in "dirty, dull or dangerous" environments.
Signals - is AI overheating?
- Meta is freezing its AI hiring amid concerns about overspending, and threats to shareholder returns.
- This interactive FT deep dive on AI Data centers suggests we may be seeing the early formation of a bubble in the AI data center space.
- Data gathering AI Agents like Tinyfish are gaining interest. This is an example of highly useful services that don't necessarily need gargantuan nuclear powered data centers to thrive.
[macroeconomics]
Full Access Members: See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.
Where do we go from here?
This Friday in Jackson Hole Wyoming, Jerome Powell delivers what is expected to be his last address on the economy.
Wall Street will watch the speech for hints of rate cuts for good reasons:
- Employment is softening in spite of a reduced immigration work force,
- Corporate bankruptcies hit their highest monthly totals since the pandemic.
- Political pressure for rate cuts is rising, but so is inflation, which still remains above the target of 2%.
So is this the beginning of Inflation 2.0?
Inflation 1.0 always held that an acceptable rate of inflation was 2%. Inflation 2.0 would represent a revision - an acquiescence to a new definition of "low inflation" at 3-4%.
Or will it just be quietly normalized over time? Will this be explicitly announced, with a clear rationale?
Such an acknowledgment (that inflation is winning) might lend credence to the thinking of investors like Ray Dalio who propose higher allocations in non-inflationary assets:
Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
As noted in previous S3T perspectives, the standard definition and tracking of inflation has been fuzzy: See Flawed inflation tracking and how to correct it. I think we should be asking our elected representatives that our federal government take an updated approach to how we track and measure inflation.
Reuters has a great history of Powell's past Jackson Hole speeches with charts showing Inflation, Unemployment and Interest Rates at the time of the speech and the 12 months after.
We're facing an era shaped by AI and a job economy impacted by high percentage of retirees, along with Government debt and global restructuring. What comes next?
America's next operating system
In his essay "America's fourth reinvention" Peter Leyden sees a brighter future via an interesting comparison of populists vs progressives and how their interaction creates new economic growth cycles:
Populists tear down old systems that aren't working for them while Progressives build new systems.
Leyden supports this view with a brief history of the phases of economic growth in the US. Highlights from the essay:
- "The Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression were all moments when Americans tore down an exhausted model and replaced it with one fit for a new age. We are there again today."
- "A wave of general‑purpose technologies sparked each of America’s three past reinventions, and each lit a political firestorm before settling into decades‑long booms."
Leyden sees MAGA as a demolition crew but points out "The problem is, they are not builders." Fortunately, Leyden says "technologists and systems thinkers are sketching the outlines of the next American operating system, built around artificial intelligence, clean energy and biotechnology."
My take: This essay indulges in a bit of "Silicon Valley saves the world" sentiment, but the overall thesis is solid. Leyden's points that resonated with me the most:
- 20th century systems (banking, healthcare, regulatory, economic, trade) devolved to serve "their custodians, not their citizens"
- The apathy of center-left and center-right politicians drove frustrated voters to extremes (ie Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump)
- We need to intentionally build the next "operating system" and it needs to be intentionally designed to serve citizens not custodians.
Leyden says transformative technologies like AI, bioengineering and clean energy aren't in themselves inherently progressive: "The challenge is to bend these forces toward humane ends." Look past the destruction and consternation on the East Coast - the next era of reinvention is being built.
Tug of war over the Genius Act "loophole"
If banks want to prevent loss of deposits, they need to pay higher yields
Banks are lobbying Congress to “close a loophole” in the Genius Act, saying they fear a decline in deposits. Example press release from the Bank Policy Institute
The flight of deposits to stablecoins started long before the Genius act. Why? Charging double digit interest rates on loans to customers then paying the same customers less than 1 percent yields on their deposits, actually does not inspire customer loyalty. It makes customers feel victimized, and drives them to seek alternatives.
Instead of asking lawmakers for shelter from the free market, banks should see this as an opportunity to deliver higher value. Compete. (Welcome to capitalism!) Compared to emerging competitors like Circle and Coinbase, banks have a perfectly fair opportunity be leaders in financial innovation:
- Understand what customers need in the 21st century
- Apply this to their mission and update their core competencies
- Recognize: financially empowered customers are better for long term ROI than customers who have had their financial futures stolen through predatory lending policies.
Banks have to evolve like the rest of us and they don’t get to be exempt from capitalism. Leading banks actually have embraced this mindset. Recommended action: Call the US Capitol switchboard (202) 224-3121 and ask to speak to your representative, and share your thoughts.
The win win - possibly...
Personally I'm not sure that the powers in Washington will allow the stablecoin market to be constrained by concerns from banks. Just to connect some dots:
- The US government needs to finance its huge and growing debt by selling Treasuries.
- Traditional buyers of Treasuries are having 2nd thoughts about wisdom of continuing to buy them, amid concerns about US debt levels.
- Treasury secretary Scott Bessent hopes the crypto industry will fill the gap and become a new major buyer of Treasuries (Stablecoin issuers and exchanges offering stablecoins are required to hold US denominated reserves equal to the stablecoins in their purview).
- How do these crypto exchanges attract people to hold stablecoins? By paying them yields. As mentioned above, these yields are significantly higher than what one can typically get from their traditional banks.
- If banks were to convince Congress to ban yields from stablecoins, then the government loses a major source of debt financing.
SO it will be interesting to see how this tug of war goes.
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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