Invoice Gates launched his annual letter on Friday and it was a bit disturbing. The Microsoft co-founder titled his letter “Optimism with Footnotes.” The footnotes are darkish, to say the least.
“Mates and colleagues typically ask me how I keep optimistic in an period with so many challenges and a lot polarization. My reply is that this: I’m nonetheless an optimist as a result of I see what innovation accelerated by synthetic intelligence will convey. However nowadays, my optimism comes with footnotes,” Gates wrote.
Gates factors to the best way that the world went backwards in 2025 in a single crucial means: the variety of deaths of youngsters underneath 5 years outdated.
“Over the past 25 years, these deaths went down sooner than at some other level in historical past,” wrote Gates. “However in 2025, they went up for the primary time this century, from 4.6 million in 2024 to 4.8 million in 2025—a rise pushed by much less assist from wealthy international locations to poor international locations. This pattern will proceed until we make progress in restoring help budgets.”
Gates has beforehand warned in regards to the destruction of USAID, calling out fellow billionaire Elon Musk specifically for taking a chainsaw to the federal authorities and destroying the overseas help company. If we are able to reverse the pattern, Gates says humanity might get again on monitor.
“The subsequent 5 years will likely be troublesome as we attempt to get again on monitor and work to scale up new lifesaving instruments. But I stay optimistic in regards to the long-term future. As onerous as final 12 months was, I don’t consider we’ll slide again into the Darkish Ages. I consider that, inside the subsequent decade, we is not going to solely get the world again on monitor however enter a brand new period of unprecedented progress,” Gates insisted.
If you wish to learn the letter in full, you’re welcome to do this, however you’ve in all probability learn sufficient miserable shit this week, from the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis to Elon Musk’s robotic making youngster sexual abuse materials.
As an alternative, why don’t you’re taking this second to take a look at a video of a 13kg deer taking over a 1.7-ton rhino? The deer is known as Tata and the Rhino is known as Maruska, based on the Telegraph and so they’re on the Wroclaw Zoo in Poland.
🦌 🦏 Tiny 13kg deer takes on 1.7-tonne rhino at Wroclaw Zoo
A case of David vs Goliath at Wroclaw Zoo, as a tiny 13kg deer takes on a virtually two-tonne rhinoceros and seems to return out of the conflict on high.
— AFP Information Company (@en.afp.com) January 9, 2026 at 4:59 AM
Isn’t that rather more enjoyable than staring on the horrors all day or studying an annual letter from some dude who retains displaying up within the Epstein files? We thought so too. Till we seen that folks had been questioning whether or not the video of the deer and rhino was actual. So far as we are able to inform, it’s not AI, particularly since AFP is a good worldwide information outlet. Additionally, the zoo posted the clip to its personal Facebook web page.
However you by no means know, do you?
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