Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a rapid prediction tool that tells data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. Their method produces reliable power estimates in a few seconds, unlike traditional modeling techniques that can take hours or even days to yield results. Moreover, their prediction tool can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations ' even emerging designs that haven't been deployed yet. Data center operators could use these estimates to effectively allocate limited resources across multiple AI models and processors, improving energy efficiency. In addition, this tool could allow algorithm developers and model providers to assess potential energy consumption of a new model before they deploy it....

' Hey, Linas here! Every day, I break down 3 stories shaping the future of FinTech & Artificial Intelligence - plus the money movements and trends worth tracking. First time here' 370k+ FinTech and AI leaders get this daily. Join them: Leopold Aschenbrenner is either the most important investor no one on Wall Street has heard of, or the most dangerous kind of genius: one who might actually be right. In the twelve months following the launch of his hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, in September 2024, he grew its disclosed U.S. equity exposure from roughly $225 million to $5.52 billion ' He did it without owning a single share of Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta. His largest position was in a fuel-cell company. His second-largest was call options on a GPU cloud startup most investors had never heard of. His third-largest was call options on a chipmaker Wall Street had largely written off. This is not a story about luck. It is a story about what happens when a mind trained in growth economics, existential risk theory, and AI scaling laws is given access to public markets and the conviction to act on conclusions everyone else considers too extreme to take seriously....

Is mathematics being taken over by generative artificial intelligence' This year, a spate of media reports have suggested that the field is being fundamentally changed by the technology. Many maths researchers say that AI's actual capabilities are often hyped up, and that it's not yet time to announce the death of their profession. Still, by many accounts, in the past year, AI has jumped from solving secondary-school-level problems to actually being useful in research mathematicians' daily work. Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been at the forefront of experimentation with large language models, including OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. In particular, he has contributed to a project to test the skills of AI systems on a collection of more than 1,000 problems, ranging from major conjectures to obscure factoids. The questions were accumulated by the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos (1913'1996) over his lifetime. Last month, Tao teamed up with Tanya Klowden, an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, to explore the implications of AI for researchers and the world at large. They took mathematics as a test case, and urge society to adopt the technology but in a human-centric way. They posted a draft of their essay, due to be published in the forthcoming edition of The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics, on arXiv1. Nature spoke to Tao about how the technology is transforming his profession....

On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and I discussed Apple's big announcement. We reflected on how Apple has changed since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, and what challenges incoming CEO John Ternus will be facing. 'If you look at a certain camp, it is very much like, 'John Ternus is a product guy and this is going to be amazing' and it's very nostalgic and going back to Steve Jobs,' Kirsten said. 'But I think what people forget is that Tim Cook actually made another product, which was completely around operations.' Similarly, Sean noted that Cook has given Ternus a strong 'running start' as 'the company's numbers just sort of keep going up.' But a running start doesn't guarantee victory: 'How much volatility is around the corner' Are we really looking at a situation [with] the breaking apart of a global economy, along with the rise of artificial intelligence changing how business gets done'' Anthony: The decisions that Apple makes also trickle down to a bunch of other companies, because there are all kinds of startups that maybe don't build their entire business on the iOS platform, but certainly a significant part of their business comes on the iPhone....