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Pakistan Joins China in World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO)
On July 16 in Shanghai, 29 countries, including China, Pakistan and Russia, signed the founding agreement of WAICO, World AI Cooperation Organization. Every BRICS founding member is in, except India. This agreement follows the launch of the US-led Pax Silica, a 24-member coalition, including India, which is designed to counter China's AI efforts. The stated goal of both these competing groups is to provide global governance, including building guardrails and setting standards, for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
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| US-China AI Competition |
The announcement of WAICO coincided with the launch of Kimi K3 by Chinese startup Moonshot AI. Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight AI model ever built, its full weights free for the world to download from July 27. Cheaper open-source AI models like Kimi K3 pose a serious threat to U.S. proprietary models. By offering 80-90% of the capability at a fraction of the cost or for free, they are squeezing the premium pricing strategies of domestic leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.
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| Top Global AI Talent. Marco Polo AI Talent Tracker |
Companies, including US-based firms, are rapidly adopting AI cost-saving measures. For example, Airbnb relies on Alibaba’s Qwen model, startups like Lindy have transitioned from Anthropic to DeepSeek, and DoorDash has employed Moonshot AI for specific workflows. Overall, Chinese open-source options now account for over 40% of Hugging Face AI community and 80% of open-source developer usage globally.
Open-source AI models—which are roughly 8 to 10 times cheaper to run than proprietary ones—are rapidly closing the reasoning and contextual intelligence gap with frontier models like Anthropic's Claude. However, open source models shift the responsibility of infrastructure maintenance and security to the user.
The people of Chinese PRC origin account for 47% of the top 20% AI talent in the world based on undergraduate degree, according to a survey. Americans make up 18%, Europeans 12% and Indians 5% of the global AI researchers. In terms of the countries they serve, 57% of them work in the United States, 12% in China, 8% in the UK, 4% each in France and Germany and 3% in Canada as of 2022. While the US still has the lion's share of the top talent, its share has declined from 65% in 2019 to 57% in 2022. Marco Polo talent tracker lists Pakistan among a dozen countries for top AI talent in Asia.
More than half (15 out 25) of the institutions (companies and universities) where the top AI researchers work are located in the United States, while 6 are in China. The remaining four are in the UK, Switzerland, Singapore and Canada, according to Marco Polo Global AI Talent Tracker.
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Riaz Haq's Youtube Channel
Riaz Haq
HealthRanger
@HealthRanger
DeepSeek is so affordable, it almost doesn't even show up on the chart.
I'm using it daily. It's astonishingly good. And it's a fraction of the price of U.S. frontier models.
Plus, it's a lot less censored and has far fewer guardrails, making it more usable. It answers questions instead of lecturing you all day.
https://x.com/HealthRanger/status/2084523575331975450?s=20
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Hedgie
@HedgieMarkets
🦔DeepSeek released its V4 Flash coding model on Friday at $0.28 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 charges $25 for the same output. That's a 99% discount, and V4 Flash debuted ahead of Opus 4.8 on http://Arena.ai's front-end coding leaderboard. OpenAI followed with an 80% cut to GPT-5.6 Luna just three weeks after launch. Google shipped three efficiency-focused Gemini Flash models. xAI dropped Grok 4.5 at Luna's old price. Meta went closed-source with Muse Spark 1.1 priced aggressively for developers. Only Anthropic held premium pricing.
My Take
Hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion in 2026 on the infrastructure to run models like these, and the models themselves are already commoditized. Prices collapse faster than any commodity cycle I can think of. Oil, memory chips, and solar panels never dropped 99% in six months during any of their busts. The capex is priced like it builds a moat while the output is priced like it builds a graveyard. That combination doesn't work in any industry cycle I've watched.
Anthropic is holding out on price for now, but I don't think they can hold that line forever if DeepSeek and the flash models keep closing the capability gap. Everyone else torches cash on subsidized inference and hopes volume shows up before the bill does. Altman told Invest Like the Best that OpenAI's plan is enough usage to make thin margins work. That's the airline industry pitch, and airlines have gone bankrupt on that pitch for fifty years. If Qualcomm is right that intelligent routers become standard, where software picks the cheapest good-enough model for each task, then no lab commands pricing power and $700 billion of capex has to earn its return from a market that pays like electricity. I don't see how the numbers work.
https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2084412496795119795?s=20
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Alvin Foo
@alvinfoo
DeepSeek’s bar on that Bloomberg chart is so flat it looks like a rounding error.
Chinese labs are shipping frontier-level models at prices that make GPT-5.6 and Claude look like luxury goods. This isn’t just competition, it’s a full-on price war that’s turning the API market into a death zone for anyone still charging Western rates.
https://x.com/alvinfoo/status/2084546219330904322?s=20
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Andrew Curran
@AndrewCurran_
At first I thought Bloomberg forgot to add DeepSeek's pricing to the chart.
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2084509003384827970?s=20
Aug 4
Riaz Haq
Pakistan Building A Digital And Green Future - OpEd - Eurasia Review
https://www.eurasiareview.com/10082026-pakistan-building-a-digital-...
By Dr. Hamza Khan
Pakistan’s youth bulge and three concurrent transitions—digital export growth, decentralised solar power, and data-driven agriculture—create an opportunity to link these sectors into a single, higher-productivity development model.
ICT exports and freelancing are already generating multi-billion-dollar inflows and a trade surplus, while rapid solar expansion (now supplying a majority of low-carbon power) can cut costs for firms and farms if storage, grids and pricing keep pace.
Agri-tech focused on water efficiency, satellite intelligence and inclusive digital platforms can raise farm incomes and resilience, but success depends on institutions that turn parallel gains into a connected system rather than isolated privileges.
Pakistan’s development debate is often trapped between crisis management and distant promises. A better reading of the country in 2026 is that three transitions are already underway: services are becoming digitally exportable, electricity is becoming decentralised and low-carbon, and agriculture is acquiring a data layer. The 2023 national census confirms an overwhelmingly young society, with roughly three-fifths of citizens below 25. That youth bulge can become either an employment burden or the workforce of a new production model.
The opportunity is not to celebrate IT, solar power and agri-tech separately, but to connect them. Digital exports can ease Pakistan’s foreign-exchange constraint; distributed energy can reduce costs for firms and farms; and data-driven agriculture can raise productivity while conserving water. According to the Pakistan Economic Survey’s technology chapter, Pakistan had 207.22 million telecom subscriptions and 160.9 million broadband connections by March 2026. The latest technology-export figures show receipts reaching approximately US$4.18 billion during July-May, FY2025-26, about 20 percent higher year on year, with US$373 million earned in May.
Digital Exports: Moving Beyond Low-Cost Labour
Technology is no longer peripheral. The Economic Survey records 34,420 registered IT and IT-enabled-services companies by March 2026. ICT exports produced a US$2.91 billion trade surplus during July-March, 86 percent of sectoral receipts, while verified technology-related freelancer inflows reached US$856.3 million in nine months and exceeded US$1 billion by May. This transaction-based figure is more defensible than broader US$1.6 billion estimates that may include additional categories.
Pakistan must now move freelancers and software houses from one-off assignments towards recurring contracts in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud services, gaming, fintech and business-process engineering. DigiSkills has delivered more than 5.51 million trainings, but scale must be matched by recognised certification, communication skills, intellectual-property protection and dependable connectivity. The Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025provides a framework for digital public infrastructure and data governance. Its value will depend on whether firms can securely verify identities, receive payments, obtain credit and access public services efficiently.
on Monday
Riaz Haq
Pakistan Building A Digital And Green Future - OpEd - Eurasia Review
https://www.eurasiareview.com/10082026-pakistan-building-a-digital-...
By Dr. Hamza Khan
Solar Power as Industrial Policy
Pakistan’s solar expansion is among the world’s most striking bottom-up energy transitions. A REN21 assessment estimated that net-metered rooftop capacity reached 5.3 GW by April 2025, nearly ten times its level two years earlier. Ember’s latest country dataindicate that low-carbon sources supplied 55 percent of Pakistan’s electricity in 2025. The recommended scenario in the IGCEP 2025-35 projects renewables, including hydropower, producing 69 percent of electricity by 2034-35, with solar and wind supplying 10 percent each.
Solarisation should be treated as industrial policy, not simply climate policy. Affordable daytime electricity can power software campuses, cold chains, food processing, electric mobility and small manufacturing. The danger is a two-tier system in which affluent consumers leave the grid while poorer households inherit fixed capacity costs. Pakistan needs storage, stronger distribution networks, time-of-use pricing and incentives for productive daytime demand. The transition will last only if it lowers economy-wide costs rather than shifting them between consumers. Pakistan’s own generation plan warns that after 2027, thermal plants alone may be unable to manage the ramping pressures created by rising solar integration, strengthening the case for battery storage and grid modernisation.
Agri-Tech: The Critical Convergence Test
The FY2025-26 agriculture survey reports that agriculture contributed 23.44 percent of GDP and grew by 2.89 percent. Yet surface-water availability was 92 million acre-feet, 11.1 percent below average system usage. Agri-tech must therefore focus on resource productivity, not fashionable hardware. Satellite crop intelligence, moisture sensors, weather forecasting, precision fertiliser use, digital marketplaces and solar-powered cold storage can reduce waste and improve margins. Solar irrigation, however, must be paired with groundwater monitoring or cheaper pumping could accelerate aquifer depletion.
The National Agri Stack roadmap offers an architecture based on verified farmer identities, integrated land data, satellite intelligence, digital payments, credit, crop insurance and market links. Three to four pilots were prioritised for the first 12-18 months. Inclusion will be decisive: tenant farmers, women, sharecroppers and farmers without clear land titles must not disappear from a system built around formal records. Success should mean higher incomes, lower post-harvest losses, improved water efficiency and faster finance, not merely more registered users.
From Parallel Successes to One Production System
Pakistan can create a circular development model: digitally skilled workers generate export income; renewable power lowers production costs; and digital platforms help agriculture use energy, water, finance and logistics more efficiently. This convergence can narrow the urban-rural divide because software, payments, advisory services and distributed electricity can reach places where large industrial investment may not. It also offers Pakistan a new export identity, one based not only on goods produced domestically, but on knowledge, digitally enabled services and climate-smart agricultural value chains.
The country is not guaranteed a digital and green future; it must build the institutions that make one possible. That requires stable internet, competitive energy markets, interoperable public data, cybersecurity, technical education, patient capital and transparent regulation. Pakistan’s most promising transformation is not any single sector, but a connected system in which code earns foreign exchange, clean power reduces vulnerability and intelligence applied to farms strengthens food security. The future will be secured when digital capability and green infrastructure become instruments of mass productivity rather than islands of privilege.
on Monday