The article is scary… I used to study biology and still know a dozen antibiotics by heart. This was resistant to everything I remembered. Reading the passage, I was unable to guess what they treated it with. The article follows up by telling, however. :)

Testing indicated that the cholera strain that the travelers brought home was a particularly nasty one. V. cholerae O1, which is linked to other recent outbreaks in Eastern and Middle Africa, is resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics, namely: fluroquinolones, trimethoprim, chloramphenicol, aminoglycosides, beta-lactams, macrolides, and sulphonamides. The strain also carried a separate genetic element (a plasmid) that provided resistance mechanisms against streptomycin and spectinomycin, cephalosporins, macrolides, and sulphonamides.

Note: design and licensing is a far cry for semiconductor fabbing, and not every country can do the latter.

Most countries depend ridiculously much on TSMC (from Taiwan), while TSMC depends ridiculously much on instruments from ASML (from the Netherlands). Grossly simplified, getting where those two currently are takes a decade, and by that time they’ll be a decade ahead (unless they get lazy).

As far as I recall, Samsung (South Korea) can fabricate large quantities of semiconductors on their own (but several times less than TSMC). Then come several Chinese companies, one in the US and one in Israel. Beyond that, there’s very small fish. The only European foundry worth mentioning (X-Fab) has dropped out of the top 10.

Wow, interesting. :)

Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.