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
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” HAL 9000, the murderous computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is one of many examples in science fiction of an artificial intelligence (AI) that outwits its human creators with deadly consequences. Recent progress in AI, notably the release of ChatGPT, has pushed the question of “existential … 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
Since AI’s most popular offering, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, debuted two years back and made esoteric AI tech accessible to the masses, there has been excitement over intelligent machines taking over mundane tasks or assisting humans in complex work. Geeks declared that costs would drop and productivity skyrocket, eventually leading to ‘artificial general intelligence’, when machines would … 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
“For India and other emerging countries, technology shifts are opportunities to catch up or leap ahead,” Pichai said. India was unlikely to match developed countries in personal computing penetration, but in mobile adoption, more people gained access than in previous generations, Pichai elaborated. Many people skipped landlines and went straight to cellular phones. With each … 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
In an unusual turn of events, Meta’s AI chatbot has found itself embroiled in controversy after a perplexing exchange within a prominent New York City parenting group on Facebook. The chatbot, developed by Meta to interact with users across its platforms, raised eyebrows when it claimed to have a child enrolled in a prestigious New … Read more
In recent weeks, some of the best-known players in artificial intelligence have intensified their efforts to gain dominance in the AI space. Anthropic, a startup backed by Google and Amazon, launched Claude 3 Opus. Google launched Gemini, but is back to the drawing board after facing complaints. Meta is spending billions to create AGI, or … Read more
In an ambitious move, Meta Platforms is gearing up to launch the latest version of its artificial intelligence language model, Llama 3, in July. This upgraded model is poised to revolutionize the way it responds to contentious questions posed by users, as reported by The Information on Wednesday. The core objective of Meta’s research team … Read more