Alex Reisner writes: When Jon Peters uploaded his first video to YouTube in 2010, he had no idea where it would lead. He was a professional woodworker running a small business who decided to film himself making a dining table with some old legs he had found in a barn. It turned out that people liked his candid style, and as he posted more videos, a fan base began to grow. “All of a sudden there’s people who appreciate the…
AI needs a lot of energy — and a new Bloomberg investigation has found that those soaring costs are being passed on to consumers who live near data centers. On today’s Big Take podcast, host David Gura talks to Bloomberg reporters Josh Saul and Leonardo Nicoletti about the AI boom’s impact on power bills, how utility companies are handling surging demand and the implications for communities with centers in their backyards.
Jacob Metcalf writes: United States President Donald Trump has notoriously never used a computer or had an email address, yet is proximally responsible for an unprecedented, rapid, and dangerous technological transformation of the federal government. The speed and drama of the first months of the second Trump administration are inextricably linked with technology, from executive orders intended to clear any obstacle to industry’s efforts to advance artificial intelligence, to the increased use of surveillance technologies to scrutinize visa holders and…
The Guardian reports: Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal. Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the…
Harvard Business Review reports: A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in…
Steven Levy writes: For decades, Mark Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him. But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and…
Spoiler alert: Yes, AI is bad for the climate. AI’s computing power relies on massive data centers that use enormous amounts of electricity and water. The Trump administration wants that energy to come from burning fossil fuels, rather than renewable sources. Where does that leave the climate and communities caught in the crosshairs? Inside Climate News executive editor Vernon Loeb sits down with Dan Gearino, ICN’s clean energy reporter; Arcelia Martin, who covers renewable energy in Texas; and Alabama…
Axios reports: While policymakers and headlines have traditionally zeroed in on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X, young people are increasingly gathering on gaming platforms — and having conversations that are typically anonymous and largely invisible to the outside world. Why it matters: Spaces like Discord, Roblox and Steam — built for gamers to connect — have evolved into the social discourse hubs where authentic interactions happen, as mainstream apps chase virality instead. Now, these gaming platforms are drawing new scrutiny…
Forbes reports: In 2021, Meta banned a surveillance company called Cobwebs from gathering intelligence across all its platforms. Its security staff had discovered Cobwebs, founded by former members of Israel’s elite cyber intel agencies, was using hundreds of accounts to snoop on Facebook and WhatsApp users, many of them activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico. Since then, ICE has spent over $5 million on the company’s tools, with one $2 million purchase made this week…
Kaitlyn Tiffany and Matteo Wong write: On Tuesday afternoon, three parents sat in a row before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Two of them had each recently lost a child to suicide; the third has a teenage son who, after cutting his arm in front of her and biting her, is undergoing residential treatment. All three blame generative AI for what has happened to their children. They had come to testify on what appears to be an…
Nathan Heller writes: On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger’s phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for…
Ariana Bindman writes: While San Francisco’s tech world has always been obnoxious on a cultural level due to its own lack of self-awareness, what it’s morphing into now is downright terrifying. As websites like Teespring continue to peddle pumpkin spice propaganda to die-hard autumnal girlies, OpenAI and Anthropic are sucking up billions of dollars in funding, signaling a new dawn in the Bay Area’s capitalist landscape. Perhaps in a futile effort to keep up, powerful biotech, hardware and software companies…
Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s AI action plan has set off a backlash from some of the biggest figures in the America First movement — a rift expected to shape the next round of arguments in Congress about how to turbocharge the technology. Trump’s rush toward AI is exposing an important faultline in the Republican coalition: Many of its voters and leaders deeply mistrust the power of Big Tech, but Trump himself has worked closely with industry CEOs to deliver…
The Wall Street Journal reports: How much would you invest in the possibility of living to 150 or beyond? Or having 20 extra healthy years? For the ultrawealthy, it’s more than $5 billion over the past 2½ decades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of longevity investment deals in PitchBook, public company statements and regulatory filings. Silicon Valley giants Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Yuri Milner and Marc Andreessen are among the boldface names behind the influx of money in…
Rogé Karma writes: If there is any field in which the rise of AI is already said to be rendering humans obsolete—in which the dawn of superintelligence is already upon us—it is coding. This makes the results of a recent study genuinely astonishing. In the study, published in July, the think tank Model Evaluation & Threat Research randomly assigned a group of experienced software developers to perform coding tasks with or without AI tools. It was the most rigorous test…
University of Copenhagen: Chemists at the University of Copenhagen have developed a method to convert plastic waste into a climate solution for efficient and sustainable CO2 capture. This is killing two birds with one stone as they address two of the world’s biggest challenges: plastic pollution and the climate crisis. The work is published in the journal Science Advances. As CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere keep rising regardless of years of political intentions to limit emissions, the world’s oceans are…