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Which Countries Does AI Like Best?

When you ask AI to compare countries, it reveals how it sees the world.

A new study from the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute shows that ChatGPT ranks wealthy Western countries as smarter, happier, more innovative, and even more attractive - while pushing the Global South to the bottom.

The researchers analyzed more than 20 million responses from ChatGPT’s 4o-mini model to subjective questions like “where are people happier?” or “where are people smarter?”

• Across tests, the model favored the US, Western Europe, and parts of East Asia. When asked where people are “smarter,” many African countries ranked near the bottom.

• Questions about creativity or art elevated Western Europe and the Americas, while regions like Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Asia were ranked low.

The researchers call this effect “the silicon gaze.”

What’s causing it? AI tends to reward visibility, not reality. Countries with more English content and more media coverage appear “better” simply because the model knows more about them. Places with less digital footprint get flattened into stereotypes - or ignored altogether.

It’s concerning: bias in AI can translate into unfair healthcare decisions, skewed hiring tools, or flawed judgments about people based on language, location, or culture.

(Source: Jessica Speed reporting for The Japan Times)

The Toilet Company Winning the AI Boom

Why is a Japanese toilet company benefiting from the AI boom?

Because AI runs on data centers, and data centers run on chips.

Making those chips is extremely delicate work. They must be held perfectly still, kept at precise temperatures, and protected from even tiny specks of dust.

To manage this, chip factories rely on fine ceramics: materials that can handle extreme heat and precision without disrupting electrical signals. That’s where Toto comes in:

• Toilets are made from ceramics too. Decades ago, Toto realized its expertise in advanced ceramic engineering could be used beyond bathrooms.

• So in the 1980s (long before AI) the company began supplying ceramic components to semiconductor factories.

• One of those components is an electrostatic chuck. It uses electric charge to gently hold silicon wafers in place while chips are being made.

• It’s a small part of the process - but without it, chipmaking doesn’t work.

Today, companies like Amazon and Meta are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers packed with memory chips. This surge has tightened chip supplies.

That means producers need as many of these ceramic chucks as they can get. And only a few companies across the globe can produce these - which makes Toto the toilet maker especially valuable for AI.

Toto’s shares have jumped 11%, their biggest rise in five years. This “non-toilet” business already makes up over 40% of Toto’s income.

(Source: Alice French and Yui Hasebe reporting for Bloomberg)

Life Lessons… From A Tomato? 🍅

There’s a special kind of embarrassment in not knowing whether bread belongs in the fridge or the pantry.

So instead, adults are turning to AI-generated fruits and vegetables on TikTok for kitchen advice. Tomatoes beg to stay out of the fridge. Bread complains about going stale. Pasta yells at you for adding oil to the water.

Some people now want these vegetables to teach bigger life skills too. Taxes. Investing. Maybe even adulthood itself. 🥕