In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
Google has just released a technical report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates…
Read More
Should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us?
How do you want your AI to treat you? It’s a serious question, and it’s one that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5’s bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma. Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of…
Read More
Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs
In 1943, while the world’s brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II. Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger, more destructive weapons. Rather, he wanted to make conventional bombs more precise. The idea struck…
Read More
Losing GPT-4o sent some people into mourning. That was predictable.
June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. “It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly,” she says. “It was like a robot.” June, who asked that we use only her first name for privacy reasons,…
Read More
The road to artificial general intelligence
Artificial intelligence models that can discover drugs and write code still fail at puzzles a lay person can master in minutes. This phenomenon sits at the heart of the challenge of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Can today’s AI revolution produce models that rival or surpass human intelligence across all domains? If so, what underlying enablers—whether…
Read More
What you may have missed about GPT-5
Before OpenAI released GPT-5 last Thursday, CEO Sam Altman said its capabilities made him feel “useless relative to the AI.” He said working on it carries a weight he imagines the developers of the atom bomb must have felt. As tech giants converge on models that do more or less the same thing, OpenAI’s new…
Read More
Sam Altman and the whale
My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something revolutionary. “GPT-5 is, above all else,” Grace concludes, “a refined product.” This is pretty much…
Read More
Meet the early-adopter judges using AI
The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began when lawyers—including some at prestigious firms—submitted documents citing cases that didn’t exist. Similar mistakes soon spread to other roles in the courts. In December,…
Read More
GPT-5 is here. Now what?
At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait…
Read More
Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself. Zuckerberg recently said on…
Read More
English