• Experimental Design: Researchers compared human performance, AI performance, and human-AI hybrid teams in forecasting real-world events.
• Predictive Accuracy: Large AI models outperformed humans working in isolation, though human-AI hybrids displayed the highest potential for total accuracy.
• Hybrid Pitfalls: Many hybrid users relied on AI for direct answers, leading to poor outcomes characterized by confirmation bias and sycophancy.
• Collaborative Cyborgs: A small subset of users treated AI as a sparring partner to interrogate assumptions and challenge AI-generated assertions.
• Cognitive Requirements: Successful integration requires perspective-taking and intellectual humility rather than simple reliance on technological convenience.
• Information Exploration Paradox: High volumes of easily accessible information may reduce critical thinking and individual exploration, potentially leading to human skill atrophy.
• Strategic Reframe: AI should be utilized to search for what is missing in one's own logic rather than as a tool to automate routine labor.
• Developmental Necessity: Cultivating cognitive resistance to AI-generated easy answers is essential for maintaining human agency and intellectual rigor.

By

Vivienne Ming

April 24, 2026 2:00 pm ET

10

EDMON DE HARO FOR WSJ; ROBOT ARM, FIREFLY

Who’s smarter, the human or the machine? 

In the 30 years I’ve worked in artificial intelligence that’s been the question driving the conversation. 

We’ve also been sold a story about AI that goes something like this: It will handle the tedious, routine work—the research, the first draft, the number-crunching—while we focus on the interesting parts: creativity, judgment, the human touch.  

My research suggests we’ve been asking the wrong question and drawing the wrong conclusions. 

A few months ago, I recruited adults from San Francisco’s Bay Area for an experiment. I gave each group one hour to make predictions about real-world events, using scenarios drawn from the prediction market platform Polymarket. This provided us a rigorous, objective way to check results against the collective wisdom of thousands of financially motivated forecasters. In addition to AI making predictions on its own, some human teams worked alone, while others worked as human-AI hybrids. (Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal).

The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models—ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case—performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself.

But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting.

Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These “validators” had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn’t true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo. 

But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument. 

The hybrids were becoming cyborgs.

These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market’s accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it.

It’s not that these people were more intelligent than the others in the study. But they demonstrated two important qualities: perspective-taking and intellectual humility.

Perspective-taking is the ability to genuinely inhabit another point of view. Not to debate it, not to tolerate it, but to actually inhabit it. Intellectual humility is the ability to recognize the edge of your own knowledge and sit with that discomfort rather than trying to rush to fill it.  

Both of these qualities are, at root, emotional skills. Perspective-taking requires genuine curiosity about minds other than your own. Intellectual humility requires a kind of emotional courage: the willingness to feel uncertain, even a little foolish, in the presence of something or someone that seems very sure of itself. 

These are not the soft skills we typically celebrate. We celebrate confidence. We promote decisiveness. We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it.  

What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They’re the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, “What’s missing?” rather than default to “Great, that’s done.” To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it.

We don’t build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one’s mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically 

I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop.

This is the divergence I worry about. Not the dramatic science-fiction scenario of AI replacing humans wholesale, but the quieter process of people gradually outsourcing their judgment in increments too small to notice. 

Over time, this produces two different kinds of people: Those who use AI as a genuine intellectual partner—whose thinking actually gets sharper through the friction of the collaboration—and those who get better at securing quick answers and worse at knowing what questions to ask.

So what can any of us actually do about it?

Start with the reframe: The goal of working with AI isn’t to get the answer faster. It’s to find out what you’re missing. Don’t deploy AI minions to “do the boring work” for you, as so many sales pitches argue; use it as a savant collaborator to explore uncertainty. 

In practice, that means before you accept an AI’s answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself. When it hedges or qualifies, pay attention—that’s usually where the real uncertainty lives. Treat it like a brilliant colleague who has read everything and understands nothing—useful precisely because they’re different from you, not because they’ll agree with you.

For the AI industry, a key design question has gone largely unasked: Is the product building human capacity or consuming it? Nearly all AI benchmarks measure what AI agents can do alone. We desperately need benchmarks for hybrid intelligence. Errors are signals our brains use to trigger learning. An AI that eliminates friction entirely is often eliminating the learning along with it.

A hopeful finding is that perspective-taking, intellectual humility and curiosity are not fixed traits. They can be cultivated and respond to practice, the right relationships and environments that reward uncertainty. 

But they require us to decide—as individuals, as parents, as educators, as designers of tools—that this is what we’re trying to build. And in the race between human potential and human atrophy, the stakes for building it could not be higher.

Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, cognitive scientist and the author of “Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People.” 

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 25, 2026, print edition as 'Is AI Smarter Than People? It’s Complicated.'.

Up Next

[

17 Gifts for Every Type of Mom in Your Life

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/mothers-day-gift-guide-4d335d10?mod=WTRN_pos1)

[

What to give when a bouquet doesn’t feel like enough.

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/mothers-day-gift-guide-4d335d10?mod=WTRN_pos1)

Continue To Article

[

Is Masculinity in Crisis? Readers Are Divided

](https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/male-masculinity-crisis-tv-b91a1231?mod=WTRN_pos2)

[

An article about television shows grappling with the state of men today elicited a range of opinions.

](https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/male-masculinity-crisis-tv-b91a1231?mod=WTRN_pos2)

Continue To Article

[

I Snagged a $550 Business-Class Ticket to Italy. Then the Airline Found Out.

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/i-snagged-a-550-business-class-ticket-to-italy-then-the-airline-found-out-49a07167?mod=WTRN_pos4)

[

The Turkish Airlines deal was a mistake fare that the carrier can either honor or not. Mine was canceled.

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/i-snagged-a-550-business-class-ticket-to-italy-then-the-airline-found-out-49a07167?mod=WTRN_pos4)

Continue To Article

[

My Son Was Killed by Hamas. The Pain Isn’t Getting Better.

](https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/rachel-goldberg-polin-hersh-book-de1f1913?mod=WTRN_pos5)

[

In an exclusive book excerpt, Rachel Goldberg-Polin writes about mourning her son, Hersh, nearly two years after his death.

](https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/rachel-goldberg-polin-hersh-book-de1f1913?mod=WTRN_pos5)

Continue To Article

[

In Defense of Tween Screen Time

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tweens-screen-time-culture-girlhood-katherine-dee-305ff292?mod=WTRN_pos6)

[

Every generation panics about girlhood. The latest, over the negative consequences of social media for tweens, hides a bigger problem in girl world: They’ve got nothing else.

](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tweens-screen-time-culture-girlhood-katherine-dee-305ff292?mod=WTRN_pos6)

Continue To Article

[

Injectable Peptides Are the Latest TikTok Wellness Fad. Doctors Are Worried.

](https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/injectable-peptides-are-the-latest-tiktok-wellness-fad-doctors-are-worried-6a020013?mod=WTRN_pos7)

[

Regulators may soon lift restrictions on making the compounds despite scant evidence of their safety or efficacy.

](https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/injectable-peptides-are-the-latest-tiktok-wellness-fad-doctors-are-worried-6a020013?mod=WTRN_pos7)

Continue To Article

[

Intel’s stock extends its spectacular run by posting its best day in nearly four decades

](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/intels-stock-extends-its-spectacular-run-and-could-see-its-best-daily-gain-on-record-6e6ef0de?mod=WTRN_pos8)

[

There’s a debate on Wall Street about whether Intel’s financial prospects have materially changed.

](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/intels-stock-extends-its-spectacular-run-and-could-see-its-best-daily-gain-on-record-6e6ef0de?mod=WTRN_pos8)

Continue To Article

[

Gina Rodriguez’s Home in ‘Jane the Virgin’ Hits the Market in Los Angeles for $2.9 Million

](https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/gina-rodriguezs-home-in-jane-the-virgin-hits-the-market-in-los-angeles-for-2-9-million-ddd198e9?mod=WTRN_pos9)

[

The Spanish-style residence served as the family home of the titular character, Jane Villanueva, in the CW series

](https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/gina-rodriguezs-home-in-jane-the-virgin-hits-the-market-in-los-angeles-for-2-9-million-ddd198e9?mod=WTRN_pos9)

Continue To Article

Videos

• Strategic Objectives: Israel intends to secure its northern border and terminate Hezbollah’s logistical supply chains.
• Syrian Leadership Motivations: President Ahmed al-Sharaa prioritizes regime survival through centralized power, financial recovery, and international recognition.
• Regional Realignment: Syria is actively seeking to remove Iranian influence and Hezbollah operatives from its territory to realign with Western interests.
• Proactive Security Measures: Syrian security forces have intercepted weapon shipments hidden in humanitarian aid and blocked rocket attacks directed at Israel.
• Territorial Assertion: The Syrian military has occupied border positions to enforce regulatory control and dismantle Hezbollah-associated propaganda and infrastructure.
• Diplomatic Incentives: The European Union has proposed a cooperation agreement and multi-billion euro financial aid packages to support Syrian state rehabilitation.
• Geopolitical Engagement: The Syrian president has secured high-level diplomatic recognition through official visits with Saudi Arabian leadership.
• Transactional Cooperation: Syrian efforts to curb Hezbollah are driven by specific political and economic concessions provided by the international community rather than ideological affinity.

Israel’s presence in southern Lebanon has two objectives: protect northern residents from direct rocket fire and choke Hezbollah’s “logistical oxygen line.” But to fully strangle the organization, Israel needs—and has received—the help of another pair of hands: those belonging to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. In the eighteen months since his ascent to power, al-Sharaa has been guided by one instinct: survival. In the “New Syria,” that survival is defined by three pillars: centralization of power, international legitimacy and a desperate need for financial rehabilitation. These interests have converged into a singular, pragmatic mission: the expulsion of Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, from Syrian soil. In a recent visit to the Chatham House research institute in London, al-Sharaa stated that Syria “paid a heavy price for Hezbollah’s involvement” and that his duty now is to “cut the lifeline” of the organization passing through his territory. Analysis by the Institute for the Study of War points to a dramatic change in Syrian behavior. Recently, Syrian forces exposed a massive smuggling tunnel in the Homs area and intercepted a shipment of 6,000 explosives and missile components hidden inside a “humanitarian aid” truck. Videos are also circulating on Telegram showing Syrian soldiers manning roadblocks near the Lebanese border, searching Hezbollah trucks and tearing down posters of Nasrallah. In one video, a Syrian officer is heard telling a Hezbollah operative, “The days when Syria was your backyard are over; now we are the ones in charge here.” The crackdown has even escalated into direct military disruption. Between April 15 and 19, Syrian security forces thwarted several rocket attacks directed at Israel by seizing a truck containing ready-to-fire rocket launchers and arresting members of a Hezbollah-linked cell. These actions are hardly the result of al-Sharaa’s secret Zionism. Rather, by persecuting the network, he is proving to the international community and the Trump administration that Syria is no longer a forward base for Iran. The Syrians aren’t doing this for free, either. In addition to an American rehabilitation package and the removal of sanctions, President al-Sharaa received a significant political and economic boost from the European Union this week. The EU mission proposed a full renewal of the 1978 cooperation agreement with Syria—a dramatic step providing the country access to development budgets, technical assistance and trade concessions. Alongside this, the EU announced a support package of 620 million euros for 2026-27, part of a wider rehabilitation plan expected to reach 2.5 billion euros. Outside of the West, al-Sharaa received a royal welcome in the Gulf. While Israel celebrated its Independence Day on Wednesday, the Syrian president arrived for an official visit to Saudi Arabia and met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Hezbollah was a key pillar of support for Ahmed al-Sharaa’s predecessor, Bashar al-Assad, and it was ultimately Israel’s crippling of the terror group that afforded the former jihadi the sudden opportunity to race for the grand prize in Damascus. While Israel rightly remains deeply distrustful of its operation’s beneficiary, it’s nice to see the new regime pay us back for the favor. To read the rest of today's newsletter click here https://newsletter.amitsegal.net/p/its-noon-in-israel-schrodingers-ayatollah…

[

](/AmitSegal/status/2047668424902394054/photo/1)

3:26 PM · Apr 24, 2026

·

[

6,111

Views](/AmitSegal/status/2047668424902394054/analytics)

View quotes

• Security Incident: Bundestags President Julia Klöckner experienced a compromised Signal account due to an ongoing phishing campaign.
• Attribution Analysis: International intelligence services identify state-affiliated actors from Russia as the entities responsible for the cyberattacks.
• High-Level Risk: The compromise extends to sensitive CDU leadership chat groups, potentially exposing communications involving high-ranking officials including Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
• Official Oversight: The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has engaged in direct consultations with government leadership regarding the vulnerability.
• Scope Of Exposure: Documented cases include at least 300 victims, involving various members of the Bundestag and specialized security experts.
• Systemic Vulnerability: Security authorities warn that numerous parliamentary group chats are likely being monitored by unauthorized parties without detection.
• Attack Modus Operandi: Adversaries pose as fake technical support to deceive users into disclosing credentials, facilitating full account takeover and data exfiltration.
• Mitigation Efforts: Federal agencies have issued technical guidance and stern warnings to political factions to prevent further unauthorized access to sensitive internal communications.

Bundestagspräsidentin Julia Klöckner ist Opfer der aktuellen Phishing-Angriffswelle gegen Nutzer des Messengerdienstes Signal geworden. Das Signal-Konto der CDU-Politikerin wurde von den Angreifern erfolgreich kompromittiert, wie mehrere Quellen dem SPIEGEL bestätigen. Internationale Nachrichtendienste machen Russland für die seit Monaten laufende Angriffswelle verantwortlich.

Der Vorgang ist hochbrisant und löst bei deutschen Sicherheitsbehörden Alarmstimmung aus. Klöckner bekleidet nicht nur das zweithöchste Staatsamt, sie ist auch Teil des CDU-Präsidiums. Dessen Mitglieder kommunizieren offenbar ebenfalls via Signal-Gruppenchat. Ein Mitglied des Chats ist Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz.

Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen haben Mitarbeiter des Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) den Kanzler in der Sache bereits persönlich aufgesucht und ihn über den Vorgang unterrichtet. Eine Untersuchung seines Smartphones hat anders als bei Bundestagspräsidentin Klöckner offenbar keine Auffälligkeiten ergeben.

Hohe Dunkelziffer befürchtet

Auf Anfrage des SPIEGEL bei Klöckner teilte die Bundestagsverwaltung lediglich mit, dass sie zu sicherheitskritischer Infrastruktur grundsätzlich keine Auskunft gebe. Eine CDU-Sprecherin bestätigte, dass eine Chatgruppe mit Präsidiumsmitgliedern betroffen gewesen sei.

Ein Regierungssprecher bestätigte nur die bereits öffentlich gewordenen Warnungen der Behörden vor der laufenden Kampagne. Zu möglichen Betroffenen und sicherheitsrelevanten Vorgängen mache er grundsätzlich keine Angaben. Auch das BfV wollte sich nicht zu dem Sachverhalt äußern.

Neben Klöckner gehört mindestens ein CDU-Bundestagsabgeordneter zu den Phishing-Opfern, ein Experte für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik. Auch das Signal-Nutzerkonto des ehemaligen BND-Vizepräsidenten Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven wurde erfolgreich angegriffen. Laut Sicherheitskreisen sind mittlerweile mindestens 300 Betroffene in Deutschland bekannt.

Erst am Dienstag hatte das BfV die Fraktionsspitzen der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien und die Parteigeschäftsstellen erneut eindringlich vor der andauernden Kampagne gewarnt.

»Es ist davon auszugehen, dass so zahlreiche Signal-Gruppen im parlamentarischen Raum derzeit von den Angreifern nahezu unbemerkt ausgelesen werden«, hieß es in der 20-seitigen Warnung, die dem SPIEGEL vorliegt, und die Tipps für »akute Gegenmassnahmen« enthält. »Dem BfV sind bereits zahlreiche hochrangige Betroffenheiten bekannt geworden«, heißt es darin weiter. Angesichts der Art der Angriffe sei »jedoch von einer deutlich höheren Dunkelziffer auszugehen«.

Mehr zum Thema

• Phishing-Kampagne gegen Signal-Nutzer: Verfassungsschutz warnt Politiker und Parteien vor laufender Ausspäh-Aktion Von Marcel Rosenbach

  [

  ](https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/phishing-kampagne-gegen-signal-nutzer-verfassungsschutz-warnt-politiker-und-parteien-vor-laufender-ausspaeh-aktion-a-b0c2981c-7489-48b3-8b19-2356d9d253f0 "Verfassungsschutz warnt Politiker und Parteien vor laufender Ausspäh-Aktion")

• »Begehrtes Ziel«: Klöckner warnt vor häufigeren Cyberattacken auf den Bundestag

  [

  ](https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/bundestag-kloeckner-warnt-vor-weiteren-cyberattacken-a-db5045cf-b1e9-4e7b-940b-aa354419987f "Klöckner warnt vor häufigeren Cyberattacken auf den Bundestag")

• Phishingversuche bei Signal-Messenger: Hackerangriffe auf Journalisten und Politiker – niederländische Geheimdienste beschuldigen Russland

  [

  ](https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/signal-hackerangriffe-niederlaendische-geheimdienste-beschuldigen-russland-a-374baf90-7750-4f9f-bae9-71078e133860 "Hackerangriffe auf Journalisten und Politiker – niederländische Geheimdienste beschuldigen Russland")

Bereits im Februar hatten das BfV und das Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) erstmals vor der Bedrohung gewarnt  , bei der sich ein angeblicher »Signal Support« bei Nutzern der Messenger-App meldet und sie zur Eingabe von Daten auffordert. Das BSI hat auf seiner Website bereits einen ausführlichen Handlungsleitfaden für potenziell Betroffene  veröffentlicht. 

Bei einer verbreiteten Vorgehensweise der Angreifer meldet sich ein vermeintlicher »Signal-Support« und fordert sie zur Eingabe ihrer Daten auf. Wenn Betroffene darauf eingehen, können die Angreifer deren Nutzerkonten übernehmen – mit gravierenden Folgen. »Sie verlieren den Zugriff auf Ihr Konto und damit die Kontrolle über alle Inhalte der Signal-App inklusive Bildern, Videos, Dokumenten oder Sprachnachrichten«, so die jüngste BfV-Warnung. Gleichzeitig könnten die Angreifer im Namen der Betroffenen kommunizieren, in bestehenden Gruppen mitlesen, neuen beitreten und die Kontakte einsehen.

In den vergangenen Jahren haben russische Staatshacker wiederholt erfolgreich politische Parteien und weitere Ziele in Deutschland angegriffen. 2015 war es ihnen beim sogenannten Bundestagshack gelungen, sensible Daten abzugreifen.

Anmerkung der Redaktion: Eine frühere Version des Textes enthielt noch keine Reaktion der Bundestagsverwaltung. Wir haben diese ergänzt.

• Economic Dominance: American corporations control key pillars of the European economy, including digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and payment systems.
• Energy Reliance: The European Union has transitioned from partial energy self-sufficiency to a heavy dependence on imported liquefied natural gas, primarily from the United States.
• Regulatory Consequences: Extensive and complex regional regulations have created high operational costs that impede European startups while American incumbents effectively absorb these burdens.
• Market Fragmentation: The inability of European businesses to scale is attributed to internal market divisions, which prevents the development of local competitors to Silicon Valley giants.
• Self Inflicted Barriers: Restrictive permitting processes and environmental policies have curtailed domestic resource extraction, increasing reliance on foreign providers for gas and critical minerals.
• Financial Dependency: Strategic missteps in policy, such as the regulation-driven sale of the pan-European payments system to an American entity, have codified structural reliance on foreign financial infrastructure.
• Geopolitical Vulnerability: Economic interconnectedness raises risks regarding the potential weaponization of commercial services, such as cloud computing and digital payment access, by foreign governments.
• Policy Paradox: While individual legislative goals concerning privacy, antitrust, and climate change are considered beneficial, their cumulative effect has restricted industrial growth and fostered ongoing institutional subservience.

Listen to this story

Your browser does not support the

It wasn’t long after blue jeans, Hollywood blockbusters and Big Macs crossed the Atlantic last century that some worrywarts started fretting about Europe falling prey to American dominance. What was once a concern about cultural hegemony has of late morphed into panic over commercial dependency. With some justification: the commanding heights of the modern European economy have quietly been captured by American firms. Apple and Google power the mobile phones used from Dublin to Dubrovnik. Other Silicon Valley titans have spawned cloud computers storing Europeans’ data, and from which American artificial-intelligence models are being deployed deep inside the continent’s businesses. Visa and MasterCard, two American firms, are often required for Europeans to pay other Europeans. Increasingly the continent’s lights are being kept on by American liquefied gas, replacing an erstwhile reliance on Russian energy.

This form of economic vassalage, which comes on top of dependency on security matters, is hardly new. “Why can’t Europe build its own Google?” has long been a predictable lament at Brussels confabs. But in an age when such entanglements can be weaponised—not least by Donald Trump and his MAGA clan in America—it also raises geopolitical questions. If Mr Trump really wants Greenland, say, could he threaten to cut off Europeans’ ability to pay in shops, or switch off their iPhones en masse? Could some perceived slight from the German chancellor result in the Mittelstand being shunted off cutting-edge AI models, hobbling their prospects? The possibilities seem, alas, endless.

Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers in Paris, Berlin and beyond: Europe’s dependency on America Inc is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms, which went on to trounce European ones even in their own backyards. What Europeans could not build quickly for themselves, due to a thicket of regulations, they often imported just as quickly from abroad. That forcing businesses to jump through endless regulatory hoops would put a burden on Europeans was always understood: meeting ambitious green targets, protecting privacy, preventing bank meltdowns or achieving other necessary goals was always going to carry a cost. But the extent to which it also left Europeans in hock to foreigners—for now mostly America, but also increasingly China—has only belatedly become clear.

Tech is where the dependency seems most acute. Europe has few firms at the forefront of AI, space or high-end computing (one notable exception is ASML, a Dutch firm globally vital to chipmaking). Even governments often have little choice but to use the likes of Microsoft or Amazon for cloud services, Palantir to sift through data or SpaceX to launch military satellites. Quixotic attempts to shake off big tech abound, for example by having civil servants ditch Windows for some clunky substitute. Too often the European alternatives are lacking anyway. It turns out that boasting about regulating AI before the public had made their first ChatGPT query—as the European Union did in 2021—is not conducive to home-growing AI champions.

Yes, EU rules often applied to American firms, insofar as they wanted to offer their wares in the bloc. But regulation in practice hit European firms harder. The costs of administering complex data-protection rules, say, could easily be absorbed by a Google or OpenAI, with their hordes of compliance staff. Not so their European rivals, which have usually lacked scale (if only because the EU’s fragmented single market made it harder for them to grow beyond their home country). The EU thus generated barriers to entry that often ended up protecting American giants.

The sapping of European sovereignty is also evident in finance. European banks requiring dollar funding have long had to enforce Washington’s edicts, for example applying American sanctions. But other dependencies are self-imposed. Several thousand European banks once jointly owned a pan-continental payments system (known as “Visa Europe”; its only American element was the name licensed from the global brand). But well-intended EU regulations that capped the sector’s profits made that business unattractive for the banks, which ultimately sold the business in 2016—to the Americans at Visa. Thus a new dependency was born.

Even less whizzy bits of the economy have regulated themselves into subservience to foreigners. In the 1990s the EU imported just half the natural gas it used, thanks in part to domestic production in places like the Netherlands. A tangle of national and EU rules made it ever-harder to drill; many countries have given up. Today 85% of all gas used is imported, over a quarter from America. Other new industrial projects are often unfeasible to launch in Europe. The EU these days frets about access to critical raw minerals, for which it depends mainly on China. Europe has deposits, but getting the environmental and other permits in place to extract them can take up to 20 years, per the EU’s auditors.

Brussels, we have a problem

The annoying thing is that, taken individually, each piece of euro-regulation is laudable. Yes, Europe should aim for “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Of course regulating AI is sensible, lest the robots turn on us one day. Firm antitrust rules enforced by the EU have served consumers well, and so on. But taken together the effect has been a tangle of red tape that has left Europe awkwardly exposed. Efforts are afoot to get to grips with some of the more unappealing dependencies; next month the commission will unveil a “tech sovereignty package”. But it remains to be seen whether Europe can escape its role as a superpower in rule-making, yet a supplicant in everything else that matters.■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.

• Model Launch Status: DeepSeek released preview versions of the V4 model following a period of delayed updates compared to domestic industry peers.
• Technical Hardware Validation: The V4 model successfully operates on both Nvidia GPUs and Huawei Ascend NPUs with full-stack support from Huawei.
• Efficiency Architecture: Integration of Sparse Attention technology optimizes processing by focusing on relevant data segments to facilitate handling of extensive documents.
• Competitive Financial Analysis: V4-Pro offers significantly lower costs at $3.48 per million output tokens compared to the $25 rate charged by comparable Western models.
• Capital Acquisition Goals: The lab is actively pursuing at least $300 million in external funding with valuation metrics tied directly to current model performance benchmarks.

By

Tracy Qu

April 24, 2026 1:47 am ET

While DeepSeek repeatedly delayed releasing a major model update, domestic rivals including Moonshot AI’s Kimi, MiniMax, Alibaba Group and ByteDance have aggressively pushed out updates. Leon Neal/Getty Images

• DeepSeek launched preview versions of its V4 model, ending months of silence from the Chinese AI lab.

• The V4 model validated key efficiency techniques on Nvidia GPUs and Huawei’s Ascend NPUs, with Huawei offering full-stack support.

• V4-Pro is cheaper than Western competitors, costing $3.48 per million output tokens, as DeepSeek seeks $300 million in funding.

This summary was generated with AI and reviewed by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• DeepSeek launched preview versions of its V4 model, ending months of silence from the Chinese AI lab.

  View more

China’s DeepSeek launched preview versions of its long-awaited V4 model, breaking months of silence from one of the country’s most closely watched AI labs.

V4-Pro’s agent ability has significantly improved from previous models, the company said on its official WeChat account on Friday. The model is now the “go-to agentic coding model” internally, with feedback showing that it beats Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.5 in user experience and delivering output quality closer to Opus 4.6’s non-thought mode, though it still lags behind Opus 4.6’s thought mode, they note.

The release ends a drawn-out wait for a major update model from DeepSeek. While the company repeatedly delayed releasing a major model update, domestic rivals including Moonshot AI’s Kimi, MiniMax, Alibaba Group and ByteDance have aggressively pushed out updates.

The Chinese company’s V4 model also marks a milestone for domestic chips.

DeepSeek said it validated one of the V4’s key efficiency techniques on both Nvidia GPUs and Huawei’s Ascend NPUs. Huawei said in a WeChat post that its entire Ascend line now offers full-stack support for DeepSeek V4 models.

The V4 model also uses “Sparse Attention,” a technique unveiled last year that enables the model to focus only on the most relevant parts rather than processing everything at once. That enables the model to handle much longer documents, the company said.

While V4-Pro is significantly more expensive than DeepSeek’s previous models, it remains much cheaper than its Western competitors. Anthropic, for example, charges $25 per million output tokens for its Opus 4.6 model, while 1 million output tokens for V4-Pro would cost $3.48.

DeepSeek also launched V4-Flash, a cheaper and faster version that holds its own against the V4-Pro on simpler tasks but trails on more demanding ones.

The startup is seeking at least $300 million in its first external fundraising, and investors have said that the company’s valuation would be pegged to the latest models’ performance, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Tracy Qu is a reporter based in Singapore who covers Asian equities for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, with a focus on China and Hong Kong markets. She previously worked as a China tech reporter at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Tracy graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a master’s degree in journalism.

• Energy As The Life Force: Human existence is defined by the flow of energy, as the presence of physical components is common to both living beings and dead bodies.
• Mitochondrial Role Redefined: Rather than just cellular powerhouses, mitochondria act as information processors that adaptively manage energy distribution based on environmental and psychological demands.
• Energy Resistance Principle: Health relies on maintaining optimal resistance levels within the body's internal biological circuits, where excessive or insufficient resistance leads to dysfunction and disease.
• Metabolic Cost Of Stress: Chronic stress forces the body to prioritize immediate survival over long-term maintenance, significantly increasing energy expenditure and accelerating cellular aging.
• Psychological And Biological Interdependence: Mental states and mitochondrial function exist in a continuous feedback loop, suggesting that human health is a manifestation of how energy moves through both the brain and body.

“When you compare a dead body with a living one, the only difference is the presence of energy — the physical machinery, the DNA, the proteins, the skin, the organs, it’s all still there.”

I was surprised by Martin Picard’s choice of words. Evoking a lifeless image to start a conversation about energy flow was counterintuitive, but the image lingers and proves his point. Cadavers have all the “stuff” we associate with being human. The only thing missing, the Columbia professor suggests, is the flow of energy. He calls this the “potential for change,” and it’s what defines us, gives us vitality, and shapes our experience.

“We are not molecular machines, but energetic beings,” he tells me, “and we relate to one another on an energetic dimension.” It’s a succinct but provocative idea, one Picard believes could not only reshape how we understand the human experience but also lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases.

Every process in the body exists downstream of energy flow.

It’s also what drew me to his research in the first place. A self-professed “high-energy” individual, I’ve always identified with that quality in myself more than any other, but I’ve also struggled to reconcile something so fluid with the more concrete ways we’re taught to understand ourselves. Picard was the first researcher I’d encountered who placed that intuition within a scientific frame — and I wanted to hear more.

From philosophy to measurable science

“We are energy” sounds like something you’d be more likely to hear in Eastern philosophy than a modern research lab. Yet Picard doesn’t speak as a guru, but as an Ivy League professor who publishes in top journals and tests his ideas empirically. Still, he welcomes the comparison. “I don’t know what chi or prana are,” he says, “but the idea that we are deeply interdependent with the flow of energy does align with those philosophies, and it’s something researchers have to remain open to.”

To move from abstraction to measurement, Picard focuses on something concrete: mitochondria, the organelles that generate and regulate the energy that powers our cells. At Columbia, he leads a lab focused on mitochondrial psychobiology — a term he coined to describe how psychological states interact with biological processes within mitochondria. This framework allows Picard to empirically study how lived experience manifests physiologically, including areas biology has struggled to explain: aging, the cost of stress on health, and how thoughts and emotions affect physiology.

If you see yourself energetically, it changes your behavior. You begin to see yourself as interdependent with the natural world and to view relationships as energetic exchanges.

Martin Picard

Partway through a technical explanation of his work, Picard pauses and briefly looks away. “I just really love mitochondria,” he says when he looks back at me, breaking into a laugh mid-sentence. He then reaches behind him, pulls a small wooden model of a mitochondrion from a shelf, and holds it up to the camera like a proud father. 

For all the talk of energy, it’s fitting that Picard himself seems indefatigable — publishing papers, writing articles, and sharing ideas at a steady pace. The energy driving him, it seems, comes from the potential of this research. “If you see yourself energetically, it changes your behavior,” he says. “You begin to see yourself as interdependent with the natural world and to view relationships as energetic exchanges. That shift can ripple outward, from individuals to households to institutions.”

Beyond the “powerhouse of the cell”

Students are taught in middle school that mitochondria are the “powerhouses” of cells and that nearly every cell in the body contains hundreds to thousands of them (more energy-intensive tissues, like those in the heart, land in the higher range). Picard pushes back on that description because it suggests that mitochondria simply keep the lights on when, in reality, the complex organelles play a far more influential role.

Yes, they do convert the food we eat into usable energy and heat, but as the body’s demands shift, mitochondria adapt. They communicate with one another, change their number and structure, and adjust how they produce and distribute energy. They are the only organelles with their own genetic material, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited exclusively from mothers.
Rather than “powerhouses,” Picard prefers to call mitochondria the “information processors” of cells: “They’re not just permissive — they don’t simply create the energy that allows life to happen. They’re instructive — they integrate how we live into the flow of energy through the body.”

Returning to first principles 

Scientists have proposed many “master explanations” for health, pointing to diet, genetics, hormones, the microbiome, and more as the factor that outweighs any other. So why does Picard focus his energy on energy?

While those other factors are important, every process in the body exists downstream of energy flow, Picard says — for cortisol to rise, for neurons to fire, for the microbiome to function, energy has to move through the system. Interventions that support health — like sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation — are ways of increasing and redistributing energy within the body.

Our modern health framework, which views humans as collections of biochemical parts, has struggled to explain basic questions, like why stress harms us or how mental states shape physical health.

Martin Picard

Every time I ask Picard something, he peels the question itself back to a more basic layer. He approaches his research the same way, reasoning from first principles, the basic laws that govern living systems. From that perspective, energy is a natural place to begin. Genes, hormones, and the microbiome vary from person to person, but energy follows physical principles that cause it to behave the same way across living systems. 

**“**We tend to see humans as collections of biochemical parts, and our medical practices focus on what goes wrong with the structure of humans,” Picard says. “But that framework has struggled to explain basic questions, like why stress harms us or how mental states shape physical health.” 

The cost of being alive

To investigate those questions, Picard argues, we need to look beyond structure to the dynamics that support it. Unsurprisingly, when he thinks about what questions matter most, he starts with a foundational principle: “Nothing in biology is free, so how much energy does something cost?”

Energy follows the same basic laws in biological systems that it follows everywhere else: It cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Ecologists use this principle to understand how energy moves through ecosystems and even why large animals typically live longer than small ones. But in medicine, where the focus often falls on genes and molecules, energy budgets are regularly overlooked.

Like many of Picard’s ideas, this framing aligns with a basic intuition. We know that our bodies can’t just create energy — we need to consume something to fuel up. This limited supply is then spread across competing demands. If I go for a long run in the morning, I often find that I can’t focus as well later. It doesn’t matter that one activity is physically exhausting, while the other is cognitive — both require energy.

Picard and his colleagues applied this question — how much energy something costs — to one of the most poorly understood yet universally experienced drains on the body: stress. 

Chronic stress doesn’t just “wear us down” metaphorically. It reallocates energy from repair to survival.

In the lab, they exposed human cells to signals similar to those of cortisol — the hormone the body releases during stress — to mimic chronic stress in the body. “You can think of a stress response like an activation; it takes energy to mobilize,” Picard says. “We found that cells increased their energy expenditure to roughly 60% above baseline, which is a significant metabolic drain.”

That extra energy has to come from somewhere, and his team demonstrated that cells with a higher stress demand age faster. This suggests that activating a stress response siphons energy away from long-term maintenance processes. Chronic stress doesn’t just “wear us down” metaphorically. It reallocates energy from repair to survival, leaving less available for the processes that keep cells healthy over time.

When you consider life as perpetually managing an energy budget, other familiar physical experiences start to click. Many people lose their appetite when they’re sick, which seems paradoxical. Wouldn’t your body need more fuel to fight the infection? But digestion is expensive, requiring roughly 10% of your daily energy budget. By suppressing appetite, the body can direct more energy toward the immune response. Reducing the amount of energy spent on digestion may also help explain why fasting can make some people feel more energized.

The right amount of resistance

As Picard points out, how we feel and function isn’t just about “how much” energy we have, but also how well energy is flowing through our system. To explore that, Picard turns again to first principles. “At its core, the organism behaves like an electric circuit,” he says. “Electrons flow from food to oxygen to sustain life.”

In biological terms, that flow runs through the mitochondria. When you eat, you take in electrons stored in carbon-based molecules. Inside your cells, those electrons move through a series of reactions toward oxygen, the final electron acceptor. As the electrons move, they release energy that mitochondria capture and convert into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the form of usable energy that fuels cellular processes. 

This flow always encounters some resistance; how much depends on oxygen availability, cellular demand, and the integrity of the system itself, including the number of mitochondria in the cell and the condition of their membranes. Picard and his colleagues argue that maintaining an optimal level of resistance to this flow is vital. “Health depends on maintaining energy resistance in a ‘Goldilocks’ level — not too high, not too low, but just right.”

How we feel and function isn’t just about “how much” energy we have, but also how well energy is flowing through our system.

Picard and his colleague Nirosha Murangan formalized this idea as the energy resistance principle. If resistance is too low, energy passes through the mitochondria but isn’t transformed into anything useful. It’s like pedaling a bike with the chain off — your legs are spinning, but the bike isn’t moving forward. But when resistance is too high, when something constrains electron flow through the mitochondria, the system backs up. This increases oxidative stress and contributes to inflammation, cellular damage, and other hallmarks of disease. Picard and Murangan argue that many features of aging and disease reflect disruptions in how energy is flowing through mitochondria.

The idea of a “Goldilocks” level of resistance appears across biology. Lift weights at just the right level, and muscles grow stronger. Doing too much leads to injury, while doing too little produces no change. Psychologically, when you engage deeply with a problem, you encounter resistance that focuses effort and transforms it into structured thought. But too much resistance, and you might get discouraged and give up on trying to solve it.

In each case, resistance doesn’t block growth. So long as it’s paired with periods of lower resistance, like meditation, sleeping, or resting, it encourages it. 

Picard’s lab has begun identifying molecular signals that reflect disruptions in this system. One of them, growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15), increases when energy flow becomes strained. “If GDF15 is high,” he says, “it’s a signal that the system is under energetic stress.” He suggests that GDF15, which can be measured in saliva, could eventually serve as a proxy for the quality of energy flow in an individual.

The mind and body connection 

We already know that thoughts and emotions affect physiology. Take the placebo effect: Simply believing a health intervention might help can produce positive outcomes. And many of us are familiar with the racing heart that comes when we simply ruminate about something negative happening. Picard’s work suggests these experiences may be reflecting shifts in how energy is moving through the body.

“The brain is a pattern of energy,” Picard says. It’s a simple statement, but a radical one. The brain is an energy-intensive system, consuming roughly 20% of the body’s total energy. It follows that mitochondrial function could play a central role in shaping mental states. “The human psychological experience is incredibly diverse,” Picard says. “You can wake up feeling refreshed and energized, like life is beautiful. Or you can wake up feeling depressed, like you don’t want to get out of bed. We began to wonder: Could subjective experiences reflect differences in how energy moves through the brain and body?”

Across several studies, Picard found a continuous feedback loop between the brain and mitochondria: Mental states may influence mitochondrial biology, and mitochondrial function may in turn shape psychological processes. Supported by this evidence, Picard proposes that individual variations in mitochondrial biology may shape health and disease risk across a suite of issues, including mental disorders. 

Looking through an energy lens

Picard hopes that energy will soon become a core dimension of health that doctors and researchers assess alongside genetics, lifestyle choices, and other biomarkers. But that vision requires overcoming an obvious challenge: How do you measure something as dynamic as energy?

One approach is to estimate how much energy different processes consume and use that information to get an idea of the body’s overall energy budget. Picard says he can imagine people measuring markers of energy flow and resistance. “I can envision wearables that track GDF15, which raises when you’re experiencing strong energy resistance, to give you an ‘energy score.’” Laughing, he points out one potential application: “You can see if the new person in your life energizes or drains you.”

More pressing than measuring energy, Picard argues, is adopting the mindset needed to study it. He urges researchers across disciplines to see humans as systems of energy flow, not just collections of molecular parts. In a recent Nature article, he and co-author Christopher P. Kempes call on biomedical researchers to “look at central questions energetically, from first principles,” linking these dynamics to diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. He’s also working on a book, Energy: The New Science of Vitality, Healing, and Transformation, expected in 2027, that explores how to tune into our energy.

Picard proposes that individual variations in mitochondrial biology may shape health and disease risk across a suite of issues, including mental disorders. 

When I ask Picard how people might apply his ideas today, he points to interventions we already know are beneficial: a healthy diet and sufficient amounts of sleep, exercise, and relaxation. The key, he says, is to consider how these activities align with our lives as energetic beings, shaping where we get our energy and how we distribute it, respectively. “When you see these behaviors through an energy lens, they become more motivating,” he says. “You understand what they’re doing for you.”

He suggests alternating high-resistance states, like exercise or sustained cognitive effort, and lower-resistance states, such as rest, meditation, or even periods of fasting. He also encourages paying attention to how you get energy. “The ketogenic diet has completely changed [some] people’s lives, and for others, it doesn’t work,” Picard says. “It’s about tuning into your energy, not just with diet, but across your life.”

He then characteristically began to zoom out, away from specifics and back toward first principles. “We should make decisions based on how they affect our energy,” he says. “You, as an energetic system, are the most sensitive instrument you have to know whether the content of your life — where you gain energy, what you do for purpose, who you are with — is aligned with who you are.”

I perked up when Picard said this, recognizing my own imperfect habits in his words. I have always tried to follow my energy — even when I couldn’t fully explain what that meant. Still, I trust the pull and, whenever possible, I make choices that feed my energy and avoid those that drain it. What Picard offers me, and everyone, is a reason beyond intuition to see that instinct as something real, measurable, and even fundamental.

If he’s right, then health isn’t just something we build through better inputs — better diets, better habits, better routines — but something we experience as the quality of energy moving through us. And the difference between feeling alive and merely being alive may come down to how well we learn to notice and work with that flow.