Post by Ziad Matar

On Monday evening, a young Lebanese artist called Adriana Diab, stood in a piazza in Trastevere and sang "Sarà perché ti amo," and broke the instaverse. While I have had the song stuck in my head for a few months, this actually turned out to be a fitting soundtrack for a week when all roads led back to Rome. The same day, a few hours' drive away, Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first electric car, designed by Jony Ive's LoveFrom and priced from EUR 550,000. (My first thought: a beautiful, very expensive Fiat.) And in the Vatican, Magnifica Humanitas, the first papal encyclical on AI, was published. For one day the usual flow ran in reverse. From Beirut and San Francisco, all roads led back to Rome, while Italy, not Silicon Valley, set the week's AI agenda. That is the opening of the new issue of The Compute by Tokenando. From there we follow the money behind the moment: the SpaceX S-1, the first audited look inside a frontier AI business; Andrej Karpathy's bet that AI can help build AI; and the geopolitical reality of the Gulf's compute ambitions. The Compute is out every Thursday for the people who need the map (link in comments).