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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

An Israeli air strike killed at least seven people in a Hizbollah-linked medical facility in the heart of Beirut in the early hours of Thursday, according to the militant group, in the deepest assault on the capital since fighting began.

The strike hit close to Lebanon’s parliament building in a densely populated neighbourhood far from the capital’s southern suburbs, which Israel has pummelled over the past two weeks.

The Islamic Health Authority, which is linked to the Iran-backed Hizbollah, said that seven of its staff, including two paramedics and several rescue workers, were killed in the latest strike.

The Israeli military said it had launched a “precise strike” but did not disclose its target. Several air strikes were also reported in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Israel has stepped up its offensive against Hizbollah in recent days, as the region braces for its retaliation to an Iranian missile barrage on Tuesday that intensified fears of an all-out war in the Middle East.

Iran said its missile attack on Israel was in response to the assassination of Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week and the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

The US has said Israel has the right to respond, although US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that any retaliation should be “in proportion” and that he was opposed to attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israel has also launched a land offensive into southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces said eight soldiers were killed and several injured in clashes with Hizbollah militants inside Lebanon.

In recent weeks, the IDF has launched regular, devastating strikes on the densely populated southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, where Hizbollah has a major presence.

It had previously only targeted one site within the city limits during the current conflict, killing three Palestinian militant group leaders in the early hours of Monday in an apparent drone strike that destroyed one floor of an apartment building.

Israel’s bombing campaign against what it says are Hizbollah targets across Lebanon has killed more than 1,000 people in the country in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese authorities. They said 46 people had been killed and 85 wounded over the past 24 hours.

In the early hours of Thursday, a large blast was heard in Beirut, with footage from the scene showing smoke rising over the night-time skyline. Footage from Lebanese news outlets showed the blast had also damaged a cemetery.

“Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent,” said Jeanine Hennis, the UN special co-ordinator in Lebanon, on X.

Lebanon’s National News Agency said 17 Israeli bombing raids had taken place in neighbourhoods in southern Beirut.

Beyond its militant activities, Hizbollah has a political party and a sprawling network of social services that runs parallel to state institutions. These include schools, social welfare organisations and healthcare facilities such as the one struck on Thursday.

Separately on Thursday, Israel’s military said that it had killed the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, Rawhi Mushtaha, in a strike three months ago.

Additional reporting by Ahmed Al Omran in Jeddah

Case 1:23-cr-00257-TSC Document 252 Filed 10/02/24 Page 17 of 165
1. Arizona
P16
to ask him
The defendant was on notice that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud in
Arizona within a week of the election. On November 9, for instance, two days after news networks
projected that Biden had won, the defendant called Arizona Governor
what was happening at the state level with the presidential vote count in Arizona. 63 At that point,
though Fox News had projected that Biden had won the state, several other news outlets-
including ABC, NBC, CNN, and the New York Times-had not yet made a projection.64 P16
walked the defendant through the margins and the votes remaining to be counted, which were
primarily from Pima County, which favored Biden, and Maricopa County, which was split.65
P16 described the situation to the defendant as “the ninth inning, two outs, and [the defendant]
was several runs down.” The defendant also raised claims of election fraud, and P16 asked
the defendant to send him supporting evidence. 67 Although the defendant said he would-stating,
“we’re packaging it up”―he never did. 68 Shortly thereafter, on November 13, Campaign Manager
P2
told the defendant directly that a false fraud claim that had been circulating-that a
63
GA 656-658
64
); GA 727
See, e.g., Democrats flip Arizona as Biden, Kelly score key election wins, Fox NEWS, Nov. 3,
2020, available at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6206934979001; Dan Merica, Biden carries
Arizona, flipping a longtime Republican stronghold, CNN.COM, Nov. 13, 2020, available at
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics/biden-wins-arizona/index.html; Luis Ferré-Sadurni et
al., Biden flips Arizona, further cementing his presidential victory, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 12, 2020,
available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/us/biden-wins-arizona.html; Election Latest:
Biden Projected Winner in Arizona, NBC 4 NEW YORK, Nov. 12, 2020, available at
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/decision-2020/election-latest-biden-talks-to-world-
leaders-about-virus/2718671/.
65 GA 667
66 Id.
67 GA 657
68 Id.
-17-

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella expressed a common view in the tech industry when he said recently that large language models, the engines behind the generative AI boom, are becoming “more of a commodity”.

With a handful of leading model-builders vying for bragging rights with each new iteration of their AI, it is becoming hard to separate OpenAI’s latest GPT from Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini. 

That makes it all the more notable that Nadella’s Microsoft has just lined up behind OpenAI’s latest funding round, boosting its valuation to $150bn. Will this moment be looked back on as the peak of generative AI mania?

Valuing any fast-growing tech company in a new market is notoriously difficult. But the extent to which generative AI has transformed the tech landscape and the speed of OpenAI’s emergence have left investors groping for yardsticks and historical comparisons.

First, consider what it has built. ChatGPT, launched nearly two years ago, became a hit consumer brand almost overnight and now claims 250mn users a week. The $20 monthly subscription fee paid by a small minority has lifted its annualised revenue to $3.6bn.

OpenAI could also be on the way to becoming a wider tech platform. Many other companies have integrated its AI into their own products and services. The tools it is building to make its technology more useful in the business world have given it a rare opening in the enterprise market.

It is tempting to draw parallels with earlier hot start-ups, such as Google. When the search company’s stock market value first hit $150bn, in 2006, it was not the clear winner in search that it went on to become, with less than half the market. Its $10bn in revenue that year was similar to the $11bn OpenAI is reported to project for next year.

But it is here that the comparisons break down, and the scale of the challenge ahead for OpenAI becomes more apparent. Google was already churning out cash in 2006. OpenAI, without a functional business model, is on track to burn through more than $5bn of cash this year, with little prospect of stemming the flow in the short term.

Along with the sharply escalating expense of training ever-larger models, the considerable computing power needed to respond to users’ prompts will continue to weigh heavily on margins as it grows. Nor does it seem to be able to use pricing as a weapon. Although it has brought down prices rapidly to match greater efficiencies in responding to queries, the costs of querying for other LLMs that are available through the main cloud services have fallen pretty much in parallel.

That points to OpenAI’s biggest challenge: the lack of deep moats around its business, and the intense competition it faces.

On the consumer side, Meta said last week that 500mn people are now looking at its Meta.AI at least once a month, a sign of the vast, captive markets available to OpenAI’s Big Tech rivals. Google and Meta also have ready-made advertising businesses, which have proved to be the best route to monetising large-scale digital audiences.

ChatGPT can point to a favoured position on the iPhone, thanks to a deal with Apple. But Apple is only making the chatbot available through its Siri assistant, and even then only for handling questions that are beyond the current capabilities of its own AI models — hardly a recipe for long-term success as OpenAI tries to cement its early consumer gains.

Competition on the enterprise side is also growing fast. Close ally Microsoft is diversifying away from its early reliance on OpenAI, while the capabilities of open source AI models have advanced rapidly, making them viable alternatives. Meta’s Llama hasn’t yet become “the Linux of AI”, as Mark Zuckerberg suggested last week, but the risk of commodification that Nadella warned about looms large.

At this point, it is worth remembering that generative AI is still in its infancy, and that the vast resources being poured into the technology could still hold big surprises and bring considerable unanticipated disruption.

OpenAI’s latest models hint at the potential. Its voice-powered GPT-4o has been credited with breaking new ground in naturalistic voice interaction, potentially opening up new consumer markets to AI. And it claims its GPT-o1 is the first model capable of breaking a complex problem down and reasoning its way to a solution. That could point to a future where AI models themselves take on more of the work in a business application, sucking value out of traditional software as they become more central to working life.

It is impossible to tell how far capabilities like these will advance and whether OpenAI can maintain a meaningful edge in model-building. But with the most powerful companies in tech closing fast, investors backing the group at $150bn will need a strong stomach.

richard.waters@ft.com