Category: 3. Tech

Yes, Google’s line up of consumer-facing products is the slickest on offer. The firm is bundling most of its multimodal models into its Gemini app, including the new Imagen 4 image generator and the new Veo 3 video-generator. That means you can…

Mitsubishi’s bragging rights for designing the world’s fastest Rubik’s…

+ But it’s not all doom and gloom. Check out the reasons to be optimistic, and examine why future AI systems could be far less energy intensive than today’s.

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do

The news: Millions of…

3/ More efficient cooling in data centers

Another huge source of energy demand is the need to manage the waste heat produced by the high-end hardware on which AI models run. Tom Earp, engineering director at the design firm Page, has been…

These somewhat unlikely partnerships could be a win for both the nuclear power industry and large tech companies. Tech giants need guaranteed sources of energy, and many are looking for low-emissions ones to hit their climate goals. For…

Despite the fact that billions of dollars are being poured into reshaping energy infrastructure around the needs of AI, no one has settled on a way to quantify AI’s energy usage. Worse, companies are generally unwilling to disclose their own…

Part Three: Fuel and emissions

Now that we have an estimate of the total energy required to run an AI model to produce text, images, and videos, we can work out what that means in terms of emissions that cause climate change.

First, a data center…

“In the extreme case, at the end of the century, that’s pretty much all of winter,” says Sean McKenna, executive director of hydrologic sciences at the Desert Research Institute, a research division of the Nevada System of Higher…

Innovation in IT got us to this point. Graphics processing units (GPUs) that power the computing behind AI have fallen in cost by 99% since 2006. There was similar concern about the energy use of data centers in the early 2010s, with wild…