• OpenAI's o1 model was hailed as a breakthrough in September.
• By November, a Chinese AI lab had released a similar model called DeepSeek.
• On Thursday, Google came out with a challenger called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.

In September, OpenAI unveiled a radically new type of AI model called o1. In a matter of months, rivals introduced similar offerings.

On Thursday, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which uses reasoning techniques that look a lot like o1.

Even before that, in November, a Chinese company announced DeepSeek, an AI model that breaks challenging questions down into more manageable tasks like OpenAI's o1 does.

This is the latest example of a crowded AI frontier where pricey innovations are swiftly matched, making it harder to stand out.

"It's amazing how quickly AI model improvements get commoditized," Rahul Sonwalkar, CEO of the startup Julius AI, said. "Companies spend massive amounts building these new models, and within a few months they become a commodity."

The proliferation of multiple AI models with similar capabilities could make it difficult to justify charging high prices to use these tools. The price of accessing AI models has indeed plunged in the past year or so.

That, in turn, could raise questions about whether it's worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions, to build the next top AI model.

September is a lifetime ago in the AI industry

When OpenAI previewed its o1 model in September, the product was hailed as a breakthrough. It uses a new approach called inference-time compute to answer more challenging questions.

It does this by slicing queries into more digestible tasks and turning each of these stages into a new prompt that the model tackles. Each step requires running a new request, which is known as the inference stage in AI.

This produces a chain of thought or chain of reasoning in which each part of the problem is answered, and the model doesn't move on to the next stage until it ultimately comes up with a full response.

The model can even backtrack and check its prior steps and correct errors, or try solutions and fail before trying something else. This is akin to how humans spend longer working through complex tasks.

DeepSeek rises

In a mere two months, o1 had a rival. On November 20, a Chinese AI company released DeepSeek.

"They were probably the first ones to reproduce o1," said Charlie Snell, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley who coauthored a Google DeepMind paper this year on inference-time compute.

He's tried DeepSeek's AI model and says it performs well on complex math problems that must be solved by thinking for longer and in stages. 

He noted that in DeepSeek's DeepThink mode, the model shows users every step of its thought process. With o1, these intermediate steps are hidden from users. 

"I've asked people at OpenAI what they think of it," Snell told BI. "They say it looks like the same thing, but they don't how DeepSeek did this so fast."

OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment. On Friday, the startup previewed an o1 successor, called o3. Francois Chollet, a respected AI expert, called the update a "significant breakthrough."

Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, praised Google's new "Thinking" model for the same reasoning feature.

"The prominent and pleasant surprise here is that unlike o1 the reasoning traces of the model are shown," he wrote on X. "As a user I personally really like this because the reasoning itself is interesting to see and read — the models actively think through different possibilities, ideas, debate themselves, etc., it's part of the value add."

A DeepSeek demo

Snell shared a multistep math problem with Business Insider, which we used to test DeepSeek for ourselves: 

"Find a sequence of +, -, /, * which can be applied to the numbers 7, 3, 11, 5 to get to 24, where each of the given numbers is used exactly once."

BI put that prompt in DeepSeek's chat window on its website. The model responded initially by laying out the challenge ahead.

"Alright, so I've got this problem here: I need to use the numbers 7, 3, 11, and 5, and combine them with the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, using each number exactly once, to get to 24," it replied. "At first glance, this seems a bit tricky, but I think with some systematic thinking, I can figure it out."

It then proceeded through multiple steps over roughly 16 pages of discussion that included mathematical calculations and equations. The model sometimes got it wrong, but it spotted this and didn't give up. Instead, it swiftly moved on to another possible solution. 

"Almost got close there with 33 / 7 * 5 ≈ 23.57, but not quite 24. Maybe I need to try a different approach," it wrote at one point. 

After a few minutes, it found the correct solution. 

"You can see it try different ideas and backtrack," Snell said in an interview on Wednesday. He highlighted this part of DeepSeek's chain of thought as particularly noteworthy:

"This is getting really time-consuming. Maybe I need to consider a different strategy," the AI model wrote. "Instead of combining two numbers at a time, perhaps I should look for a way to group them differently or use operations in a nested manner."

Then Google appears

Snell said other companies are likely working on AI models that use the same inference-time compute approach as OpenAI.

"DeepSeek does this already, so I assume others are working on this," he added on Wednesday.

The following day, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Like DeepSeek, this new model shows users each step of its thought process while tackling problems. 

Jeff Dean, a Google AI veteran, shared a demo on X that showed this new model solving a physics problem and explained its reasoning steps. 

"This model is trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning," Dean wrote. "We see promising results when we increase inference time computation!"

• Drone sightings across the US have captivated many Americans and sparked widespread speculation.
• The sightings have also put a spotlight on airspace management strategies in the US.
• Experts say the focus should be on improved regulation and countermeasures instead of hysteria.

A recent wave of mysterious drone sightings across the US has, to a certain extent, kick-started a long-overdue discussion on drone technology and airspace management.

These drone sightings have captured national attention, and the public is now paying more attention to drone activity near US military bases. Federal agencies are talking to the public about drone issues. And there's more public discussion of congressional legislation to boost federal authority as the government says it's hamstrung in its ability to respond to drone threats.

"There's a fundamental notion that drones present a very, very new expanded type of threat," Doug Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Business Insider, noting that the US largely lacks "the tactics and the procedures to deal with this."

Birkey said many people are "overplaying" the mystery behind the latest drone sightings. But the resulting buzz is driving conversations about counterstrategies and systems that "should have happened a long time ago."

Officials from the White House, FBI, DHS, DoD, and the FAA have urged Congress to "enact counter-UAS legislation when it reconvenes that would help extend and expand existing counter-drone authorities to identify and mitigate any threat that may emerge." This has been a recurring topic in press briefings in recent weeks.

"The good news is that technology largely exists" to address the challenges presented by drone tech, Birkey said. "We just have to get serious about going after it and then having the procedures down to be smart about it."

The latest drone drama

In mid-November, unidentified aircraft were first seen flying over New Jersey. They drew national attention as reported sightings extended to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, among other states, this month.

It wasn't until worry and wild speculation about the drones reached a fever pitch that agencies began a more organized effort to communicate. In the initial absence, others filled the void with conspiracy theories, a major one being that the drones were launched from an Iranian drone mothership off the US East Coast.

The federal government has shot many of these assertions down, saying they're not of foreign origin and not a threat.

The White House, FBI, Homeland Security, Pentagon, and FAA have said that all the evidence available indicates the drone sightings are a mixture of "lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones."

Though not nefarious, US officials said they "recognize the concern among many communities" and the "irresponsible" nature of the drone activity near restricted airspace and infrastructure, including military bases and civilian airports.

Things have "sort of moved to a point of hysteria," said Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. She said that "the public has gotten really agitated because of the perceived novelty of drones or the danger associated with them."

She said "people seeing drones everywhere" are "starting to conflate just normal air traffic and anything in the sky and assuming that something nefarious or strange is happening."

But even as the government has attempted to quell concerns, skepticism remains, leading some to push for greater clarity on this issue so that drones can be discussed rationally.

William Austin, a drone expert and president of Warren County Community College, said the federal government needs to be clear with the public in this situation.

He wrote in a recent op-ed that "the public needs clear, authoritative communication: there is no credible evidence of large drones operating over New Jersey,"

Austin argued in his article that "the drone industry has too much to offer — cutting-edge technology, job creation, and life-saving applications — to be derailed by myths." He said, "We need facts, not speculation."

Drones are becoming prolific

Surging interest and investment in new drone tech have catalyzed rapid advancements, transforming the technology at an unprecedented pace in recent years.

Increasing competition in the global market is making drones more accessible, affordable, and user-friendly, expanding their use beyond traditional military and defense applications to sectors like agriculture, logistics, and recreation.

"It's part of the changing technological landscape that extends beyond just the military," Pettyjohn said. "It's not just the realm of the government anymore to have really sophisticated capabilities. It's just part of everyday society."

Commercial and civilian drones only began to emerge in the early 2000s, leaving the general public largely unaccustomed to encountering them in their daily lives.

The high-profile Chinese spy balloon incident last year that ended with it being shot down by a US fighter jet spotlighted aerial surveillance as a potential threat to public safety and national security. Terrorist and insurgent operations, as well as the widespread use of drone warfare in Ukraine, have also heightened fears regarding their possible weaponization.

And there are real risks, regardless of whether drone activity is malicious. As drone technology proliferates further, activities around military bases and airfields are becoming a "huge problem" for the US, Mark Cancian, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired US Marine Corps colonel, recently told BI.

A US military base in Ohio briefly closed its airspace after small drones were spotted in the area, and the runways at a New York airport were also briefly shut down due to nearby drone activity.

Sociologist and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci wrote that the hysteria and drama of the recent drone situation aside, "unauthorized drones are a problem, and there does need to be better regulation and technology to deal with them. Let's hear about that, then, rather than this mindless dangerous panic."

• Suchir Balaji helped OpenAI collect data from the internet for AI model training, the NYT reported.
• He was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco in late November, according to police.
• About a month before, Balaji published an essay criticizing how AI models use data.

The recent death of former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji has brought an under-discussed AI debate back into the limelight.

AI models are trained on information from the internet. These tools answer user questions directly, so fewer people visit the websites that created and verified the original data. This drains resources from content creators, which could lead to a less accurate and rich internet.

Elon Musk calls this "Death by LLM." Stack Overflow, a coding Q&A website, has already been damaged by this phenomenon. And Balaji was concerned about this.

Balaji was found dead in late November. The San Francisco Police Department said it found "no evidence of foul play" during the initial investigation. The city's chief medical examiner determined the death to be suicide.

Balaji's concerns

About a month before Balaji died, he published an essay on his personal website that addressed how AI models are created and how this may be bad for the internet. 

He cited research that studied the impact of AI models using online data for free to answer questions directly while sucking traffic away from the original sources.

The study analyzed Stack Overflow and found that traffic to this site declined by about 12% after the release of ChatGPT. Instead of going to Stack Overflow to ask coding questions and do research, some developers were just asking ChatGPT for the answers. 

Other findings from the research Balaji cited: 

• There was a decline in the number of questions posted on Stack Overflow after the release of ChatGPT.
• The average account age of the question-askers rose after ChatGPT came out, suggesting fewer people signed up to Stack Overflow or that more users left the online community.

This suggests that AI models could undermine some of the incentives that created the information-rich internet as we know it today.

If people can get their answers directly from AI models, there's no need to go to the original sources of the information. If people don't visit websites as much, advertising and subscription revenue may fall, and there would be less money to fund the creation and verification of high-quality online data.

MKBHD wants to opt out

It's even more galling to imagine that AI models might be doing this based partly on your own work. 

Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee experienced this recently when he reviewed OpenAI's Sora video model and found that it created a clip with a plant that looked a lot like a plant from his own videos posted on YouTube. 

"Are my videos in that source material? Is this exact plant part of the source material? Is it just a coincidence?" said Brownlee, who's known as MKBHD.

Naturally, he also wanted to know if he could opt out and prevent his videos from being used to train AI models. "We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said.

'Not a sustainable model'

In an interview with The New York Times published in October, Balaji said AI chatbots like ChatGPT are stripping away the commercial value of people's work and services.

The publication reported that while working at OpenAI, Balaji was part of a team that collected data from the internet for AI model training. He joined the startup with high hopes for how AI could help society, but became disillusioned, NYT wrote. 

"This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem," he told the publication.

In a statement to the Times about Balaji's comments, OpenAI said the way it builds AI models is protected by fair use copyright principles and supported by legal precedents. "We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness," it added.

In his essay, Balaji disagreed.

One of the four tests for copyright infringement is whether a new work impacts the potential market for, or value of, the original copyrighted work. If it does this type of damage, then it's not "fair use" and is not allowed. 

Balaji concluded that ChatGPT and other AI models don't quality for fair use copyright protection. 

"None of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data," he wrote. "That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains."

Talking about data

Tech companies producing these powerful AI models don't like to talk about the value of training data. They've even stopped disclosing where they get the data from, which was a common practice until a few years ago. 

"They always highlight their clever algorithms, not the underlying data," Nick Vincent, an AI researcher, told BI last year.

Balaji's death may finally give this debate the attention it deserves. 

"We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," an OpenAI spokesperson told BI recently. 

If you or someone you know is experiencing depression or has had thoughts of harming themself or taking their own life, get help. In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress, as well as best practices for professionals and resources to aid in prevention and crisis situations. Help is also available through the Crisis Text Line — just text "HOME" to 741741. The International Association for Suicide Prevention offers resources for those outside the US.

• Elon Musk has demonstrated his ability to upend Washington.
• Trump allies' and Musk's posts have once again shown the power of X.
• Recently, they nuked a government funding bill and possibly saved a cabinet nomination.

Washington better turn on its Twitter, er, X alerts again.

Elon Musk and a loose band of MAGA influencers have shown that even if Twitter wasn't real life, X just might be.

In recent days, Musk's platform has been at the center of efforts to save Pete Hegseth's embattled nomination to lead the Pentagon and to torpedo the type of 1,000-page, year-end spending bills that have joined the National Christmas Tree as a marker of the holiday season.

Democrats are saying that the world's richest man is akin to a shadow president. Some Republicans, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are floating Musk to become the next speaker of the House.

Musk was already set to wield significant power through Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency," an advisory panel the Tesla CEO will co-lead with former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump had said relatively little about how Republicans should finish their final business before he returns to the White House. Musk upended that silence on Wednesday when he began a full-on assault on X against Speaker Mike Johnson's continuing resolution, which would have extended government funding until March 14.

"The voice of the people was heard," Musk wrote on X, quoting a Republican lawmaker's comments that cited his influence in helping kill the funding bill. "This was a good day for America."

Republicans have long complained about how party leaders fund the government with sweeping proposals, via either continuing resolution or omnibus. The conservative opposition then forces Republicans to cater more to Democrats, as leaders have to find the votes somewhere. Case in point, the year-end 2024 continuing resolution included everything from a congressional pay raise to opening the door to Washington's NFL team returning to the city proper to entice Democrats to support it. There was also $100 billion in disaster relief and a one-year extension to the law that prevents the US from reverting to decades-old farm policies. The total bill was 1,547 pages long.

Musk is also using X to urge Republicans to shut down the federal government if they don't get what they want, potentially affecting everything from pay for US service members to the status of US National Parks.

This isn't the first time Trump and his allies have wielded X. His supporters have been highly alert over the president-elect's Cabinet picks since former Rep. Matt Gaetz pulled out of contention to be the next Attorney General. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, looked to be in jeopardy amid a series of reports about his drinking habits and his treatment of women, including allegations of sexual assault.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a combat veteran, expressed concern about Hegseth. In response, a wave of conservative influencers called her out by name on X, and some threatened her with a primary challenge.

"People in Iowa have a well-funded primary challenger ready against her," Charlie Kirk wrote on X. "Her political career is in serious jeopardy."

Ernst, amid the pressure campaign and after additional meetings with Hegseth, later signaled a change in tone on Hegseth's nomination. Without naming her directly, one of Ernst's incoming colleagues said one senator felt "like the entire world coming after her" for not supporting one of Trump's nominees.

"She's being plummeted with threats, with all sorts of things that don't belong in political arena, and her staff is. And so you talk about pressure, right?" Sen.-elect John Curtis of Utah said at a recent event, per Politico. "And speaking with her, she has to worry about things like, 'Well, if I vote against this nominee, what happens to my state when I need something from this administration?'"

Musk alone didn't make X powerful. He is remaking the platform, though, as evidenced by the exodus to Blue Sky and other competitors. He aims to create a free-speech oasis where it is "the best source for truth."

The X CEO has changed policies on the platform based on polls, including when he reinstated Trump's prized account after a simple survey. Musk's posts, including the ones he used to take down the government funding bill, aren't always truthful, such as when he falsely claimed Congress would receive a 40% pay raise (it was 3.5% at most).

It seems like Musk often just wants to dominate the conversation. And while his lofty goals are still in progress, Congress and the rest of the nation's capitol can't afford to ignore him.

They should also turn on Truth Social notifications for good measure.

• Lawmakers in both parties say Elon Musk played a major role in tanking a government funding bill.
• Now the government is on the brink of shutting down.
• It's an early sign of how he'll wield influence as the co-lead of DOGE.

After a government funding bill went down in flames on Wednesday, lawmakers in both parties were in agreement about one thing: Elon Musk played a huge role in bringing Washington to the brink.

"Yesterday was DOGE in action and it was the most refreshing thing I've seen since I've been here for 4 years," Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote on X.

"The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk," Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania wrote. "He's now calling the shots."

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance put the final nail in the coffin of the bill, but their joint statement trashing the continuing resolution — and issuing a new demand for Congress to raise the debt ceiling — came after several hours of silence on the matter.

That void was filled by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency co-lead, Vivek Ramaswamy, who savaged the bill as an example of the wasteful spending that Trump has empowered them to target for elimination during his second term. Newly galvanized by DOGE and lacking any guidance from Trump, several Republican lawmakers publicly cited arguments put forward by the two leaders to justify their opposition to the bill.

"This omnibus is the very thing the incoming Department of Government Efficiency is trying to put an end to," Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri wrote on X. "A vote for this monstrosity is a vote against DOGE."

As Republican support for the bill dried up, passage through the GOP-controlled House became an impossibility, and the bill was scrapped.

Federal funding is set to run out at midnight on Friday. If lawmakers are unable to agree upon and pass a new bill by then, the government will shut down for the first time in six years, prompting flight delays, closures of national parks, and paycheck delays for federal workers.

In a statement to Business Insider, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition, disputed the notion that Musk is the leader of the GOP.

"As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view," Leavitt said. "President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop."

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

'This bill should not pass'

Over the past several weeks, Democrats and Republicans had been hammering out a compromise bill to fund the government through March 14. After significant delays, the bill's text was released on Tuesday night.

Aside from extending government funding at current levels for another three months, the bill also included language allowing the District of Columbia to take control of a stadium that the Washington Commanders have long sought to use, a modest pay increase for lawmakers, billions of dollars in disaster relief for states affected by recent hurricanes, and other provisions that Trump and Vance later characterized as "giveaways" to Democrats.

Musk first came out against the bill on Wednesday morning, writing on X: "This bill should not pass."

Over the course of several hours, what began as a simple statement of opposition turned into something much larger, including Musk endorsing shutting down the government until January 20 and saying that any Republican who voted for the bill would deserve to be voted out of office.

Along the way, Musk made and amplified false claims about the contents of the bill, including that it included a 40% pay raise for lawmakers (it was 3.8% maximum) and $3 billion for the Commanders' stadium.

By the time Trump and Vance weighed in on Wednesday afternoon, the bill already appeared dead, and the two men had a different demand: Lawmakers shouldn't simply shut down the government but pass a spending bill without "giveaways," while raising the debt ceiling.

Musk, the 'shadow president'

It remains unclear what legislation will emerge. Democrats have insisted on moving forward with the deal they struck with Republicans, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected in Thursday-morning a Bluesky post the idea of raising the debt ceiling.

The government spending bill's collapse was an early demonstration of Musk's newfound clout with Republicans on Capitol Hill, previewing how the mercurial billionaire might handle the role of DOGE co-lead under Trump.

Over the past two years, a pattern has emerged in government funding and other fiscal fights. Both parties work on compromise legislation, hard-line Republicans rail against it, and both the House and the Senate easily pass it with mostly Democratic votes.

On Wednesday, that pattern was broken, with a shutdown appearing imminent.

For hard-line Republicans who've typically opposed government funding bills, it marked a moment of elation and a sign that with the advent of DOGE, the balance of power is set to shift in their direction under Trump.

Some Democrats, meanwhile, have seized the moment as an opportunity to embarrass Trump, painting him as subordinate to Musk.

In a steady drumbeat of social media posts and TV interviews, Democrats have begun referring to Musk as the "president-elect," the "shadow president," the "copresident," and even the "decider in chief" as they've attacked Republicans for opposing the bill.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, released a fact sheet about "what Elon will cost your state" that said "President-Elect Musk's" opposition to the government funding bill had also derailed disaster-relief funds.

"It is dangerous for House Republicans to have folded to the demands of the richest man on the planet, who nobody elected, after leaders in both parties came to an agreement to fund the government and provide this disaster aid," DeLauro said in a statement. "There was no need for a government shutdown."

Musk, for his part, rejected the notion that he was the real leader of the GOP.

"All I can do is bring things to the attention of the people," he wrote on X, "so they may voice their support if they so choose."

• Generative AI tools have made it easier to create fake images, videos, and audio.
• That sparked concern that this busy election year would be disrupted by realistic disinformation.
• The barrage of AI deepfakes didn't happen. An AI researcher explains why and what's to come.

Oren Etzioni has studied artificial intelligence and worked on the technology for well over a decade, so when he saw the huge election cycle of 2024 coming, he got ready.

India, Indonesia, and the US were just some of the populous nations sending citizens to the ballot box. Generative AI had been unleashed upon the world about a year earlier, and there were major concerns about a potential wave of AI-powered disinformation disrupting the democratic process.

"We're going into the jungle without bug spray," Etzioni recalled thinking at the time.

He responded by starting TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that uses AI-detection technologies to help people determine whether online videos, images, and audio are real or fake.

The group launched an early beta version of its service in April, so it was ready for a barrage of realistic AI deepfakes and other misleading online content.

In the end, the barrage never came.

"It really wasn't nearly as bad as we thought," Etzioni said. "That was good news, period."

He's still slightly mystified by this, although he has theories.

First, you don't need AI to lie during elections.

"Out-and-out lies and conspiracy theories were prevalent, but they weren't always accompanied by synthetic media," Etzioni said.

Second, he suspects that generative AI technology is not quite there yet, particularly when it comes to deepfake videos. 

"Some of the most egregious videos that are truly realistic — those are still pretty hard to create," Etzioni said. "There's another lap to go before people can generate what they want easily and have it look the way they want. Awareness of how to do this may not have penetrated the dark corners of the internet yet."

One thing he's sure of: High-end AI video-generation capabilities will come. This might happen during the next major election cycle or the one after that, but it's coming.

With that in mind, Etzioni shared learnings from TrueMedia's first go-round this year:

• Democracies are still not prepared for the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI deepfakes.
• There's no purely technical solution for this looming problem, and AI will need regulation. 
• Social media has an important role to play. 
• TrueMedia achieves roughly 90% accuracy, although people asked for more. It will be impossible to be 100% accurate, so there's room for human analysts.
• It's not always scalable to have humans at the end checking every decision, so humans only get involved in edge cases, such as when users question a decision made by TrueMedia's technology. 

The group plans to publish research on its AI deepfake detection efforts, and it's working on potential licensing deals. 

"There's a lot of interest in our AI models that have been tuned based on the flurry of uploads and deepfakes," Etzioni said. "We hope to license those to entities that are mission-oriented."

• Vladimir Putin has been quiet about Syria since the end of Bashir Assad's rule.
• Rebels deposed Russia's longtime ally earlier this month, jeopardizing its military presence there.
• Any discussion about Syria may expose Moscow to further scrutiny, one expert told BI.

During an annual televised meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Russia's top military officials on Monday, Putin was keen to keep the focus firmly on incremental successes in Ukraine.

But he was conspicuously silent about recent events in Syria — where longtime Kremlin ally Bashar Assad was deposed by rebels earlier this month.

Russia had long provided military support to prop up Assad's government, but a lightning offensive by rebel groups that Russian intelligence failed to predict toppled Assad in just two weeks.

It also exposed the limits of Putin's ambition to reestablish Russia as a great power, according to analysts.

"The fall of the Assad regime is perceived as a sign of Russia's weakness in supporting its allies," Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Kent, told BI.

He added that under such circumstances, "any discussion of the situation in Syria may expose Moscow to further scrutiny about its capabilities."

The loss of Assad also leaves the status of Russia's crucial Syrian military bases in doubt — and means Putin needs victories in Ukraine more than ever.

Russia's slow response to Syria

Putin has long boasted of Russia's success in Syria. In 2015, it launched its first foreign military mission since the end of the Cold War, and successfully achieved its core goal of keeping Assad in power.

The Kremlin used the campaign to mock the US and its allies over their failed Middle Eastern policies. It also used its military bases granted by Assad to project Russian power into Africa and beyond.

Yet, with Russia's military stretched by its costly war in Ukraine, Putin appeared unwilling or unable to divert forces to save Assad.

In the face of events unfolding in Syria, the Kremlin's early comments were limited to confirming it had provided asylum to Assad and his family, who fled on a Russian plane as rebels approached Damascus.

Russian media, which is tightly controlled by the Kremlin, was also muted in its coverage of events, according to RFE/RL, while military bloggers blamed Russian military leaders for the debacle and the ineptness of Assad's forces.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, sought to shift the blame to a familiar geopolitical foe: the US and its allies.

"All this is a repetition of the old, very old habit of creating some havoc, some mess, and then fishing in the muddy waters," he said.

What has Russia lost?

The collapse of Assad's government could have wider implications for Russia's global military footprint, which might help explain Putin's silence on the matter.

Nikolay Kozhanov, a research associate professor at the Gulf Studies Center of Qatar University, argued in a piece for Chatham House last week that it has damaged Russia's reputation as a reliable ally capable of guaranteeing the survival of its partners.

Stefan Wolff, a professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham, went further.

In a piece for The Conversation, Wolff said that Russia's failure to save a key partner like Assad highlights serious flaws in its capacity to act like a great power.

And four former US officials and military researchers even predicted that countries in Russia's sphere of influence could break away in the coming weeks, as many did in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed.

"The house of cards that Vladimir Putin has so carefully stacked over more than two decades is folding before our eyes," they wrote in Time Magazine.

Other analysts, however, are more circumspect.

Mohammed Albasha, founder of Basha Report, a Virginia-based consultancy specializing in Middle East affairs, told BI that "withdrawing from Syria would primarily impact Russia's influence in the Middle East."

He said that it might prompt governments in Armenia or those in the Sahel region, such as Niger and Burkina Faso, to reconsider their alliances with Moscow, and shift focus toward building closer ties with the West or China.

But when it comes to countries bordering Russia — such as Georgia, Tajikistan, and Belarus — he said those were likely to remain due to their deep economic ties and Russia's national security mandate to protect its borders.

Putin stays silent

Some analysts believe that Putin's silence on Syria may not just be about wanting to divert attention from an embarrassing defeat, but also about brokering a deal with Syria's new government to enable it to retain at least some of its military assets in the country.

Reports indicate that Russia has withdrawn naval vessels from the Tartus base, but has kept planes and other air force assets in Hmeimim.

"Even if Russia withdraws its forces from Syria, Moscow will still try to negotiate so that this withdrawal will not be perceived as a flight," Voller told BI.

Even so, Putin's focus on Ukraine on Monday underscores, now more than ever, that the Russian president needs a win.

A victory in Ukraine, where Russia has been making incremental but important progress in recent months, would enable Russia to buffer its reputation as a military power, despite recent setbacks and losses.

"There should be no expectation of anything but Russia doubling down in Ukraine," wrote Wolff in last week's blog post. "Putin needs a success that restores domestic and international confidence in him — and fast."

• Big Tech companies and CEOs are already lining up six-figure donations to Donald Trump's inauguration.
• Amazon, Sam Altman, and Meta are each prepared to donate $1 million.
• There are virtually no limits on inaugural donations, meaning Big Tech companies can cut massive checks.

Big Tech companies and the moguls behind them are preparing to make six-figure donations to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee.

Jeff Bezos' Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have all been reported to have made or will make $1 million to the outfit tasked with planning and organizing Trump's triumphant return to power.

"The financing of inaugurations is really a cesspool when it comes to campaign financing," Craig Holman, a lobbyist for government watchdog Public Citizen, told Business Insider.

Holman said there are few, if any, limits to inaugural donations, and what makes them particularly appealing is that megadonors and CEOs don't have to worry about picking the loser.

"Unlike financing a campaign, when you don't know for sure who is going to win, here in the inauguration, you've got the winner," he said. "So corporations and other special interests just throw money at them at the feet of the president with the hope of currying favor."

Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group, said donations to the inaugural committee are less likely to irk the opposition.

"They are frequently a mechanism for entities that sit out elections to get good with the incoming administration," he said.

Trump's 2017 inaugural set a record, raking in roughly $107 million. Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson donated $5 million, the largest single donation. AT&T gave just over $2 million. For many in Washington, it was a time to make nice with an incoming president that few thought would win the 2016 race.

This time, Trump's inaugural offers one final major opportunity for CEOs to curry influence with the president-elect at his peak.

Since he'll be term-limited, the next major fundraising opportunity likely won't come until Trump begins preparations for a presidential library (should that even occur). At that point, companies will have missed their window to make a final impression before mergers and acquisitions.

2017 Trump inaugural donors benefited greatly

Playing ball can have major benefits. OpenSecrets found in 2018 that "of the 63 federal contractors that donated to the inauguration, more than half won multimillion-dollar bids" from the federal government later on.

Foreign donors can't contribute to a president-elect's inaugural committee, and the committee must publicly disclose details about donations over $200 within 90 days of Inauguration Day. Otherwise, there are few limits on what individuals or corporations can give, and inaugural committees are not required to explain how they spend the money.

Some presidents, especially Obama in 2009, have imposed voluntary restrictions on donations. Obama refused to accept corporate donations or individual contributions over $50,000 for his historic first inauguration, though he later lifted those limits for his reelection celebration.

Hauser said donations will allow corporations to prepare for an especially transactional period.

"I think that corporations with an agenda in Trump's Washington, be it offense, like getting new contracts, or defense, like avoiding negative federal scrutiny, are going to spend millions of dollars in Washington to either make or protect billions in the real economy," Hauser said.

Tech companies are under the microscope.

Amazon, Google, and Meta have all faced antitrust concerns. Republican lawmakers have frequently grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's decision to limit sharing the New York Post's initial report on Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to help election officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, enraging some on the right, while Trump repeatedly lit into Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post's coverage of his first administration. Amazon sued the Trump administration after Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract over them, alleging that Trump's animus for Bezos sunk their chances.

Bezos and Zuckerberg have since taken steps to repair their relationships with the Trump world. Zuckerberg has expressed regret over Facebook's decision to censor some posts about COVID-19. He also pledged not to donate to help election officials. Bezos intervened when The Post's editorial board was ready to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos also recently said Trump seemed "calmer than he was the first time and more settled."

"You've probably grown in the last eight years," Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December. "He has, too."

Altman has been entangled in a legal battle with his OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, who is set to be an influential figure in the Trump administration.

In a statement about his donation, Altman said, "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead."

Representatives for Amazon, Meta, and Trump's inaugural did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

To get a taste of what may be in store, one only needs to look at what happened at President Joe Biden's inauguration.

A leaked fundraising memo showed that large donations netted individuals and organizations various perks, including opportunities to meet Biden, receive private briefings from top campaign officials, and "preferred viewing" for the virtual inauguration.

All of those benefits came amid pandemic precautions. Trump's party will have no such limits.

• Undersea cables between Finland-Germany and Lithuania-Sweden were cut, potentially sabotaged.
• The incident is one of a number of similar incidents in recent years, highlighting the vulnerability of these lines.
• NATO is enhancing surveillance and coordination to protect critical underwater infrastructure.

Last month, an underwater data cable between Finland and Germany and another between Lithuania and Sweden were discovered cut within a day of each other. The damage to the cables, which European officials said appeared deliberate, highlights just how vulnerable these critical undersea lines are.

Yi Peng 3, a Chinese-flagged cargo ship that had departed from Russia's Ust-Luga port in the Gulf of Finland three days before and was tracked loitering near the two locations, is suspected in connection with the incident. It is said to have dragged an anchor over 100 miles, damaging the cables.

"No one believes that these cables were accidentally cut," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in November. "We have to assume it is sabotage," he added.

In a joint statement with his Finnish counterpart, Pistorius said the damage comes at a time when "our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors."

As Russia received added scrutiny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian involvement in the incident, saying that "it is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason."

Critical but vulnerable

In recent years, a string of incidents involving damage to underwater infrastructure has occurred, many of them in the same region.

Last year, Newnew Polar Bear, another Chinese cargo ship, damaged a gas pipeline running between Estonia and Finland. China's investigation concluded the damage was accidental; however, Estonia and Finland's investigation is still ongoing.

In 2022, a Norwegian underwater data cable was damaged, and there were indications of human involvement in that incident. In 2021, a 2.5-mile-long section of another data cable disappeared from waters north of Norway.

The incident that received the most attention, though, was the sabotage of the Nord Steam gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in September 2022. There have been indications that Ukrainian elements might have been behind the sabotage, but this has not been confirmed.

Underwater infrastructure is increasingly critical to modern life. The vast majority of internet traffic passes through underwater fiber-optics cables, and underwater energy pipelines are common in many regions. But protecting this infrastructure, which can stretch for hundreds or thousands of miles, is difficult.

"There's no way that we can have NATO presence alone all these thousands of kilometers of undersea, offshore infrastructure," then-NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg said in 2023. Yet, NATO can be better at collecting and sharing information and intelligence "and connecting the dots," he added.

Indeed, NATO and the European Union are trying to do that.

In May this year, NATO held its first Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network meeting and launched its Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure to better coordinate the capabilities of its members and increase collaboration between them.

Further, the EU is funding several initiatives to develop uncrewed surface and underwater systems to surveil critical areas and detect threats early.

But there are also legal difficulties to protecting underwater infrastructure, as it usually traverses the territorial waters of several countries and can also pass through international waters.

The usual suspects

Although it can often be difficult to establish a culprit whenever such infrastructure is damaged, officials have pointed out that Russian activity near underwater cables has intensified.

In 2017, the US admiral in charge of NATO's submarine forces said the alliance was "seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen."

The war in Ukraine has added another dimension to this matter.

"There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life, to gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine," David Cattler, NATO's intelligence chief, said last year.

Russia has developed a number of underwater capabilities and has a specialized unit, the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, committed to the task.

GUGI, as the operation is also known, is an elite Russian unit that employs specialized surface and underwater vessels capable of underwater sabotage and surveillance. Yantar, one of GUGI's special-purpose spy vessels, which nominally acts as a survey vessel, has often been spotted near underwater cables.

Furthermore, a joint investigation released in 2023 by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland discovered that Russia, over the past decade, employed a fleet of 50 boats — masking as research or commercial vessels — to gather intelligence on allied underwater cables and wind farms in the Nordic region.

"When you look at the evidence of their activities now, the places they are doing surveys, overlaid with this critical undersea infrastructure … you can see that they are at least signaling that they have the intent and the capability to take action in this domain if they choose," Cattler said.

• Taylor Swift's Eras Tour raked in over $2 billion, more than any tour in history.
• One of the reasons: She capitalized on some of her most popular spots with "mini-residencies."
• Here's a look at Swift's touring strategy and how it's made her so rich.

Taylor Swift wrapped up her Eras Tour in Vancouver last week — and it grossed more than any tour in history.

With 149 dates across 21 countries, the Eras Tour earned more than $2 billion, according to Pollstar. While that 10-figure sum is in large part due to the sheer number of shows she played — she said the tour was attended by over 10 million people — there was a strategy to her touring that helped her maximize the profits from each stop.

Swift spent eight nights in London and six in cities like Toronto, Los Angeles, and Singapore. Meanwhile, she skipped nearby cities that she visited on past tours, like Ottawa and Pasadena.

These mini-residencies likely added millions of dollars to her personal bottom line. 

The underlying business assumption was that Swifties would travel and pay big bucks for tickets, no matter where she performed. It turned out to be correct: All of her shows were sold out. Playing in fewer cities meant less money spent on production, travel, and labor — which in turn meant more profit for Swift and her team.

"It significantly reduces the overhead of a tour," Nathan Hubbard, the former CEO of Ticketmaster who founded the management firm Firebird, told Business Insider. "Think about the cost of taking down an entire stage, packing up 50 trucks, moving it all to another town. Every night you can avoid striking the set saves millions of dollars."

Swift's representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Swift isn't the first performer to employ this strategy.

Harry Styles tested it with his 15-night runs at New York's Madison Square Garden and Los Angeles' Kia Forum, an extension of the Las Vegas residencies that have long minted millions for stars.

"Coming out of Covid, the largest artists understand that their fan bases will travel to be with them," Hubbard said. "Previously, this was just happening in Las Vegas. But so many of these cities can be a fun excursion for a fan and their friends. That's driving a lot of what we're seeing in the evolution of touring right now."

BI spoke with several fans who said they traveled out of state to see and across the Atlantic to see Swift perform.

"I probably would've come to Scotland at one point, but it was the concert that got me here," one Swiftie from Minneapolis told BI.

"We said to ourselves, 'Let's just go and have an adventure," her friend added. "Tickets are outrageously expensive in the US, and this entire trip for both of us was cheaper than our friends back home paid."

Of course, it's a delicate balance. Swift is considered among the pop stars most in touch with her fans and wouldn't want to alienate anyone by skipping over their local venues. But with nearly 150 shows in 50-plus cities, it would be hard to complain about her doing a few extra nights in one place and passing over another.

Plus, she's charged less — an average of about $219 per ticket, per Pollstar — than she could have. The average resale price for the North American leg of her tour was $3,801, Pitchfork reported.

And she's not the only one profiting.

The Common Sense Institute said that "the totality of Taylor Swift's US tour could generate $4.6 billion in total consumer spending, larger than the GDP of 35 countries." In Europe, the total figure will surely be impressive as well.

Turns out that she's an industry disruptor — if not the smooth-talking huckster — after all.

• An Austrian gas company ended its historic relationship with Russia's Gazprom.
• Austria framed the move as defiance against Russian energy blackmail attempts.
• It's a key step in Europe's thorny path to gaining energy independence from Russia.

A European gas supplier ended a decades-long contract with Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy juggernaut.

Analysts are hailing the decision as a sign of Europe moving to be more resilient in its energy supplies.

The Austrian gas conglomerate OMV announced on Wednesday that it was cutting ties with Gazprom over a protracted contract dispute, ending its dealings with Russia.

OMV was one of the last large, long-term buyers of Russian gas.

"Huge, positive development. Russia is in trouble," political scientist Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, wrote on X about the collapse of the deal.

The termination of the 34-year contract comes after months of wrangling between the two companies, in which Gazprom switched off the gas supply to OMV last month.

Austria's government — which owns 31.5% of OMV — framed the move as defiance against Russian attempts to blackmail the country, a common refrain from European leaders.

Austria's chancellor, Karl Nehammer, wrote on X on Wednesday: "Russia wanted to use energy as a weapon against us — that didn't work," adding: "Austria cannot be blackmailed by Russia!"

Austria has a secure energy supply, he added.

The news is a blow to Gazprom and, despite rising prices, is one sign of success on Europe's rocky path to wean itself off energy dependence on Russia, industry experts told Business Insider.

Dmitrij Ljubinskij, Russia's ambassador to Austria, denied in an interview with Ivzestia that Russia uses energy as a tool of pressure and said that OMV's move would not go unanswered.

Gazprom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A calculated move?

Gazprom's supply to OMV and Austria — which comes via Ukraine — was not likely to be there for long anyway.

Ukraine has long signaled that it will not renew an agreement, which expires in January, to allow Russian gas to transit its pipelines.

Jack Sharples, a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, told Business Insider that OMV had likely been eyeing the Ukrainian decision, in parallel to the Gazprom dispute, for some time, and preparing alternative suppliers.

"There were significant risks to transit as a result of the Ukrainian transit deal ending in January, so canceling the deal seems a good idea," Tom Edwards, a modeler at the energy-market analysis company Cornwall Insight, told BI.

OMV now says its gas storage is at around 85%, and that it's well positioned to supply gas from alternative sources.

A feud entangled deep in the Ukraine war

OMV's announcement ends a historic partnership. It was among the first Western European, non-socialist companies to import gas and invest in Soviet Russia in the 1960s.

It signed its 34-year contract with Gazprom to supply Austria with gas in 2006, signaling a relationship of trust that showed signs of breaking down with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

By March that year, the company announced it would no longer invest in Russia, but kept up its long-term supply relationship.

A Brookings Institute report from June highlighted that remaining tie as one of the many issues Europe still faced in decoupling, saying any break would be fraught with risk.

But a long-running, separate contract dispute sowed the seeds. A subsidiary of OMV had a smaller contract with Gazprom to supply gas to Germany via the Nord Stream undersea pipelines.

In summer 2022, Gazprom said that newly-imposed sanctions were preventing it from accessing key parts needed to drive the pipe's turbine.

That supply petered out and then stopped. Infamously, it never restarted after the attack on Nord Stream a few months later.

OMV went to commercial arbitration over the lack of supply to Germany, and in November was awarded 230 million euros, or about $240 million, plus interest and costs.

It said it would offset this award "against payments to be made by OMV to Gazprom Export under its Austrian gas supply contract."

Gas prices jumped 5% at the news, reaching a new high for the year. Three days later, Gazprom shut off the supply to Austria.

Europe is — slowly — weaning itself off Russian gas

The start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine stiffened political will across Europe to end dependency on Russian energy — something few could have foreseen, Sharples said.

Before 2022, Europe got around 40% of its imported natural gas from Russia.

"I think if you had asked European gas market analysts back in 2021, could the European market cope with losing 80% of what it gets from Gazprom via pipelines? We'd have said no, it would be horrendous," he said.

The landscape has changed significantly, Sharples said.

Over the last years, Europe has invested more not only in alternative suppliers but also the integration of its distribution system, meaning it can more flexibly respond to shortages, he said.

There are still many difficulties. A Chatham House analysis from this year pointed out that some replacement imports are Russian gas being "laundered" via third states.

And as of 2024, gas prices are still higher than they were before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sharples said.

But the market has reacted with both a reduction in demand and the seeking out of alternative supplies, he said.

"What has actually happened is that European gas demand has come down by a fifth, and we've ramped up our imports of LNG from the global market," he said.

"There's no doubt that Gazprom has lost a huge chunk of its revenues by losing these export volumes to Europe," he said.

The impact on Russia

"Gazprom has lost a substantial share of its gas sector revenues since February 2022, and the loss of the Austrian market is another chip away at those revenues," Sharples said.

"It's not make-or-break for Gazprom, but it certainly doesn't help."

There's also a domestic impact — the Russian government derives much of its tax revenue from energy sales and also uses the funding from Europe to subsidize domestic gas prices, Sharples said.

• New regional price parity data showed the varying cost of living in the US.
• California and Washington, DC, had the highest cost of living, largely driven by housing costs.
• Most of the states with the lowest relative cost of living were around the middle of the country.

Many states have a lower cost of living than the national average, but the West Coast and Northeast are still pricey.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis published new regional price parity data on Thursday that showed how expensive it is to live in different areas of the US.

"Regional price parities measure the differences in price levels across states for a given year and are expressed as a percentage of the overall national price level," BEA said in a news release.

The new 2023 data showed 16 states and Washington, DC, had more expensive goods and services than the national average. The states with the lowest cost of living were mainly around the middle of the country, including some states in the South.

The following map shows overall regional price parities, where a value over 100 means it was above the national average. Hawaii's figure of 108.6 means goods and services were about 9% more expensive than the average.

California had the highest relative cost of living; the state is 12.6% more expensive than the average. California metros also made up the majority of the top 10 that had the highest all-items regional price parities in 2023. The metro area of San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley had the highest at 118.2, meaning it was almost 20% more expensive than the national average.

Washington, DC, had an ever-so-slightly higher figure than California in 2022 but fell short of California's in 2023. DC was 10.8% more expensive than the average. New Jersey ranked right below DC.

Relatively high housing costs contributed to the overall high regional price parities in those two states and DC. BEA said rents are usually "the main driver in differences in RPPs." DC, California, and New Jersey had the highest regional price parities for rents.

Arkansas continued to have the lowest regional price parity and was 13.5% less expensive than the national average in 2023. Alabama, West Virginia, and South Dakota were among the 10 states that were at least 10% less expensive than the national average.

• YouTube TV will cost close to $83 a month after a just-announced price hike.
• That's a far cry from the $35 a month it was when it launched in 2017.
• However, YouTube TV is arguably still attractive relative to some other pay-TV offerings.

The price of YouTube TV is going up again — and cord-cutters around the internet are up in arms.

Google announced Thursday that the cost of its popular pay-TV service is now $82.99 a month for new users, up from $72.99. Existing users will see the price hike start on January 13, so some might not pay more until February.

The last time the service raised prices was in March 2023.

YouTube TV is now roughly in line with a typical pay-TV bundle and will cost exactly as much as rival service Hulu + Live TV, which includes ad-supported versions of Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

YouTube TV's price has grown dramatically in the nearly eight years since it launched, though that's largely because the service was underpriced at first relative to its offering.

Before this hike, YouTube TV was generally cheaper than many rival streaming TV packages from competitors such as Hulu + Live TV, Fubo TV, Spectrum, and DirecTV. (Many pay-TV services have a variety of plans, so it can be difficult to truly compare apples to apples, however.)

YouTube TV also has a slick interface that appeals to many cord-cutters.

These factors helped YouTube TV grow to 8 million customers (as of earlier this year) and far outpace its digital rivals.

Although YouTube TV's price growth has been eye-popping, the price of pay-TV services — from cable to satellite to streamers — has generally outpaced inflation, per data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the largest inflation surge in decades.

As the cable bundle became more expensive, millions of households cut the cord. TV networks make less money when pay-TV subscriptions fall, so to keep investors happy, they've increased the amount they charge TV providers, who then pass those costs on to customers.

In other words, when fewer people pay for TV, the remaining subscribers pay more. That has created a flywheel effect, with customers fleeing the bundle even faster in favor of streaming services, social media, or other forms of entertainment.

When asked for comment, a YouTube TV spokesperson issued a statement that acknowledged this dynamic: "To keep up with the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service, we are increasing our Base Plan price for YouTube TV from $72.99/month to $82.99/month."

Google may also have raised YouTube TV prices to help cover its investment in NFL Sunday Ticket. The tech giant won the right to distribute the premium out-of-market package starting in 2023 and priced it at $379 per season for YouTube TV customers and $479 for others. Even at those prices, media analysts at Morgan Stanley don't think the service is profitable.

Still, despite the price increase, YouTube TV can often be one of the better deals in town for those who want a large bundle of channels. And it has another thing going for it: It's easy to cancel and resubscribe to.

"We give all members the flexibility to cancel their membership at any time," the YouTube TV spokesperson said in their statement.

• Despite what some analysts predicted, the sky hasn't fallen at Warner Bros. Discovery without the NBA.
• The company's new deal with the cable giant Comcast is better than some anticipated.
• Those at WBD are thrilled to have saved money on NBA rights while avoiding a carriage-fee disaster.

It looks like Warner Bros. Discovery didn't "have to have the NBA" after all.

A year and a half after WBD's CEO, David Zaslav, gave that quote, the NBA's broadcast partner of four decades was outbid by Disney's ESPN, Comcast's NBC, and Amazon for the league's next TV deal, valued at $76 billion over 11 years.

Zaslav was widely chastised for allowing NBA rights to slip through his fingers after appearing indifferent about their value at a time when live sports seemed like it could be the cable bundle's only hope. Some media analysts said WBD underestimated NBC's bid and that the value of its TV networks would take a major hit without the NBA.

But the worst didn't happen. The media conglomerate has managed to secure higher rates for most of its TV networks from Charter and Comcast, the two largest cable providers in the US, people familiar with the terms of the deals told Business Insider.

The Comcast deal is particularly notable, as some in the industry expected the cable giant to drive a hard bargain. Comcast and WBD surprised the industry on Monday when they announced they'd reached a carriage-renewal deal. The financial terms weren't disclosed, but people familiar with them told BI that Comcast's affiliate fees for TNT would remain flat and that it would pay slightly more for WBD's other networks. In return, Comcast customers in the US, the UK, and Ireland can get Max for free.

This new deal, especially TNT's fees remaining flat without the NBA, looks like a win for Zaslav that certainly wasn't guaranteed just a few months ago.

No NBA, no problem?

Before the Charter and Comcast deals were announced, the general feeling in the media world was that pay-TV providers could play hardball and demand lower affiliate fees for WBD's networks, especially an NBA-less TNT. Shrinking affiliate fees and weaker ad revenue from lower ratings could be disastrous for debt-riddled WBD.

Instead, in mid-September, WBD struck a deal with the cable giant Charter in which it secured a flat rate for TNT and higher rates for other channels like CNN, HGTV, and Discovery. However, doing so took a key concession: giving away its Max streaming service.

The Charter deal was heralded as a success, with Zaslav a "clear winner" in the eyes of the veteran media analyst Rich Greenfield of LightShed. Greenfield had said that if WBD could fend off a major decline in affiliate fees in its next deals, then "investor fears are misplaced."

Still, another major test was ahead: WBD's negotiations with Comcast. Some observers thought WBD got a sweetheart deal from Charter since the cable legend John Malone was on the board of both companies, but they expected Comcast would take no prisoners. LightShed's Brandon Ross predicted that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts would be aggressive in negotiations.

The terms WBD and Comcast agreed to are remarkably similar to WBD's deal with Charter, and each came together more than a year before key deadlines. "Most favored nation" clauses mean cable providers can get similar terms as their competitors, but some analysts thought Comcast would get a better deal that Charter could match in retrospect.

Company insiders seemed pleased with the deals, though the WBD side seemed especially thrilled. Some people within the company believed they'd been vindicated after taking heat for losing the NBA.

Those with knowledge of WBD's thinking said the company could actually be better off without the NBA now that it avoided carriage-fee cuts. Instead of paying up for the NBA, whose ratings are down so far this season, the company can invest in other sports or pay down debt.

Unlike Amazon or Comcast, which have other businesses that can help subsidize their NBA rights, WBD would have needed its NBA investment to pay for itself — mainly through carriage fees, advertising revenue, and subscriptions to Max, which airs the NBA on TNT. And the company wasn't sure that would be possible if it paid significantly more money for fewer games.

So while the WBD hoped to keep the NBA at the right price, it was prepared to walk away — hence Zaslav's surprisingly blunt quote. By opting for plan B, WBD sent the message that its priority was keeping costs in check and paying down debt.

WBD shares are up by 58% since mid-September, suggesting that the market is rewarding the company for passing on the NBA — even though doing so was controversial.

• Ad industry insiders say the Omnicom takeover of Interpublic Group could kick off more M&A.
• Insiders laid out who could be involved, from WPP to smaller holding companies.
• Private equity and global solutions providers like Accenture also could be consolidators.

The planned $13.25 billion takeover by ad holding company Omnicom of Interpublic Group by merger has industry insiders speculating: Who's next?

Other agency giants face similar conditions that led two of the six big ad-holding companies to seek a merger. There's the concentration of ad dollars with tech giants Google, Meta, and Amazon; the need for media-buying scale to maintain an edge with global advertisers; and the growing use of AI that threatens to wipe out certain agency tasks. The US ad industry has barely grown over the past few years. By combining, Omnicom and IPG are looking to ensure their continued survival.

Some industry insiders think the Omnicom-IPG tie-up is just the start of a massive reordering of the $70 billion ad agency industry and that it's only a matter of time before other holding companies are forced to acquire or be acquired as they look to bulk up.

"From an M&A perspective, it's only going to add fuel to the fire," said William Ritchie, founding and managing director of the media and technology advisory firm WY Partners. "As others vie for competitive advantage over the newly crowned world's largest holding company, I'd expect there is going to be more competition for the best assets and more focus on building a streamlined data and tech-first offering which can compete — notably with companies like WPP, which remains behind the curve on competitive advantage here."

Ritchie said he sees continuing interest in assets that specialize in using data, tech, and AI to inform advertising, as well as PR and communications companies. He noted KKR's recent move to increase its stake in FGS Global, a comms and public affairs firm.

The IPG-Omnicom combo will spark more consolidation for other reasons, said Andreas Roell, CEO of Evros Group, which advises on media, marketing, entertainment, and tech deals. Once the new group decides what it wants to be known for, it may discard the units that don't fit that new identity and also divest some agencies that have competing clients or culture clashes.

Other networks will have to look in the mirror and decide if they're strong enough to acquire weaker networks or acknowledge they're falling behind due to tech disruption, Roell added.

"My prediction is that 2025 will serve as a reckoning year for networks," he said.

Other holding companies could partner up

Starting at the top of the food chain, some industry insiders think the upheaval could force two other longtime rivals to come together: French ad-holding company Publicis Groupe, which has been outperforming its competitors lately, and London-based WPP.

"Mark Read has not done the job that he probably expected he would be able to do; [Arthur] Sadoun is doing a great job," Tom Triscari, CEO and founder of Lemonade Projects, a programmatic ad agency, said of WPP's and Publicis' leaders, respectively.

Such a combo might be tricky to align culturally, though. A proposed merger between Publicis Groupe and Omnicom famously broke down in 2014 after they failed to agree on multiple fronts, including which agency would be seen as the acquirer and who would be appointed chief financial officer. It would also need to pass regulatory muster. That could be harder to do if the IPG and Omnicom deal succeeds, reducing the number of big agency groups in the sector. And there would be so much complexity that Publicis might not see the upside.

Another top holding company that could be active is Havas. Its parent, France's Vivendi, just approved its split into four companies. This is set to lead to Havas being publicly traded as its own company. Havas has indicated that it has M&A in its sights.

A number of other smaller, independent ad-holding companies could help bigger players scale up, like Mark Penn's Stagwell, the Bill Koenigsberg-led Horizon Media, or the Martin Sorrell-founded S4 Capital.

David Morgan, executive chairman of TV ad-buying company Simulmedia, said Horizon Media could be in play since Temasek, the investment firm that bought a minority share in 2021, needs an exit at some point.

Digital performance shops like PMG and Kepler also could be of interest.

Private equity has been circling

The big holding companies could also be a target for private-equity giants. Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone have shown interest in media and entertainment. Industry insiders have speculated for months that WPP, which once ranked as No. 1 among agency businesses, could be taken private — or at least some parts of it could be.

"They all see the same thing — these assets are bloated and mismanaged," said an industry player who's had conversations with PE firms. They asked for anonymity to preserve business relationships. Their identity is known to BI.

Another group of potential acquirers is companies like IBM and Capgemini, which provide a range of business solutions. Tata Consultancy Services and Accenture Song have eyed ad agencies as a way to offer end-to-end services to clients. Tata was in talks to buy R/GA this year and Accenture acquired creative agency Droga5 in 2019.

When it comes to deals that are just about getting bigger, though, there's plenty of skepticism that bulking up will solve the problems agencies face.

"Agencies today are not losing to the tech giants because of a shift in power," said Jay Friedman, CEO of the Goodway Group, a brand consulting firm. "They're losing because the capabilities they have aren't fit for how brands need to buy advertising today. They need a better cost model overall, which is global and AI-driven."

• Rebels toppled the Assad regime in Syria after a brutal 13-year civil war.
• Once again, the region's power dynamics have been dramatically reshaped.
• And there are risks and opportunities for the US.

In a lightning two-week campaign that shocked the world, Syrian rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group deposed Bashar Assad, the longtime ruler of Syria.

President Joe Biden cautiously welcomed Assad's removal on Sunday, calling it a "moment of historic opportunity."

With Assad gone, there is a lot at stake for the US, and analysts warn that it must work carefully to further its goals in the region, and avoid the country collapsing into chaos.

Burcu Ozcelik a senior research fellow for Middle East Security at the UK's Royal United Services Institute think tank, said Assad's defeat presents the US with an opportunity to further its longtime goal of denting Iranian regional power.

"With the overthrow of Assad, Iran has been dealt a strategic blow, meeting overarching US objectives to diminish and dismantle Iran's so-called axis of resistance," she said.

But Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab British Understanding, said that since the Arab Spring of 2011, the US has had no diplomatic relations with Syria, and its role in the country in recent years has largely been limited to defeating ISIS.

This means it is still figuring out how to handle the situation.

"All of a sudden, I think they're dusting down documents," he said of the US.

A divided country

When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, it quickly became a brutal struggle for power between rebel militias, government forces, and their powerful foreign backers, including the US, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

The US provided training and support for some rebel groups, notably Kurdish militias and moderate groups, but stopped short of direct involvement in the conflict.

When Islamic State militia seized swaths of northeastern Syria in 2014, and used it as a base for terror attacks in the West, the US led an international campaign to destroy the group.

But it's played a largely limited role in the country since, and has around 900 troops in the northeast, whose task is to quash IS operations and defend the US' Kurdish allies.

This could limit its ability to play a larger role now.

Developing ties

Andreas Krieg, a Gulf specialist at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King's College London, told BI that the US will likely limit its role to a "low-level campaign" fighting ISIS until a new authority is in place in Syria.

One key goal for the US will be to help restore order, defend its allies, and prevent another brutal power struggle among rival militias and religious groups that could spill over into neighboring countries.

According to Mohammed Albasha, founder of Basha Report, a Virginia-based consultancy specializing in Middle East affairs, the end of Assad's rule has led to a "significant security vacuum" that extremist groups could exploit to regroup and expand.

Against that backdrop, the "caretaker government may struggle to deliver basic services," worsening the already dire humanitarian situation, he said.

On top of that, he said the US will likely have to contend with Iran and Russia as they seek to rebuild influence. Both countries will likely act "swiftly" to strike favorable deals with emerging power brokers in Syria, he said.

"Without effective coordination, this could spiral into another civil war."

Iran's power damaged

For years, Iran helped prop up the Assad regime, providing vital economic and military support during the civil war.

With Assad gone, Iran's "Axis of resistance" of states and militias whose mission is to eradicate US regional influence and destroy Israel looks much weaker, according to the Royal United Services Institute's Ozcelik.

She added: "As the dust settles, Iran will seek to carve out a reformed role for itself in a post-Assad Syria in the months and years to come, but for now, Tehran is weakened in its foreign policy adventurism and reputation in the Middle East."

Russia has also suffered a defeat with the overthrow of Assad.

Russian forces played a key role in rolling back advances by rebels when Russia entered the conflict in 2015. According to reports, Assad and his family have taken refuge in Moscow.

With Assad gone, Russia may have lost access to strategically vital military bases in Syria.

Who will take over?

Speculation is swirling on who will take power in the vacuum left by Assad's deposal.

Among the key contenders is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia that played a central role in defeating Assad, and who fought alongside an Al Qaeda affiliate during the US occupation of Iraq.

The HTS — a militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the US and the United Nations — has controlled Syria's northwestern Idlib Province, where analysts say it worked to consolidate power and transform its image while pursuing its ultimate goal of toppling Assad.

But the group's roots as an affiliate of the terrorist group al Qaeda will likely be of concern in Washington, which has a $10 million bounty on the head of al-Jolani that US officials are now reportedly discussing removing.

"The terrorist designation of HTS and al-Jolani's own violent legacy in Iraq against American troops makes him far from an ideal partner for peace from the perspective of Western policymakers," said Ozcelik.

In a post on Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said the US should stay out of the conflict.

Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, an international organization formed to combat the threat from extremist ideologies, said the main US concerns revolve around whether the HTS would seek stable governance, or continued insurgency.

"Some aspects of their rule in Idlib have been exclusionary and tyrannical," he said, "yet they claim to have cut ties with Al-Qaeda and to embrace diversity (Christians, Kurds, etc.) as part of Syria's identity."

Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Kent, meanwhile, said he struggles to see how Washington could work with al-Jolani directly unless he completely abandons his jihadist rhetoric and animosity toward Israel.

"Jolani is associated with al Qaeda and throughout much of his 'career' has expressed staunch anti-American and anti-Western views," he said.

However, he said another risk is that Syria breaks into territories controlled by competing militias and warlords, which he said would turn Syria into a potential base for terrorist activities.

From a US perspective, that would arguably be far worse.

On Thursday, OpenAI released what’s effectively a $200-a-month chatbot — and the AI community didn’t know quite what to make of it. The company’s new ChatGPT Pro plan grants access to “o1 pro mode,” which OpenAI says “uses more compute for the best answers to the hardest questions.” A souped-up version of OpenAI’s o1 reasoning […]

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Between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, people in Alaska kept reinventing dogs with mixed results.

The dogs that share our homes today are the descendants of a single group of wolves that lived in Siberia about 23,000 years ago. But for thousands of years after that split, the line between wolf and dog wasn’t quite clear-cut. A recent study shows that long after dogs had spread into Eurasia and the Americas, people living in what is now Alaska still spent time with—and fed—a bizarre mix of dogs, wolves, dog-wolf hybrids, and even some coyotes.

We just can’t stop feeding the wildlife

University of Arizona archaeologist François Lanoë and his colleagues studied 111 sets of bones from dogs and wolves from archaeological sites across the Alaskan interior. The oldest bones came from wolves that roamed what’s now Alaska long before people set foot there, and the most recent came from modern, wild Alaskan wolves. In between, the researchers worked with the remains of both wolves and dogs (and even a couple of coyotes) that span a swath of time from about 1,000 to around 14,000 years ago. And it turns out that even the wolves were tangled up in the lives of nearby humans.

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• AWS unveiled a new AI chip and a supercomputer at its Re: Invent conference on Tuesday.
• It's a sign that Amazon is ready to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for AI chips.
• Amazon isn't alone: Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are also designing their own AI chips.

Big Tech's next AI era will be all about controlling silicon and supercomputers of their own. Just ask Amazon.

At its Re: Invent conference on Tuesday, the tech giant's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, unveiled the next line of its AI chips, Trainium3, while announcing a new supercomputer that will be built with its own chips to serve its AI ambitions.

It marks a significant shift from the status quo that has defined the generative AI boom since OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, in which the tech world has relied on Nvidia to secure a supply of its industry-leading chips, known as GPUs, for training AI models in huge data centers.

While Nvidia has a formidable moat — experts say its hardware-software combination serves as a powerful vendor lock-in system — AWS' reveal shows companies are finding ways to take ownership of the tech shaping the next era of AI development.

Putting your own chips on the table

On the chip side, Amazon shared that Trainium2, which was first unveiled at last year's Re: Invent, was now generally available. Its big claim was that the chip offers "30-40% better price performance" than the current generation of servers with Nvidia GPUs.

That would mark a big step up from its first series of chips, which analysts at SemiAnalysis described on Tuesday as "underwhelming" for generative AI training and used instead for "training non-complex" workloads within Amazon, such as credit card fraud detection.

"With the release of Trainium2, Amazon has made a significant course correction and is on a path to eventually providing a competitive custom silicon," the SemiAnalysis researchers wrote.

Trainium3, which AWS gave a preview of ahead of a late 2025 release, has been billed as a "next-generation AI training chip." Servers loaded with Trainium3 chips offer four times greater performance than those packed with Trainium2 chips, AWS said.

Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, told The Wall Street Journal that some of the company's chip push is due to there being "really only one choice on the GPU side" at present, given Nvidia's dominant place in the market. "We think that customers would appreciate having multiple choices," he said.

It's an observation that others in the industry have noted and responded to. Google has been busy designing its own chips that reduce its dependence on Nvidia, while OpenAI is reported to be exploring custom, in-house chip designs of its own.

But having in-house silicon is just one part of this.

The supercomputer advantage

AWS acknowledged that as AI models trained on GPUs continue to get bigger, they are "pushing the limits of compute and networking infrastructure."

That means companies serious about building their own AI models — like Amazon in its partnership with Anthropic, the OpenAI rival that raised a total of $8 billion from the tech giant — will need access to highly specialized computing that can handle a new era of AI.

With this in mind, AWS shared that it was working with Anthropic to build an "UltraCluster" of servers that form the basis of a supercomputer it has named Project Rainier. According to Amazon, it will scale model training across "hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips."

"When completed, it is expected to be the world's largest AI compute cluster reported to date available for Anthropic to build and deploy their future models on," AWS said in a blog, adding that it will be "over five times the size" of the cluster used to build Anthropic's last model.

The supercomputer push follows similar moves elsewhere. The Information first reported earlier this year that OpenAI and Microsoft were working together to build a $100 billion AI supercomputer called Stargate.

Of course, Nvidia is also in the supercomputer business and aims to make them a big part of its allure to companies looking to use its next-generation AI chips, Blackwell.

Last month, for instance, Nvidia announced that SoftBank, the first customer to receive its new Blackwell-based servers, would use them to build a supercomputer for AI development. Elon Musk has also bragged about his company xAI building a supercomputer with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs in Memphis this year.

AWS made no secret that it remains tied to Nvidia for now. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Garman acknowledged that Nvidia is responsible for "99% of the workloads" for training AI models today and doesn't expect that to change anytime soon.

That said, Garman reckoned "Trainium can carve out a good niche" for itself. He'll be wise to recognize that everyone else is busy carving out a niche for themselves, too.

• Russia carried out airstrikes in Syria after rebels launched an offensive against the Syrian government.
• Russia and Iran have supported Syrian President Bashar Assad for years.
• Here's why Syria is so important for both Moscow and Tehran.

Russia has been carrying out airstrikes on Syrian rebel fighters who are advancing through the country as part of an offensive that has seen them seize control of Aleppo, one of Syria's largest cities.

The surprise offensive, led by Islamist militants from the opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, marks the most significant escalation in the Syrian civil war in years — and the outcome has serious implications for both Russia and Iran.

Russia's gateway to the Mediterranean

Syria holds strategic importance for Moscow and Tehran, which have both supported Syrian President Bashar Assad's embattled regime.

For Russia, which operates two major military bases in the country — the Hmeimim airbase and the Tartus naval base — Syria offers a key foothold in the region, giving its forces crucial access to the Mediterranean Sea and a launching pad for operations in Africa.

Russia has sought to extend its influence across the Middle East and Africa in recent years as a counterweight to the US, forging closer ties with key Middle Eastern players like Iran and Saudi Arabia and reportedly providing African governments with security assistance through the Wagner mercenary group.

Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot afford to lose a Russia-friendly government in Syria for fear of losing the airbase and warm water port crucial to maintaining its influence in the region.

"It's used that port and the base as a launching pad to move into Africa," Hall said. "At one point, there were at least 30 Russian warships in the Mediterranean, whereas just a few years prior, there were none."

Zineb Riboua, a research fellow and program manager at the Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, said losing Syria would be "a big deal for Russia."

"Most of its plans in the Sahel and Libya revolve around supporting Russia's access to the Mediterranean, without a strong Russian military base in Syria, all of Putin's plans collapse," Riboua wrote on X.

Putin's support for Assad helped boost his popularity in Africa, Riboua continued, adding that losing Syria would "make Putin not just look weak, but look unreliable to many African countries that rely today on Wagner."

Iran's network of proxies

Syria also provides Iran with access to the Mediterranean via a land corridor that extends from Tehran through to Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut, connecting its proxies in the region.

"For Iran, Syria is absolutely essential in order to maintain its proxy network," Hall said. "It now has this unimpeded route from Tehran all the way to Lebanon."

Syria is particularly important for Iran's ability to support the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which for over a year has been embroiled in conflict with Israel. Israel has recently thrown this top Iranian ally into disarray, killing its longtime leader and wounding thousands of its fighters with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. A cease-fire agreement was reached between Israel and Hezbollah last week.

"Iran is deeply invested in Syria with dozens of military bases and other facilities because the country is critical to Tehran's support for Hezbollah," wrote Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

Syria provides Tehran with a place to manufacture weapons and a route to transport them, as well as a command post for Iranian commanders who work with Hezbollah, Cook said.

But Israeli strikes on the militant group have impacted Iran's corridor and put its position in the region under pressure.

Tehran may, therefore, see the Syrian conflict as a way to reimpose itself in the region, Riboua said in another post on X.

"Weakened in Lebanon and Gaza, Iran now views the conflict in Syria as an opportunity to reassert its influence by joining the Assad regime against its opposition," Riboua said. "Tehran likely sees this renewed involvement as a chance to restore its legitimacy and strengthen its control over its proxies."

Latest conflict is 'no surprise'

Russian ties with Syria trace back to the Cold War-era when Moscow supplied arms to the country.

The two countries grew closer under the leadership of Putin and Assad, as the former sought to expand and defend Russian interests in the Middle East.

In 2015, this resulted in Russia directly intervening in the country's civil war, which began in 2011, to prop up Assad.

Over the following years, Moscow steadily built up its military presence in Syria, and by 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that more than 63,000 Russian troops had "received combat experience" in the country.

But following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow's Syrian operations were put on the back burner, and it reportedly redeployed some troops, mercenaries, and military equipment from Syria to Ukraine.

Iran and Syria, meanwhile, have had strong relations since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Iranian troops are also reported to have fought alongside Syrian government forces in 2015.

But like Russia, Iran's priorities have shifted in recent months, with Tehran locked with Israel in a series of escalating long-range strikes.

For the US, that meant the latest offensive seemingly came as no great shock.

Speaking to NBC News, national security advisor Jake Sullivan said that Assad's three key backers, Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, had all "been distracted and weakened by conflicts elsewhere."

"So it's no surprise that you see actors in Syria, including the rebels, try to take advantage of that," he added.

For Russia and Iran, the fall of Aleppo will nevertheless come as a humiliating blow, Hall said.

It shows "how weak their ally is, even after 13 years of war," she added.