Friday Wrap : Volume 5

Believe it or not, it's Friday again and so here is a quick rundown of the stories that caught my eye this week.

AI energy demands

It's well known that AI data centres suck up a lot of power. But according to this article, quoting MIT research, one AI-generated video can use more energy than three hours of continuous home cooking. It probably doesn't taste very good either.

Copilots or HUDs?

Geoffrey Litt has a great write up of what's wrong with the AI as co-pilot metaphor. Essentially he says we should be looking for something more like an AI HUD (heads up display) that provides us insight when we need it not a virtual co-pilot who is constantly interrupting us. Best of all, this is all based on a talk from 1992 - and still we haven't got it right.

Not just artificial, now it's super too!

Mark Zuckerberg has released a memo in which he tries to convince us that Meta is close to demonstrating "Super Intelligence", whatever that might be. It's heavy on rhetoric and very sparse on actual examples. Remember that this is the guy who was last year trying to convince us that the Metaverse was the most exciting development since the silicon chip.

It's the dotcom boom all over again

Wall Street has lost touch with reality over AI share prices, according to Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a major global investment firm. Slok's research shows that AI stocks are even more massively overvalued than the dotcom boom darlings were in the late 90s. If he's right, the financial markets across the world are in for one heck of a crash.

AI = An Indian

Builder.AI was a darling of the new AI-powered startup market. Its chatbot would enable companies to build their websites and apps faster than ever by leveraging AI to do the heavy lifting. Except, of course, it was all a scam. The majority of the work was outsourced to low wage economies such as India. Rest of World has a great deep look at what was going on inside the company.