Skip to writing

19 June 2026 / Geopolitics

# The Comfort of Being Wrong

Originally published at humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/06/19/the-comfort-of-being-wrong

The economist

The economist was young, brilliant, earnest in his work and captivated by the power of the data and models at his command. I was having a quiet chat with him, after yet another of the conferences that continued to take place in Singapore, even in these uncertain times.

"Did you know that Singapore's economy grew 6% in the first quarter of 2026 ? I predicted less than 4% and thought it would go even lower with the Iran war, but the Singapore economy was actually so strong! I was so wrong."

"Really?" I asked, quizzical, "The vibes are bad out there, how did we do so well?"

"The semiconductor and electronic industries did super well – all the chips and hardware and power being exported. I thought there would be no oil, but we bought crude from the US and South Africa. And logistics, services like finance, wealth management – all did better than expected. Money is moving from the Middle East here," the economist shared excitedly.

"Huh… guess I was wrong as well, I thought times would be bad."

Times did feel bad, with circulating news of layoffs and beloved factories closing in 1Q 2026 . But I guess the numbers don't lie.

The bureaucrats in charge of developing the economy should be pleased. Developing a diversified, resilient export sector was one of the Singapore government's key priorities, and it sure paid off at an unexpected time.

One of my favorite economic factoids is that one in every ten microchips sold worldwide is produced in Singapore , and the semiconductor industry benefited from the worldwide, AI-driven semiconductor and electronics boom. The investments we attracted in oil refining also paid off – the leaders of New Zealand and Australia visited Singapore, an island without oil, to sign agreements to ensure access to refined fuel products like jet fuel and diesel, having more demand for these products than they could supply themselves, and threatened by the loss of other suppliers.

Singapore's economic direction in all these sectors has come under criticism in the past. Singapore never created its own semiconductor champion on the frontier like TSMC, and local companies like Chartered Semiconductor were sold off in the past, leaving the many fabs in Singapore focused on older generation products instead of the leading edge 2nm -4nm chips. The petroleum refining sector was seen as a potential sunset industry with Shell and Chevron both selling stakes in refineries in Singapore in recent years.

I privately shared some of these gloomy views. More intelligent men than me had designed the economic policies of Singapore, but I wondered if we had focused too much on diversification and export, at the expense of building local industries. And I was worried about the impact of the Iran war in 2026. But all these sectors helped the economy pull through in this challenging time.

But I am glad to be proven very wrong, in this short time.

Peace in our time

Speaking of being glad to be proven wrong, the US-Israel-Iran war is another case in point. I wrote about the beginning of the war – probably the first war with LLM-assisted targeting, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – back in February.

I expected the worst. So many bad things could have happened. Either an unstoppable military backed with the latest in frontier intelligence and a new norm in AI-driven warfare, or soaring oil and commodity prices, inflation, starvation and crisis from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

But the fighting seems to be coming to an end – not with a peace treaty – but with a MoU signed by President Trump and President Pezeshkian that is expected to lead to further discussions and peace. Some fighting is still ongoing between the main allies of the belligerents – Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon – that may ignite further conflict, but my hope is that a ceasefire will take hold in that arena as well.

Few of my fears came to pass. AI-driven targeting with Palantir and Claude didn't seem to meaningfully improve the ability of the already fearsome US military to impose its will on Iran – few of the US war goals were achieved in the MoU, with both sides claiming victory. The LLM-assisted targeting systems didn't seem to improve on what an experienced planning staff already provided, and the age of raw intelligence being the trump card in warfare does not seem to be with us yet.

The experts on X.com insisted that this was the greatest supply shock to the oil markets ever. A friend told me that a supply chain planner he trusted (his brother), said that this was the worst disruption to the supply chain ever – worse than Covid. Airlines were in discussion on how much runway of cash they had if jet fuel prices continued to stay high, and some Southeast Asian countries cancelled flights. I took those warnings to heart and kept the fuel tank in my car topped up, and bought bottled water and canned food.

That turned out to be unnecessary. The reserves of the countries of the world managed to hold out until the end of this war. The oil price did not go up even to the level of previous crises, petrol price at the pump was high but not apocalyptic, and the feared supply chain disruptions have not materialized. In fact, the cancelled flights have started resuming.

Here too, I am very glad that I have been wrong, the past few months. I can only hope that I am not wrong again, about the MOU leading to a promised peace.

Intelligence at the frontier

And just as I have been wrong about the impact of AI in war, I have been proven wrong even more quickly on the nature of developments on the intelligence frontier and periphery.

Last week, I wrote a post lamenting the centralization of the frontier in the US , and how the rest of the world was falling behind, with the gap between US closed source and rest-of-the-world open source growing bigger and bigger. It only took me a week to be proven wrong.

Z.ai was represented on the stage at SuperAI. I had used their GLM models before, and wasn't impressed, wrongly pegging them as a Tier 2 lab. I couldn't have been more wrong.

2 days ago, they released GLM 5.2, which was quickly found to be competitive with frontier models on several coding and agentic benchmarks. I do not know if it is truly in the same class as the best closed models across every domain, but it was far closer than I had expected, and only clearly behind Claude Fable 5.

I tried GLM 5.2 myself again – it is indeed very intelligent, although it similarly failed my personal test of coming up with a viable space commercialization plan for Singapore. But it was solid, thorough, and did not say anything wrong that I could find.

I think my issue is that the newest models like GLM 5.2 show their best work in coding and agentic harnesses, whereas my main use case was chat and essay writing / review. Hence, I've not been able to judge their intelligence accurately. GLM 5.2 is a notable leap over the GLM 4.7 model I was previously using, and in any case it seems so similar to Claude Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5 that I am unable to distinguish their levels of raw intelligence.

And the rest of the Chinese labs are accelerating their open source output. Kimi released its 2.7 model this week as well, which is also competitive to the latest models with the exception of Claude Fable 5. Deepseek is tipped to release its 4.1 model soon, and other competitors like MiniMax and Stepfun are hot on their heels.

It is an open question on whether the Chinese labs will continue open sourcing when they reach the intelligence frontier. They certainly need to think about how their future business models work.

But for now, the periphery has access to near frontier intelligence, there is peace in our time, and the economy (in Singapore at least) isn't all that bad.

Small blessings, and great things to be wrong about.

Note: This post picks up a thread from Genuine Uncertainty, written in March 2026, when I was trying to describe the strange calm of living through yet another possible catastrophe. Three months later, some of those fears are resolving more gently than expected, at least for those of us far from the fighting.