Group shot of the xAI team
🔥 THE DEAL
• 50-year AUKUS-lite defence pact → signed & sealed.
• Billions for subs, spy planes, “interoperability” workshops.
• Canberra locks its military supply chain to a country that can’t keep the lights on.
🎓 UK REALITY CHECK
• £42 bn / yr in foreign-student tuition, bigger than aerospace + cars + oil combined.
• Chinese enrolments -7 % YoY; visa rules being rewritten overnight.
• Universities leveraged like hedge funds; one bad intake = campus fire-sales.
• 1 in 3 British households skipped heating last winter to pay the energy bill. (ONS 2023)
🧬 PIPELINE WHIPLASH
🇬🇧 Old Power Pipeline
Oxbridge (Philosophy, Politics, Economics)→ Goldman Sachs / Whitehall
– Moves money, drafts policies
– Exports: Financialized prestige
🇨🇳 New Elite Pipeline
Tsinghua / Zhejiang / Fudan STEM → ByteDance / Huawei / Tencent AI
– Builds hypersonics, controls infrastructure
– Exports: Tech that dictates sovereignty
Beijing’s STEM grads now skip the UK detour. Every cohort that stays home = one less full-fee student + one more engineer building the very kit that will achieve per-emienence over the Pacific.
🔥 THE IRONY
Australia anchors its defence to a nation that:
• Has no sovereign AI/tech base (Arm HQ just IPO’d in NYC)
• Exports consultants, not capability: Mass-produces elite financiers while China graduates 10x more AI engineers.
• Relies on the same Chinese talent pipeline it now labels a strategic threat.
Bottom line:
The UK trains global elites in governance decks; China trains engineers who build the future and Australia just bet 50 years of security on the former.
