Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Video: AI and our energy future In May, MIT Technology Review published an unprecedented and comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses—down to a single query. Our reporters and editors traced where AI’s carbon footprint stands now, and where it’s headed, as AI barrels towards billions of daily users. We’ve just produced a short video to accompany that investigation. You can read the original full story here , and check out—and share— the full video on YouTube here . AI is changing the grid. Could it help more than it harms? The rising popularity of AI is driving an increase in electricity demand so significant it has the potential to reshape the grid. Energy consumption by data centers has gone up by 80% from 2020 to 2025 and is likely to keep growing. Electricity prices are already rising, especially in places where data centers are most concentrated. Yet many people, especially in Big Tech, argue that AI will be, on balance, a positive force for the grid. They claim that the technology could help get more clean power online faster, run our power system more efficiently, and predict and prevent failures that cause blackouts. How much merit is there to that argument ? —Casey Crownhart Three big things we still don’t know about AI’s energy burden —James O’Donnell Earlier this year, when my colleague Casey Crownhart and I spent six months researching the climate and energy burden of AI, we came to see one number in particular as our white whale: how much energy the leading AI models, like ChatGPT or Gemini, use up when generating a single response. We pestered Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, but each company refused to provide its figure for our article . But then this summer, after we published, a strange thing started to happen. They finally started to release the numbers we’d been calling for. So with this newfound transparency, is our job complete? Did we finally harpoon our white whale? I reached out to some of our old sources, and some new ones, to find out. Read the full story . MIT Technology Review Narrated: Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind” We don’t know exactly how AI works, or why it works so well. That’s a problem: It could lead us to deploy an AI system in a highly sensitive field like medicine without understanding its critical flaws.But a team at Google DeepMind that studies something called mechanistic interpretability has been working on new ways to let us peer under the hood. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts . Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/sca
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review