Is AI More Sustainable if You Generate it Underwater?

SATYA NADELLA: When we went from GPT 2.5 to 3, we all started seeing these emergent capabilities. It began showing scaling effects. We didn’t train it on just coding, but it got really good at coding. That’s when I became a believer. I thought, “Wow, this is really on.” Was there a single eureka moment…

Pretty much every online lurker knows the image: A man gawks at a passing woman making the kind of “How you doin’?” face that would make Joey Tribbiani blush. Ever since it landed in 2017, the “distracted boyfriend” meme, which took that stock photo and projected scenarios onto it, has been seared into the internet’s…

The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out. Google’s release of Gemini, claimed to…

After ChatGPT burst on the scene last November, some government officials raced to prohibit its use. Italy banned the chatbot. New York City, Los Angeles Unified, Seattle, and Baltimore School Districts either banned or blocked access to generative AI tools, fearing that ChatGPT, Bard, and other content generation sites could tempt students to cheat on assignments, induce…

Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy of the latest issue of WIRED!). It’s the exact sort of question that I hoped Google Search’s new generative AI feature, which I’ve been testing…

“In most of these areas, you already have existing statutes that prohibit the behaviors that we want to continue to be prohibited,” Young says. “So the policy challenge then becomes to ensure that within government, our existing regulatory and enforcement mechanisms are attuned to an AI-enabled world.” While many Democrats are calling for a new…