AI's Rapid Growth: Balancing Innovation with Environmental Concerns

AI's Bizarro World, we're marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar

Happy Friday! I've been covering AI as a daily beat for two and a half years now, but recently I've been feeling like we are living in a kind of Bizarro World, the fictional planet in DC Comics (also made famous in Seinfeld) where everything is opposite -- beauty is hated, ugliness is prized, goodbye is hello -- leading to distorted societal norms, moral values, and logical reasoning. In AI's Bizarro World, a company like OpenAI can blithely tell employees about creating a five-point checklist to track progress toward building artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that is capable of outperforming humans, as Bloomberg reported yesterday -- in a bid towards developing "AGI that benefits all of humanity." At the same time, media headlines can blare about Google and Microsoft's soaring carbon emissions due to computationally intensive and power-hungry generative AI models -- to the detriment of all of humanity. In AI's Bizarro World, the public is encouraged -- and increasingly mandated by their employers -- to use tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to increase productivity and boost efficiency (or, let's be honest, just save a little bit of mental energy). In the meantime, according to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query. So while millions of Americans are advised to turn down their air conditioning to conserve energy, millions are also asking ChatGPT for an energy-sucking synonym, recipe, or haiku. In AI's Bizarro World, AI 'frontier' model companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral can raise billions of dollars at massive valuations to develop their models, but it is the companies with the picks and shovels they rely on -- hello, Nvidia GPUs -- that rake in the most money and stock market value for their energy-intensive processes and physical parts. In AI's Bizarro World, Elon Musk can volunteer his sperm for those looking to procreate in a planned Martian city built by SpaceX, while a proposed supercomputer in Memphis, meant for his AI company X.ai, is expected to add about 150 megawatts to the electric grid's peak demand -- an amount that could power tens of thousands of homes. Of course, there is always a certain amount of madness that goes along with developing new technologies. And the potential for advanced AI systems to help tackle climate change issues -- to predict weather, identify pollution, or improve agriculture, for example -- is real. In addition, the massive costs of developing and running sophisticated AI models will likely continue to put pressure on companies to make them more energy-efficient. Still, as Silicon Valley and the rest of California suffer through ever-hotter summers and restricted water use, it seems like sheer lunacy to simply march towards the development of AGI without being equally concerned about data centers guzzling scarce water resources, AI computing power burning excess electricity, and Big Tech companies quietly stepping away from previously touted climate goals. I don't want Bizarro Superman to guide us toward an AGI future on Bizarro World. I just want a sustainable future on earth -- and hopefully, AI can be a part of it. Today's edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Meyer. X could face EU fine. The European Commission says Elon Musk's X has broken the new Digital Services Act, which governs online content, in multiple ways. That includes "deceiving" users into thinking its paid-for blue checkmarks denote authenticity, not complying with rules about ad transparency, and stopping researchers from accessing its public data. X now gets to defend itself, but, if the Commission confirms its preliminary findings, it could issue a fine of up to 6% of global revenue and demand big changes to how X operates. Apple antitrust. An investigation by India's antitrust body found that Apple has been abusing its position as App Store proprietor by forcing developers to use its billing and payments systems, Reuters reports. Again, the regulator can hit Apple with a fine and tell it to change its ways. SoftBank buys Graphcore. Japan's SoftBank, which has been promising to go all in on AI, has bought the British AI chip company Graphcore. Graphcore, which counts Nvidia and Arm among its rivals, had been hemorrhaging money for a couple years and was desperately seeking a buyer. According to TechCrunch, Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon dismissed the reported $500 million figure for the acquisition as inaccurate, but the companies aren't providing financial details about the deal. -- The number of AT&T customers affected by someone's illegal downloading of call and text records relating to several months in 2022. The FBI is involved and one person has been arrested, Reuters reports. AT&T reckons the data is not publicly available. Tesla walks back Robotaxi reveal, sending its stock plummeting, by Bloomberg 65,000 mugs have gone missing at Tesla's German factory, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez Amazon's $20 billion NBA deal isn't riskless. But it's close, by Jason Del Rey Amazon trails behind in latest U.K. compliance test and is threatened with investigation over poor supplier treatment, by Bloomberg 70,000 students are already using AI textbooks, by Sage Lazzaro How we raised $100 million for my Silicon Valley startup in a down market, by Amir Khan (Commentary) This 84-year-old quit an elite job and went $160K into debt to launch his career. Now he's suing ChatGPT to protect writers like him from 'highway robbery', by the Associated Press COPIED Act. There's a bipartisan push in the Senate to give artists and journalists more protection against voracious AI models. As The Verge reports, the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media (COPIED ) Act would see the creation of security measures that could be added to content to prove its origin and potentially block its use in training AI models. Removing or tampering with these watermarks would be illegal.

AWS aims its AI push at enterprises, and the chip industry dreams of an AI boom - SiliconANGLE

AWS aims its AI push at enterprises, and the chip industry dreams of an AI boom Despite the seeming dominance of OpenAI and Microsoft in generative artificial intelligence, it's becoming clear that the other cloud providers, not to mention AI startups, will make this anything but a winner-take-all business. Amazon Web Services made it latest bid to be a major player at its summit in New York this week, aiming to steal a march in generative AI via enterprises, not just developers. That said, it also provided a boost for developers with this week's introduction of App Studio. The money keeps piling into AI as Skild AI, Hebbia, Hayden AI and others raise big rounds. And SoftBank bought Graphcore to boost its AI ambitions. But exits remain slow as initial public offerings are still in the doldrums and regulators give the side eye to big tech acquisitions -- just look at Alphabet's purchase of HubSpot getting called off on apparent concerns it could face antitrust scrutiny. And some older companies aren't yet benefiting from the AI boom. UiPath laid off 10% of its staff as returning CEO Daniel Dines tries to ensure its robotic process automation services remain relevant amid the gen AI boom. In a different industry, Intuit also announced cutbacks. The chipmaking equipment industry is gearing up for a trillion-dollar AI chip opportunity. We'll see if anybody but Nvidia gets the spoils, but energy concerns are likely to weigh in favor of alternatives to power-hungry graphics processing units. But there seems to be plenty of opportunity outside the cloud providers, as demonstrated in Paul Gillin's story on how eBay does AI -- on-premises, not in the cloud for the most part. Here's all the news this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond: An interesting and contrarian case study by Paul Gillin: Where does eBay do most of its AI development? You might be surprised The skinny from theCUBE Research analyst David Linthicum: Is the mainframe a viable option for generative AI? Optimism abounds as semiconductor industry takes aim at AI-fueled trillion-dollar market Lots of news and analysis from SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's unsponsored, onsite editorial coverage of AWS Summit New York: AWS introduces App Studio to speed up application development with AI Navigating the generative AI revolution: AWS' Matt Wood weighs in on possible platform shift From code to cloud, how is AWS shaping the gen AI landscape? TheCUBE keynote analysis from AWS Summit NY AWS' AI and sustainability push: theCUBE's analysis from AWS Summit New York Amazon updates its commitment to responsible use of generative AI Transforming tech: AWS' strategic AI integration and Marketplace evolution SoftBank buys Graphcore, the British chipmaking startup, to fuel its AI ambitions AMD acquires language model developer Silo AI for $665M OpenAI Startup Fund and Ariana Huffington's Thrive Global join to launch personalized AI health coach Storj Labs buys GPU cloud company Valdi to offer on-demand storage and compute for AI workloads UiPath lays off 10% of workforce in push for increased efficiency Investor consortium acquires majority stake in Nasuni at $1.2B valuation Skild AI raises $300M to build a general-purpose, AI-powered brain for any robot Hebbia reels in $130M for its AI search platform Vision AI startup Hayden AI raises $90M to boost public transit efficiency Healthcare AI platform Regard raises $61M to advance AI-powered clinical insights Jared Leto joins Index Ventures in $60M round for generative AI video startup Captions Fireworks AI raises $52M led by Sequoia at $522B valuation HerculesAI reels in $26M for its AI-powered data management toolkit Intel Capital leads $15M round in AI construction tech startup Buildots AI data reliability startup Soda Data raises $14M Enso Technologies raises $6M to build an army of guided AI agents for SMBs Building the modern application platform: Industry veteran Bob Muglia forecasts rise of the knowledge graph Salesforce powers new AI use cases with Data Cloud and integrated capabilities Patronus AI open-sources Lynx, a real-time LLM-based judge of AI hallucinations Salesforce pioneers application platform that unlocks generative AI and actions Anthropic expands developer console for creating and evaluating AI prompts Solo.io paves the way for smoother LLM connectivity with Gloo AI Gateway Zeus Kerravala looks at big data in the Indy 500: Merging auto racing and high-tech data enables a faster ride for everyone Check out more news on AI and data. AWS announces wider release of next-generation Graviton4 custom chips for high-performance cloud workloads Alphabet calls off multibillion-dollar HubSpot acquisition US announces $1.6B to fund research in advanced chip packaging technologies Defense technology startup Helsing raises €450M at reported €5B valuation Oracle offers shared Exadata-as-a-service at dramatically lower cost than for full instances Boomi centralizes API discovery, management and governance with new control plane Mirantis upgrades its OpenStack distribution with performance, AI optimizations Alluxio says it can achieve 97% GPU utilization across a distributed filesystem We've got lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and related enterprise news. Investor confidence boosts cybersecurity funding to $3.3B in second quarter Command Zero launches with $21M to speed up breach investigations Tracebit lands $5M in funding to enable mass adoption of cyberthreat deception techniques Closing the barn door and all that, but badly needed: Snowflake introduces mandatory multifactor authentication following recent cyberattacks New APT group CloudSorcerer uses cloud services to target Russian government entities Security vulnerability in NSA training tool allowed unauthorized content modifications BlastRADIUS vulnerability exposes legacy security flaws in widely used RADIUS Protocol Cisco Talos details latest tactics employed by prolific ransomware groups New 'RockYou2024' password dump raises global cybersecurity alarms New 'FishXProxy' phishing kit lowers entry bar for cyberattacks RansomHub publishes stolen Florida Health Department data after ransom deadline passes Justice Department seizes domains linked to Russian disinformation campaign Plenty more SiliconANGLE news on cybersecurity here. Apple will open access to its iOS payment system to end EU antitrust probe Samsung debuts Fold 6, Flip 6 alongside new Galaxy Ring and Watch Ultra wearables Apple reportedly preparing new Apple Watch with chip, display upgrades Metaverse platform Infinite Reality raises $350M at $5.1B valuation and acquires Landvault Bitcoin starts to recover after Mt. Gox trustee disbursements causes price plunge Immunefi and Ethereum Foundation partner on crowdsourced network audit to boost blockchain security Delivery Hero shares drop ahead of potential €400M+ antitrust fine Microsoft, Apple give up observer seats on OpenAI's board amid regulatory scrutiny Former Rapid7 President and COO Andrew Burton is new CEO of commercetools. He succeeds co-founder and CEO Dirk Hoerig, who will remain on the board and become chief innovation officer. Intuit to lay off 1,800 employees, plans to rehire in new AI and customer roles Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years, per VentureBeat Earnings season gets underway with two key semiconductor industry reports: July 16-17: International Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Symposium: TheCUBE Research will be there. July 30: Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform: Our latest Supercloud editorial event will look at the foundation for the new AI era, with lots of executives, practitioners, analysts and entrepreneurs from startups to established companies. Here are some of the topics we'll be exploring. And get up to speed with our special section ahead of the event.