Hi Global Recap readers,

I hope you are having a wonderful week.

Meanwhile, a new Prigozhin video has surfaced, ballistic missiles were fired, and beautif… I mean Chinese “AI employees” are lowering already-high youth unemployment numbers.

I think we lost.

With all the jokes aside, find out more below.

📈 Top News

📼 New Prigozhin video surfaces. In this previously unseen video, posted by a Wagner-linked Telegram channel, Yevgeny Prigozhin claims to be enjoying his day in Africa in the second half of August 2023.

He also addresses rumors about his “liquidation,” which has reignited rumors about him possibly faking his own death.

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🇬🇦 The Bongo dynasty is over in Gabon, or is it? As army officers seize power and arrest the president, the head of the Republican Guard has been elected as the new leader.

But get this: The new leader is President Bongo’s cousin.

The people celebrate in the streets, while France and other allies condemn the coup.

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🤖 AI bots go public in China. China’s tech giants have unleashed their own AI chatbots into the wild. Baidu and SenseTime have announced the public launch of their ERNIE Bot and SenseChat platforms, respectively, which can perform various tasks we are all familiar with in our usage of ChatGPT.

The companies claim their bots have an edge over GPT-4 in understanding Chinese queries and generating diverse responses.

Is this the start of a new AI race?

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✋ But don’t worry. Biden banned sales of Nvidia’s advanced compute GPUs to Middle East. These high-end GPUs are crucial for training generative AI models.

But why Middle East? To stop China from getting its hands on them of course.

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🚨 Haiti is a no-go zone for U.S. citizens. The U.S. State Department has issued a warning for Americans to leave Haiti ASAP due to the worsening security situation.

Gang violence, kidnappings, and political instability has been expanding in the country since the assassination of President Moïse in 2021.

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🚀 North Korea fires missiles to show off its power. It is not happy with the U.S. and South Korea’s military exercises. It launched two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea to warn and scare them.

Click for more

✍️ In-Depth

U.S.
Chinese Bots Exposed by Meta

❌ Busted. Meta just exposed and shut down thousands of fake accounts linked to China.

It says these accounts were part of a network of accounts that:

• Spread pro-China propaganda,

• Attacked critics of Beijing.

The operation, dubbed “Spamouflage”, targeted audiences in Taiwan, the U.S., Australia, the UK, Japan, and other countries.

📃 Claims. The company says it has found evidence that some of the accounts were run by individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement. The network purchased accounts from spam operators in other countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh and repurposed them overnight to post political messages.

🕵️ Spamouflage? It is called that because the spammers were pretending to be real accounts, hiding among the crowd to steer the conversation in their desired direction. On X, people call these types of accounts “bots” for their robotically predictable comments.

🛜 Platforms. Meta says the network spanned more than 50 platforms and forums online, including X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, Quora, Medium, and others. Some of the techniques they used were similar to those of Russia’s “troll factories”, suggesting they may have learned from each other.

😮‍💨 But don’t worry. Meta says the network was “large and noisy” but it mostly reached out only to its fake followers. The content they posted did not receive much engagement or attention from real users.

Do you know why?

The network spent only $3,500 on ads on Facebook.

I guess capitalism won.