Section

Artificial Intelligence

What's actually happening in AI, minus the hype and the doom.

Your AI Prompt Uses About Five Drops of Water. That Is Not the Number You Should Be Worried About.

Google says one Gemini prompt costs 0.24 watt-hours and five drops of water. Both numbers are real. Both are also close to useless for answering the question people are actually asking.

The World Built AI in English First. India Just Spent $1.25 Billion to Build One in Its Own Languages

A government program is renting out nearly 60,000 GPUs to Indian startups at a fraction of market price, and a translation platform fields tens of millions of requests a day in languages ChatGPT still stumbles over. Not every bet has paid off yet.

AI Just Won a Nobel Prize for Cracking a Problem That Stumped Biology for 50 Years

For 50 years, working out how a single protein folds took years of lab work. Then an AI learned to predict it in seconds, and it just won a Nobel Prize for it.

Your Chatbot Is Just Guessing the Next Word. So Why Is It So Good?

The model at the heart of it looks nothing up and knows no facts. It plays the most sophisticated game of autocomplete ever built, and that one idea explains what it gets brilliantly right and embarrassingly wrong.