Holy smoke! An American pope

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month.

Now you don't even need to wrap it.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing.

You a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day.

Yeah.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.

The Economist. Hello 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. The race for dominance in artificial intelligence is not only about who's making the best AI chips, but also who can get their hands on them. America is finding out that controlling that is harder than it is for lots of other sensitive tech. And for many people, an opera house is where the art is expressed. For Martin Graham, the venue itself could be a work of art. Our obituary's editor reflects on his path from music minded bricklayer to founder of the Longborough Festival Opera. But first, Never is a modest chimney such a focus of attention as when the world awaits a new Pope. Yesterday, the world got one. White smoke puffed out above the Sistine Chapel and crowds of thousands at the Vatican cheered. Secretive conclave had come to a conclusion in the fourth ballot on their second day of sequestration and an hour later the new Pope's name was revealed.

Abemus papam. Eminentissimum Acreberendissimum Dominum Dominum Robertum Franciscum Sancte.

Romane ecclesia Cardinal et ma prevost.

Robert Prevost, an American and naturalized Peruvian, then appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica.

Atute le persone o bun quecu ecano a tutti popoli.

So who is he? And what will his appointment mean for the Church and its faithful?

Robert Prevost is now, of course, Pope Leo XIV and the first American Pope in history.

John hooper is the Economist's Italy and Vatican correspondent.

69 years old. He was born in Chicago, but he's very like Jason Palmer, actually. He is an American who speaks a number of languages and who has spent much of his life outside America. He was appointed a cardinal in 2023. So very recently he worked for many years in Latin America, in Peru as a missionary, as parish priest, a teacher and a bishop. He then was the head of his order, the Augustinian order. And he was then hooked by Francis to Rome to occupy one of the most important posts in the Vatican, which is heading the department that vets bishops.

And the questions when last we spoke were largely about whether or not the next pope would be a continuation of Pope Francis's legacy, ideology, way of doing things. What's your take on that question now?

I think that he is both a continu of Francis's legacy and a break with the most recent past. The latter was quite obvious in the symbolism of his appearance on the balcony of St. Peter. He was dressed more traditionally in the robes of a pope, whereas Francis had appeared dressed entirely and simply in white. And I think that that brings out a difference between the two men that Pope Leo will try to bridge the g in the Catholic Church that separates traditionalists from progressives in a way that other candidates who'd been spoken about would not have done. They would have plowed ahead with a perhaps even more radical progressive agenda. Having said that, he is also in many ways similar to Francis. He's apparently got a very good sense of humor. He is someone who will stand up for the rights of the marginalized and particularly immigrants. And his name reflects that. He's adopted the name of the pope who reigned at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, Pope Leo XIII, who was known for his attempt to get to grips with the modern world and the father of Roman Catholic social doctrine. And he was the author of a hugely important encyclical, Rerum Novarum of New Things.

What you've described there is someone who is extremely apposite, a choice, one of unity, someone who's already important in the Church, has held important roles, has written important te. Why was he such a surprise, seemingly to so many people, as a choice?

Largely because he's an American and there had been an assumption in and around the Vatican for decades that they would never have an American pope because it would superimpose the geopolitical power of the United States on the spiritual power and authority of the Vatican. But the cardinals decided otherwise and that this particular American was sufficiently cosmopolitan and global in his outlook and perhaps also wanting to send a message to the current administration in the United States of disapproval of some of the policies that it is adopting, such as on immigration. He has directly criticized J.D. vance, the Vice president, and indirectly criticized the president, Donald Trump, through a retweet. Having said that, he will see eye to eye with the administration in some areas. He is known to have taken a much less benign attitude towards gay people than his predecessor. He has criticized the homosexual lifestyle and the formation of non traditional families of gay people with adopted children. He is also a prelate who is not convinced of the argument for the admission of women to holy orders. And in that sense, and in others, he is no radical.

We've seen the appointment of lots of important people on this show and always the question of what's in the inbox on day one. What's in the papal inbox on day one?

John well, I think the first thing is where that inbox will sit. Will Pope Leo, and this would be very symbolic, go back to living in the Apostolic palace, because that would be a signal of a return to a more traditional kind of papacy. Having said that, the inbox, wherever it is, is going to be stacked pretty high with different issues for him to deal with. There is going to be quite near to the top the finances of the Vatican, which are in a parlous state. He's also going to be expected to to deal with the ongoing crisis in the Catholic Church over clerical sex abuse. And he himself has been criticized for allowing a priest who faced an allegation of child abuse to reside at a friary in Chicago. He will also be having to deal with a number of issues that are to do with the running of the church, whether to continue down the path laid out by Pope Francis towards greater decentralization. And then he will be immediately involved in the Roman Catholic Church's efforts to help broker peace in many parts of the world. I hardly need tell you that this is a time of convulsion in international relations and Pope Leo will be stepping into a crisis torn global scene. But then his church has had to deal with crisis and convulsion for much of its history.

John, thanks as ever for joining us.

My pleasure.

My colleagues over at Economist Education have again asked us to mention a course they've put together on international relations. It's six weeks online, and as a discerning listener to the intelligence, it's available to you at a discount. As with our other courses, it's written by our senior editors and correspondents here at the Economist. It's designed to give you a grasp of shifting geopolitical trends, to help navigate uncertainty, to deal with risk. The next course starts on May 14, and you can save 15% by heading to education.exterator.com intelligence and use the code intelligence. Did you get that? Don't worry, you can find those details in the show. Notes.

As a matter of economic security, as a matter of national security, America has to beat China in the AI race.

The AI race, the language that Senator Ted Cruz used this week, sounds in spirit like what Americans were saying six decades ago. The race was for space, and it was against the Soviet Union. Now the technology and the key competitor are different.

China has made AI central to its national strategy, and China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030.

This race has actually been going on for years. America has tried to maintain its lead in AI in part by being good at it, but also by imposing export controls on the sale of AI chips. In its last days, the Biden administration concocted a complicated set of rules to give friendly countries more access and less friendly ones less. And now it is no more.

In the middle of this week, the Trump administration scrapped a pretty complex system of rules that was supposed to control the export of chips to all over the world. That would have been a bureaucratic nightmare to enforce and practically would have been unworkable. So that's definitely a good thing.

Shailesh Chitnis writes about global business for the Economist.

The Trump administration should now proceed with caution, because while the temptation is there to continue these restrictions, they do come with a lot of unwanted consequences.

So let's start with the system as it was and why you reckon it wouldn't have been easy to implement before we even think about what comes Next.

So since 2022, America has been trying to bar Chinese firms from getting their hands on the most advanced AI processes that they can then use to train and run large language models. And every year they have steadily added more and more processors to the banned list. So Chinese firms cannot get access to those chips that are there. Now. Having these rules is one thing, but being actually able to enforce them and prevent China from getting their hands on them is quite another. And in that final few days of the Biden administration, they actually went further and they came up with a pretty elaborate system of licensing these chips, not just preventing it from going to China, but licensing it to to the rest of the world, which is a very complex system which thankfully I think they've pulled back on. But the challenges still remain.

But talk me through why it is so hard to implement these controls. You simply bar them from being shipped from America.

To understand that, I think it's important to understand a little bit more about Nvidia. Now, Nvidia is the world's largest semiconductor firm. It probably is the only company that has these leading edge AI processes. Other companies do make them, but the performance of Nvidia Systems is far ahead from all the other firms that are out there. Nvidia designs its ships in America. They are then shipped off to Taiwan where they are manufactured and packaged, and then they go through a pretty intricate supply chain where they get fitted into data center servers either in Taiwan or sometimes even in Mexico. And from there they are then sold to the rest of the world. Now, as you start tracking Nvidia's supply chain from Taiwan to Malaysia to Mexico, there are multiple leakages points where different entities can try to get their hands onto this. This year, Nvidia expects to sell almost 6 million of these type of chips. So to be able to actually enforce this and to make sure that they end up in only the places that they're supposed to is actually pretty hard.

When you say leakages, though, I mean, this is not just, as the Brits would say, falling off the back of a lorry. Right. How does the supply chain leak?

It leaks primarily in two ways. The first, I would say is fairly straightforward, where Chinese firms that are banned from accessing these chips essentially lease processing power through data centers in Malaysia, perhaps uae, through various means. And so what happens is a lot of Chinese firms are able to actually access these chips. The second is straightforward smuggling, which is you ship these chips ostensibly to a particular destination, when they get there, then further on supposed to be shipped to another destination, and from there they are diverted to China. And this can happen through different ways. You can have false invoicing, you can put it as part of different servers, so on and so forth. A few researchers I spoke to, they kind of estimated roughly between 10% to almost half of China's AI training capacity comes through these kind of chips. It's hard to verify, but it's also plausible this is not just about shipping bar chips to China. During the piece of my research, I also uncovered several Indian firms that were importing Nvidia chips into India. And from there on, they were then exported to Russia, which is among the countries that is barred from getting access to these chips. Now, to be clear, when I spoke to Nvidia, the company was very clear that they comply with all export control requirements. The actual supply chain and the way Nvidia sells the chips is quite complex. So in many cases, the company is a few layers removed from the actual end customer and so they are not able to actually see with complete visibility who the users are.

And is this materially different from any other kind of high value product that might be under sanctions that is kind of leaking out of supply chains, despite what various export controls or rules might say? Are AI chips different in some material way?

That's a very good question. I think it is different in a few ways. First and foremost is just the process of making these chips is completely global, which makes enforcement that much harder. The second thing is the volume. We are talking about literally millions of chips a year. And lastly, I think because this is essentially the oil that keeps all the AI progress going, the stakes are so high that not just nations, but even companies are incentivized to get their hands on these kind of chips through any way possible.

It's clear that this is a particularly thorny question for the Trump administration. If they want to stop all of those flows, all of those leaks, what should the ensuing legislation look like if the previous system wasn't going to work, wasn't working, what do you think a system that would work looks like?

I think the temptation among American policymakers is to continue to add more and more chips into the restricted list. And I think that's a mistake because it spurs China to actually spend more effort in building their homegrown domestic alternatives, which is precisely the opposite of what you want. There are certain export controls that do work, one of them being preventing China from getting access to the most advanced chip making tools. And so to be able to actually monitor that is much easier than looking at the chips that are made downstream. And so what I would argue is, rather than focusing on the chips, make it very hard for China to be able to build these advanced chips. And really, the point that we keep hearing from business leaders and tech executives all the time is let America compete on innovation, which it has done historically. Well, don't impede it with all these different rules, which just makes it that much harder. And at that point, most tech executives are fairly confident that they would actually be able to do well under that regime, rather than something which is more stopgap, uncertain and keeps changing, frankly, every six months.

Shailesh thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

Whenever his family went away on holiday, Martin Graham had to go through a particular routine. First of all, he had to say a formal goodbye to the garden, the trees and the house.

Ann Ro is the Economist's obituaries editor.

And he would make sure all his treasures were locked up. And only when all that was done would he consent to go away. When he was in his 60s and 70s, he found himself going through a similar procedure to say goodnight to his treasure. He would go in to lock up the foyer and the auditorium. He would then go in to turn out the lights. He would watch as they faded over the ranks of red plush seats, which he'd managed to get as a job lot free from Covent Garden. And he'd watch his assistance assistant threading his way through the orchestra pit, among the chairs and the music stands, putting the whole place to sleep. And when his assistant had left, he didn't immediately leave himself, but he would always make sure he'd say a gentle good night to this toy of his, as he called it. Some people in his position had got rich and had then collected Rolls Royces and Ferraris. His toy was an opera house. It stood in the village of Loughborough, typical Cotswold village of lovely golden stone houses and views across the Evenlode Valley. Very beautiful place. His opera house stood out rather. It was painted bright pink. On the roof there were three statues of Wagner, Mozart and Verdi. All this was according to his own treasured plans, but however, he spent two years fighting the Cotswold District Council to get these things put up. He managed to negotiate a change of use from a chicken shed and a cow barn, and there he would put a high temple to culture. It was a bold and brave and extraordinary idea, but he thought, and had always thought, that if you wanted something badly enough, then it could come to be. You could make it possible. And his dream that he made clear from the very start of the enterprise, was that he wanted to stage Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen in full in the middle of the Cotswolds in his opera house. He was by trade not a musician at all, or anything in that industry, but he was a builder. He had left school early and become a brickie or a builder's mate. He always believed that if you wanted something, you could take a spade, go out in a field and just dig, and you'd probably come up with what you'd wanted. And he took the same approach to his opera house in the early days, though, it was still half a hen house and when you went there you had to park in a very muddy field. The boxes were made of plywood and people sat around on straw bales or on very cheap benches to watch the opera. And the hens were very evident wandering in and out everywhere. It's only gradually over the years that the place became rather good looking and rather stylish, mostly as a result of getting those plush red seats from Covent Garden. Mr. Graham hadn't had any formal musical training and there was no musicianship in the. But he got most of his knowledge by befriending as a boy a village character called Jack, a tall old man who used to walk through the streets declaiming and singing and who had an immense record collection. And that was how Martin Graham learned about Mozart, Haydn, Schubert. So he continued trying to stage his operas, first of all, starting with smaller scale ones, then going on to put on mini rings, which was a reduction of the whole ring made by other musicians, which would have suited him fine, except that he still had this crazy dream in his head that he would do the whole huge thing. The one thing that rather worried patrons was that they wanted to keep Longborough as it was a rather quaint place where hens would wander about and where there was a certain amount of mud to negotiate. So people came in jeans and old clothes, but it was impossible to hold back the idea of making it a little glynde born. So people now quite often wear black tie and they bring their picnic hampers and picnic on the garden terraces, which now look much more elegant than they did. Some people saw it as a decline and others as an improvement to becoming one of the staple British opera houses. What didn't fade was Mr. Graham's absolute faith in his project. First of all, that whatever he wanted to do, he would do. And if it required going out and digging with a spade in a field, then that was perfectly fine, and that was what he would do. And he also felt right in his soul that it was never a matter of profit to create this opera house. What he was doing, in fact, was making a work of art. He said it was more or less a religious enterprise that had given he and his wife a whole new meaning to life. And that was the reason he had put his wonderful pink and white building among the Cotswold Hills.

Ann Ro on Martin Graham, who's died aged 83. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John, Joe Devlin. And our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our audio correspondent is Sarah Larnyuk. Our senior producer is Rory Galloway. And our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Benji Guy, Jonathan day and Henrietta McFarlane. With extra production help this week from Megan, we we'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence.

Sam.