Large language models have a keen appetite for electricity. The energy used to train OpenAI’s gpt-4 model could have powered 50 American homes for a century. And as models get bigger, costs rise rapidly. By one estimate, today’s biggest models cost $100m to train; the next generation could cost $1bn, and the following one $10bn. … Read more
Mr Pichai is not alone. New Street Research, a firm of analysts, estimates that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will together splurge $104bn on building AI data centres this year. Add in spending by smaller tech firms and other industries and the total AI data-centre binge between 2023 and 2027 could reach $1.4trn. The scale … Read more
When Aravind Srinivas was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to do a PhD, his mother was disappointed. Like many Indian parents, she wanted him to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But things worked out after all; on the west coast he interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, both of which became … Read more
When ChatGPT took everyone by storm in November 2022, it was OpenAI, the startup behind it, that seized the business world’s attention. But, as usual, big tech is back on the front foot. Nvidia, maker of accelerator chips that are at the core of generative artificial intelligence (AI), is now duelling with Microsoft, a tech … Read more
The comparison with the famously capex-happy energy industry is apt not just because of the sums involved. AI needs vast amounts of processing power. And that processing power needs vast amounts of electricity. On May 2nd Bob Blue, chief executive of Dominion Energy, one of America’s biggest utilities, said that data-centre developers now regularly ask … Read more
Fund of funds (FoFs) that invest in overseas exchange traded funds (ETFs) will stop accepting fresh inflows from 1 April as the mutual fund industry is close to hitting its $1-billion limit to invest in overseas ETFs. However, investors can still diversify globally as some international funds have headroom to invest in international stocks. These … Read more
Trustbusters have big tech in their sights. On March 25th the European Commission opened a probe into Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta (which is Facebook’s). Regulators in Brussels think the measures which the American technology behemoths have put in place to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a sweeping new law meant to … Read more