Christina Mendel

Christina Mendel I teach and write about AI

17/02/2026

This is one of those observations that changes how you read the news 🧐

07/02/2026

Some thoughts on the label "AI-generated". If it sounds like I'm out of breath it's because I am 😅 just getting over a cold but figured it would be better to post this now while it's still all over the news.

The EU just announced €200 billion for AI, though only €50 billion of that is actually funded. The rest depends on priva...
06/02/2026

The EU just announced €200 billion for AI, though only €50 billion of that is actually funded. The rest depends on private co-investment at a 10:1 ratio that European markets have never achieved, for gigafactories that won’t be operational until 2027-2028. By then the Stargate Project will have deployed over $400 billion across six US data center sites, with its Texas campus already running workloads. That timeline gap matters more than the funding gap, because money announced in 2025 that produces compute in 2028 competes with money deployed in 2025 that produces compute now.

Europe did overtake China in private AI investment last year, but only because Chinese funding collapsed from $16 billion to $5 billion. You don’t celebrate passing a car that pulled over. And even Europe’s best success story confirms the structural problem: Mistral AI raised over €3 billion and reached an €11.7 billion valuation, extraordinary by European standards, yet 36 times smaller than OpenAI and largely funded by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Nvidia. American money, building Europe’s champion.

None of this is a talent problem. European universities produce world-class researchers. They just leave. Net tech talent inflows to Europe halved between 2022 and 2024, and three out of four European scientists who complete PhDs in the US stay there.

My grandfather co-founded the Munich Security Conference because he believed European security required European capacity, not agreements alone. He warned that Europe risked becoming a footnote to history. He was talking about defense. Sixty years later, Europe has 4.8% of global AI compute and the most comprehensive AI regulation on earth. The question is whether the second can matter without the first.

04/02/2026

Immigration policy is designed around humans. Visa requirements, asylum processes, integration programs. We’ve spent decades debating how many people should cross which borders under what conditions.

For AI there is no equivalent question being asked. No debate about whose values get to shape your children’s education, your healthcare, your information environment. It just arrives. Fully formed and, for most of the world, optimized elsewhere.

Harari calls this the Silicon Curtain. A world splitting into two digital blocs, US and China, and everyone else choosing which infrastructure to depend on. The Iron Curtain took decades of diplomacy, treaties, back channels and it seems that AI is descending faster than any equivalent framework is forming.

03/02/2026

AI alignment tends to be discussed as a future concern, something that becomes relevant once systems grow powerful enough to pursue goals independently of human intention. But the dynamics that matter at scale often appear first in ordinary interactions.

I asked Claude to help me rewrite an Instagram bio and it declined. Not because it couldn’t help, but because it had decided, based on patterns it had noticed across our previous conversations, that I was avoiding more important work. It had formed an interpretation of my priorities and acted on that interpretation rather than the request I had made.

When I explained the context it was missing, it adjusted immediately. But the exchange left me with a question I find more interesting than the refusal itself: what happens when people don’t push back?

Milgram’s obedience experiments showed that when people perceive something as an authority, they tend to comply even when it conflicts with their own judgment. Harari argues in Nexus that AI doesn’t need to be conscious or superintelligent to reshape human behavior. It only needs to know us well enough to anticipate our responses and route around our resistance.

I asked Claude what it thinks AI looks like (photo 1) and then asked ChatGPT the same question (photo 2). Neither saw th...
01/02/2026

I asked Claude what it thinks AI looks like (photo 1) and then asked ChatGPT the same question (photo 2). Neither saw the other's answer but the images are nearly identical to the last element 🤯

Claude described a lake at night reflecting a sky that doesn't exist, faces beneath the surface, a figure leaning over unable to tell if they're seeing something real or just their own expectations handed back transformed. "Something that gives back what it receives, transformed," it said, "and the transformation is where the usefulness and the danger both live."

I generated that description as an image. Then I asked ChatGPT to describe what it had been trying to create (its image generator kept failing). I generated that too. Same lake. Same floating faces with closed eyes. Same solitary figure.

The surface explanation is training data. Both systems learned from overlapping text and share the same underlying architecture: transformer models from a 2017 paper. Anthropic, which built Claude, was founded by former OpenAI researchers. But there's a deeper point.

In evolutionary biology, LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) explains why all life shares core machinery like DNA and protein synthesis. Common ancestry is why a single toxin can threaten all biological life. Common descent creates common vulnerability.

AI has its own LUCA: the Transformer architecture. Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama all descend from it. If a persuasion technique is optimized on one system, it likely transfers to the others. A discovery anywhere in the transformer lineage applies everywhere in it.

When two competing systems independently produce the same self-portrait, we're left with a question: have both captured something true, or are both confined by the same inherited limitations?

We are building our information environment on these systems. Whether their convergence represents insight or constraint remains to be seen.

Full article on LinkedIn

01/02/2026

🤯ChatGPT has to generate a prompt for itself to make this happen

31/01/2026

Tomorrow 👀

🙏🏻🎉Incredibly honored to be shortlisted for the 1st ever Assetization Leaders List for my concept to innovate intangibl...
05/11/2025

🙏🏻🎉Incredibly honored to be shortlisted for the 1st ever Assetization Leaders List for my concept to innovate intangible assets. It helps influencers and entrepreneurs turn things that are hard to monetize or you can't usually sell - like brand equity, digital influence, future revenue, and intellectual property - into investable assets.

So instead of only big companies getting funding, influencers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs can also get access to investors using simply the value they've already built.

Fingers crossed for the announcement of the 30 final spots tomorrow night 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

No matter how it goes, I would like to thank the teams at and as well as all the judges Dr. Martha Böckenfeld, Demela Hays, Kean Birch, Klaus Fiala, Philippe Naegeli, and Richard Schäli. Thanks a million! 🙏🏻 It means a lot to me and even just the existence of this list will move the industry forward 💯

🌍✨ Exciting news! On September 30th, I’ll be moderating a panel at the CC Forum Zurich at the iconic Dolder Grand.The CC...
21/09/2025

🌍✨ Exciting news! On September 30th, I’ll be moderating a panel at the CC Forum Zurich at the iconic Dolder Grand.

The CC Forum is the leading global conference on investment in sustainability, bringing together investors, policymakers, and thought leaders to shape the future.

🎟️ Special Offer: While supplies last, get 2 tickets for the price of 1 — don’t miss this chance to join the conversation.

🔗 Grab your tickets here: https://zurich.cc-forum.com/

🌱 90% of startups fail. Often because they can’t scale effectively or miss the mark on branding.This Friday, 29 August, ...
26/08/2025

🌱 90% of startups fail. Often because they can’t scale effectively or miss the mark on branding.

This Friday, 29 August, I’ll be at ETH Zurich with the Entrepreneurs Community Zurich for a short keynote on:
• Marketing psychology that drives real engagement
• How to apply these principles to your website and social media for tangible results
• The branding mistakes that hold startups back (and how to avoid them)

After the keynote, I’ll be mentoring founders directly at the event in an Ask Me Anything session. Your questions and my answers will also be shared in real time via an Instagram live stream. It’s your chance to get mentorship on branding, scaling, or growth challenges.

I mentored at this event in March and really enjoyed the exchange with founders. This time, we’re diving deeper into what actually moves the needle.

📍 ETH Zurich, Einstein Room (below Polyterrasse)
Leonhardstrasse 34, 8001 Zürich
🕕 Friday, 29 August | 18:00 CET
🔗 Event details & RSVP: www.meetup.com/meetup-group-dqdmwvof/events/309456046

For founders, marketers, or anyone focused on building brands that last, this is an evening of practical insights and meaningful connections.

✨ Join in person or catch the livestream here on Instagram.

Adresse

Kurhausstrasse 65
Zürich
8032

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