Dr Fazal Ali

The fu­ture is still about fig­ur­ing out what ques­tions to ask. This is more im­por­tant than find­ing the cor­rect an­swer to the wrong ques­tion. We once learned to use search en­gines to do more im­pact­ful things. Now we are learn­ing to use AI to ush­er in an era of in­cred­i­ble pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and rad­i­cal abun­dance.

AI is rapid­ly re­shap­ing how peo­ple work, cre­ate, and solve prob­lems. It is fast. It is every­where. But ve­loc­i­ty and ubiq­ui­ty are not imag­i­na­tion and an­tic­i­pa­tion. Cur­sor’s 25-year-old CEO, Michael Tru­ell, who dropped out of MIT, has just inked a US$60 bil­lion deal with SpaceX. Elon Musk, who holds 42 per cent of SpaceX’s eq­ui­ty and rough­ly 79 per cent of vot­ing pow­er via su­per-vot­ing shares, has now locked in his bets to win the AI race. Cur­sor can give SpaceX the kind of growth nar­ra­tive the mar­ket will chase.

Tru­ell’s imag­i­na­tion and his adept­ness to an­tic­i­pate what comes next have pro­pelled his start­up along one of the fastest up­ward tra­jec­to­ries in Sil­i­con Val­ley his­to­ry. The val­u­a­tion of his start­up has sky­rock­et­ed al­most as fast as AI’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties have im­proved. Cur­sor is a cod­ing as­sis­tant with its own in­te­grat­ed de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment (IDE), in which the com­pa­ny’s AI is built in. Cur­sor’s AI ca­pa­bil­i­ties al­low the user to code more quick­ly by con­stant­ly “think­ing” and pre­dict­ing the next piece of code the hu­man is like­ly to write.

This is not a glib ob­ser­va­tion. It is al­lur­ing to those in­ter­est­ed in the so­cio-eco­nom­ic op­er­at­ing sys­tems (OS) of screen economies, and in the mak­ing of minds like Demis Has­s­abis, CEO of Google. Eu­rope did not stum­ble in­to moder­ni­ty. Eu­rope made the mod­ern world. Eu­rope is pro­duc­ing many No­bel Lau­re­ates, but the Bronx in New York, the Bay Area, and Los An­ge­les have so­cio-eco­nom­ic op­er­at­ing sys­tems that out­strip those of Lon­don. Lon­don is now the world’s fourth-largest ven­ture hub, with US$17.7 bil­lion in 2025. A 58 per cent in­crease com­pared to 2024.

Punch­ing above its weight, Lon­don is now out­strip­ping the com­bined num­ber of uni­corns in Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. But this is still not enough. Late-stage fund­ing re­mains a thin sheet of ice, push­ing ma­tur­ing, scal­ing com­pa­nies to­wards US list­ings or out­right Amer­i­can ac­qui­si­tion. The AI grav­i­ty is pulling open-source AI plat­forms to­wards Bei­jing and the Bay Area. In April 2026, Open­Claw be­came a vi­ral AI phe­nom­e­non in Chi­na. De­vel­oped by Aus­tri­an pro­gram­mer Pe­ter Stein­berg­er, it is an open-source au­tonomous AI agent de­signed to man­age tasks across Apps such as WeChat, Telegram and oth­ers.

Eu­rope is pro­duc­ing more No­bel Lau­re­ates and grad­u­ates per capi­ta, and more jour­nal ar­ti­cles than any com­pa­ra­ble re­gion. House­holds in Eu­rope hold about €37 tril­lion in fi­nan­cial as­sets. How­ev­er, Mario Draghi’s 2024 re­port con­tends that Eu­rope must pro­found­ly re­fo­cus its col­lec­tive ef­forts on clos­ing the in­no­va­tion gap with the US and Chi­na. The Draghi Re­port re­volves around dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture, high-per­for­mance com­put­ing, and AI, form­ing the ba­sis for the EU Cloud and AI De­vel­op­ment Act. Mar­ket analy­sis avail­able in ear­ly 2026 shows that, with­in the last 50 years, no AI com­pa­nies head­quar­tered in the EU, found­ed from scratch, have reached a mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of €100 bil­lion, while six US com­pa­nies with a val­u­a­tion above €1 tril­lion have been cre­at­ed in this pe­ri­od.

Mo­roc­co’s US$700 mil­lion, 55-storey sky­scraper in Salé, de­signed by Iraqi-British ar­chi­tect Za­ha Ha­did, is part of the Casablan­ca Fi­nance City (CFC). The CFC aims to serve as a strate­gic gate­way for in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness­es ex­pand­ing in­to North, West and Cen­tral Africa. The gate­way of­fers favourable tax regimes and in­cen­tives to en­cour­age for­eign in­vest­ment. Recog­nis­ing that com­mer­cial iden­ti­ty alone is in­suf­fi­cient in the Age of AI, the CFC is align­ing with the AI zeit­geist sweep­ing across the con­ti­nent as deep-sea fi­bre-op­tic ca­bles en­cir­cle the con­ti­nent.

AI is now ac­ces­si­ble to SEA, CSEC, and CAPE stu­dents, fac­ul­ty, and schol­ars in high­er ed­u­ca­tion; en­tre­pre­neurs; wireben­ders; and pro­fes­sion­als in every prac­tice. From writ­ing as­sis­tants and de­sign gen­er­a­tors to da­ta analy­sis tools and au­toma­tion soft­ware, AI is now a reg­u­lar part of con­tem­po­rary work.

Lov­able, Claude Code, Cur­sor, Codex, and Replit can take any­one from idea to a work­ing pro­to­type on these brown leaves of is­lands that cling to the blue rim of the Caribbean Basin with­out the need to learn the fun­da­men­tals of pro­gram­ming. Gov­ern­ments need to en­cour­age and even at­tract every work­er and life­long learn­er in­to the Vibe-cod­ing Open-Source space.

Claude Code and Codex are de­vel­op­er-fo­cused with a slight learn­ing curve. Lov­able and Replit have no re­al learn­ing curve. Un­like Claude Code and Codex, where you see the re­sult at the end, Love­able and Replit let you watch the App you are build­ing take shape in re­al time. This makes it pos­si­ble for “dream­ers” to course-cor­rect in re­sponse to serendip­i­tous gifts that ap­pear out of the blue.

Dr Fazal Ali com­plet­ed his Mas­ter's in Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. He was a Com­mon­wealth Schol­ar who at­tend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, Hugh­es Hall, the Provost of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go, the act­ing Pres­i­dent of UTT and the Chair­man of the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. He is the Pres­i­dent of NI­HERST and an ex­ter­nal ser­vices con­sul­tant with the IDB.