What's Happening with AI, Social Media, Tesla, Google and more...

Welcome back to another crazy busy news week involving tech around the world. The big news seems to be in AI chips and Hackers. Intel, Google, Meta, and Amazon all announcing new chips that are faster, cheaper, and/or take less energy. The government announces hackers getting their email (more on that below) and even Roku had over a half-million accounts hacked.

With so much news we won’t be able to talk about Tesla settling a lawsuit over a Self Driving Crash.

We’ve got lots of information to share, so let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• Will AI be Smarter than Mankind?

• We NEED More Power!

• Millions of Papers Written with AI

• Who Snoops on the Snoopers?

• Nutrition Labels for Broadband

• Google Goes All Out, or is it All In, on AI?

Elon Musk says AI will be Smarter than Mankind?

Not only is AI growing its resource base, but it will continue to do so, outsmarting the sum of the knowledge of it’s creators as early as next year (2025). Technically, they are expecting superhuman (smarter than any one human) by next year, and super-intelligent (smarter than all humans) by 2029.

There’s only a couple of issues with that. AI companies are running out of training material, which is leading to complaints we discussed last week of training off of YouTube data, and other private data.

Musk didn’t list that as a challenge. Instead, his caveats are: will we have the AI chips and the power ability to handle that type of computing?

Read more about his predictions here.

We NEED More Power!

One of the key thing we need is more power. Electric power for our electric cars. Power for our AI chips. Power for everything. What we don’t have is the power grid to support it. What's worse is we're not preparing for it. The US only put up about 250 miles of new high voltage power lines last year. And we're told we will need over 43,000 miles of power lines by 2040.

Luckily, there might be an alternative. By changing the way we make power lines, we can add 40% capacity. Instead of steel and aluminum, we can use smaller, stronger materials to support, and thus have more conductive material. While this is huge, it is not enough if we’re being honest. But we have to start somewhere.

Read more about this idea, but don’t expect to find out how much it will cost.

Millions of Papers Written with AI

High School and college students might just be a large cause of the Power Drain, and not because they love playing games, charging their phones, and watching Netflix. Last year, about 22 million papers were wholly or at least partially written with AI! (AI is very power hungry.)

The challenge for administrators is both detecting this and trying to figure out to know what a student actually knows. With AI detectors giving false positives up to 60% of the time, we’ve got a problem.

As for this professor, I’m working on learning how to ask other questions, so while students can use AI, they will still have their knowledge tested. It takes time to reinvent the material, however.

Learn more about this.

Who Snoops on the Snoopers?

All major world powers spy. They just don’t want to admit that they spy or that they might be spied on. But that’s just what was acknowledged this week when the US says that state backed hacker groups inside of Russia had stolen some emails that were stored on Microsoft servers.

And this is after Microsoft “let” Chinese hackers into their system last year.

No word on what was compromised, or how sensitive that data was. Maybe all they got was a message about left over birthday cake in the break room, but I kind of doubt it.

One also wonders if this is in response to the US moving to ban Kaspersky Lab from selling their products to US businesses. The government is already prohibited.

Finding Out What You’re Getting with ‘Broadband Labels’

Inspired by Nutrition Labels, Broadband is getting a similar labeling system. Starting this past Wednesday, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is requiring all broadband providers to clearly label their prices and services.

So how good is this going to be? Well, have you ever read a nutrition label and walked away more confused than when you started? Yeah - it’s kind of like that. I checked Xfinity, as an example, and while they break things down based upon your address, they still say things like “Government Taxes vary by location.” Thanks but, that’s not helpful at all. Don’t you know what they would be, since you can bill me at that location?

Hopefully things get better, but this is at least a start. Read more about it.

Google Goes All Out, or is it All In, on AI?

Not to be outdone by the other FAANG companies (Meta (META) (formerly known as Facebook), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX); and Alphabet (GOOG) (formerly known as Google)), Google has developed their own AI computing chips called Axion.

This isn’t the first time Google has created their own chip, and like previous examples, they claim it is a specialty purpose chip that will use less power and be more powerful, but it is not designed for general computing.

One thing that makes this chip special is that it is ARM-based, and they are not typically used in a data center environment. You can learn more from Google, and join them at cloud Next ‘24.