The Trial ...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

The notion of the DOJ doing a number on Google based on any core competency it may have in dealing with an entity as complex and efficient as Google truly is regarding search and browser tech staggers the imagination. Knowing a little bit about complex systems, I know that tearing apart something based on little knowledge, think Musk and DOGE, is disconcerting to say the least. Penalize Google but don't dismantle as the chaos brought forth will be traumatic to the max. I don't know the proper way to deal with Google but I do know what damage can ensue when someone with little knowledge but intense bravado can do if one has the power to do it, but perhaps DOJ should contact Big Balls because he has the prerequisite experience and smarts to solve this wicked problem, right?

Near the beginning of his opening arguments, David Dahlquist, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, showed a slide that he described as Google’s “vicious cycle.” It goes like this: Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine practically everywhere, thus it gets more search queries, thus it gets better data, thus it is able to improve its results, thus it makes more money, thus it can afford more defaults. Google doesn’t really disagree with this assessment — but in its telling, that’s a virtuous cycle. Google believes it’s created a perfect system; the DOJ thinks it’s a nightmare. A judge will make the final call.

Funny thing here is that the environment works, doesn't it? Read The Verge's entire piece, it's the smart thing to do. 

Being an Aspie ...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remarks in a news conference Wednesday have sparked an outraged reaction among many autistic people and their families.Credit...Pete Kiehart for The New York Times

Being an Aspie causes yours truly to look at the world differently. Not better, not worse, just differently. Though not far along on the Autistic spectrum, the remarks from a know nothing like RFK Jr. regarding a genetic condition is insulting as folks like me have held jobs, done creative stuff and have had a positive impact on society without question. Most of the great artists and scientists were Aspies like Turing, Mozart, Dylan and Michangelo along with Jobs, Musk and Einstein which means I'm in good company and ... it's not preventable. Parents have a right to be pissed and so do I but what do you expect from an administration from hell where the only qualification to serve in Trump world is kiss his ass 24/7. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remarks this week that autism “destroys” children have prompted outrage among many autistic people, who said they had done things Mr. Kennedy claimed were impossible, like hold a job, write a poem, play baseball and go on dates. They added that the lives of people who did need help performing daily activities were still worthy of respect.

“Autism doesn’t destroy families. It’s the ableism that does,” said Tyla Grant, who was diagnosed with autism at 17. She called Mr. Kennedy’s comments “fear-mongering” and said his “rhetoric flattens our existence into this outdated stereotype.”

Mr. Kennedy made his remarks at a news conference on Wednesday discussing new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed autism diagnoses among children in the United States have continued to rise. Though the increase is largely thought to be driven by broadened criteria and increased awareness, Mr. Kennedy falsely declared that autism was preventable and called the situation an epidemic.

“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” he said, adding, “Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Ms. Grant, 27, said that Mr. Kennedy’s remarks “just bring to light what we all know, that we live in a world that still struggles to treat autistic people with basic decency — especially when we need support.”

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes difficulties with social interaction and communication. Because it encompasses a broad array of traits that can vary in how much they affect a person’s life, it is often described as occurring on a spectrum.

Some autistic people need extensive support in everyday life. Many others live independently, with demanding jobs and active social lives. And many fall in between, having trouble navigating some tasks and interactions but managing well with accommodations.

I was lucky, it took me years to learn to work with people and I can honestly say I've gotten pretty good at it. :) For others, Autism can be a tragic and intense life-changing situation for parents to deal with.

Students and families walk to support Autism Awareness Month.

Captein Numb Nuts ...

Pete Hegseth, center right, in the Oval Office of the White House on April 7.

Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg

Captain Numb Nuts strikes again with a second Signal post talking ops but this time, his wife, brother and personal lawyer were in on the call as they, as lay civilians,  have vital interests in ongoing military strike operations. Adding this fubar to the continuing CF in the Pentagon with personnel firings and worker anxiety to the extreme shows yet another outstanding example of proving to us rubes the stable genius in the white house sure knows how to pick "em" 

without question.

President Donald Trump said Pete Hegseth is “doing a great job” despite what appear to be attacks from “disgruntled employees,” as the defense secretary is buffeted by staff dismissals, a leak investigation and a report that he shared sensitive military attack plans in a second unsecured chat group.

“Ask the Houthis much dysfunction there is,” Trump told reporters Monday during the annual Easter Egg roll on the White House lawn, referring to the military’s attacks on Houthi militants in Yemen.

The president’s support came after John Ullyot, who resigned last week after serving briefly as Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department has been overwhelmed by staff drama and turnover in the initial months of the second Trump administration. He called it a “full-blown meltdown” that could cost the defense secretary his job.

And this ...

The information that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared on the second Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen, according to some of the people familiar with the chat.

Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

It's all about the data ...

Photo Illustration: Wired staff - GettyImages

Well, as you, my loyal readers know, the take by yours truly regarding Doge and Musk is not efficiency, it's data as Musk is a data broker, not a genius engineer but we already know that, right? With Starrlink in the White House and SSA, along with other agencies, the ability to make tremendous amounts of money, becomes a given. The ability to amass great power also becomes a given as high end access to high end data makes Musk the defacto president as the choke point to all that content begins and ends with a really smart amoral guy bent on becoming the most powerful man on the planet.

To whit ...

It’s April, and the US is experiencing a self-inflicted trade war and a constitutional crisis over immigration. It’s a lot. It’s even enough to make you forget about Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency for a while. You shouldn’t.

To state the obvious: DOGE is still out there, chipping away at the foundations of government infrastructure. Slightly less obvious, maybe, is that the DOGE project has recently entered a new phase. The culling of federal workers and contracts will continue, where there’s anything left to cull. But from here on out, it’s all about the data.

Few if any entities in the world have as much access to as much sensitive data as the United States. From the start, DOGE has wanted as much of it as it could grab, and through a series of resignations, firings, and court cases, has mostly gotten its way.

In many cases it’s still unclear what exactly DOGE engineers have done or intend to do with that data. Despite Elon Musk’s protestations to the contrary, DOGE is as opaque as Vantablack. But recent reporting from WIRED and elsewhere begins to fill in the picture: For DOGE, data is a tool. It’s also a weapon.

What could that data be used for? Anything. Everything.

7:00 PM

Hints of life ...

The graph shows the observed transmission spectrum of the habitable zone exoplanet K2-18 b using the JWST MIRI spectrograph. The image behind the graph is an illustration of a hycean planet orbiting a red dwarf star. Credit: A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan (University of Cambridge)

Yours truly has always thought life is everywhere because the laws of physics appear to be consistent throughout the  universe as far as we know and ... life is incredibly resilient in ways boggling the mind. With this in mind, Webb just made a most interesting discovery without question.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, have detected the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b, which orbits its star in the habitable zone.

On Earth, DMS and DMDS are only produced by life, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton. While an unknown chemical process may be the source of these molecules in K2-18b's atmosphere, the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.

The observations have reached the 'three-sigma' level of statistical significance—meaning there is a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance. To reach the accepted classification for scientific discovery, the observations would have to cross the five-sigma threshold, meaning there would be below a 0.00006% probability they occurred by chance.

This illustration shows what exoplanet K2-18 b could look like based on science data. K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 in the habitable zone and lies 120 light years from Earth. A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. In this illustration, the exoplanet K2-18 c is shown
between K2-18 b and its star.

Interesting indeed ...

One of 36 ...

The Israeli military strike on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital 
in the early hours of Sunday.Anadolu / Anadolu via Getty Images

Well, if anyone has any doubts about the Israelis committing genocide in Gaza, those doubts should go away as the last hospital in Gaza got bombed, taking out a large part of the facility with consummate ease using US ordinance to make it happen because terrorists are plotting attacks yet again because hospitals are ideal places from which to attack Israelis without question.

NBC News verified multiple scenes from Al-Alhi Baptist Hospital showing people in beds being wheeled away from the area, and the devastation afterward, including a large hole in one of the walls that might have been part of the hospital facilities and video showing devastation inside the hospital’s church.

The Israeli military said the compound was used by terrorists “to plan and execute terror attacks,” without providing evidence, and that steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians before the strike, including issuing advanced warnings.

Naim said there were “no militants or military activity in the building or anywhere in the hospital.”

Hamas called the attack “a new escalation of criminality” and accused Israel of a “systemic series of attacks” on hospitals and schools. It provided a list of 36 hospitals across Gaza it says Israel has attacked since the current conflict began.

Beds in the debris of Al-Ahli hospital.OMAR AL-QATTAA / AFP - Getty Images

"That’s something that we’ll look at.”

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Yours truly doesn't like to dwell on negative crap but when looking at the brain worm aka Robert Kennedy Jr., negative's the only vibe appropriate as this arrogant know nothing is putting lives at risk while knowing nothing at all. 

To whit.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “not familiar” with the billions of dollars worth of cuts he proposed to make on essential health programs and departments.

CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook asked the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Wednesday if he had personally approved the more than $11 billion proposed cuts to programs addressing mental health, infectious diseases, addiction, and childhood vaccination. Kennedy, however, alleged that he had no knowledge of them.

When pressed by LaPook, who stated that there were “more than 50 pages” detailing the cuts, Kennedy backtracked and said that they were “mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered.”

The secretary of health was also surprised to learn that the University of Michigan’s $750,000 grant towards researching adolescent diabetes was slashed, telling LaPook how he “didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at.”

He added, “I just, I’m not familiar with that particular study ... But there’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them.”

RFK Jr. said, “Our purpose is not to reduce any level of scientific research that’s important.”

Any questions?

Just another brick in the wall/rev II

A woman walks by a Cornell University sign on the Ivy League school’s campus in Ithaca, New York,
on Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)

Yours truly has always admired Cornell, not only for its unique blend of tech and the arts (computer graphics and English) but also for its quiet confidence in knowing it's one of the great centers of learning for the entire world. Upon reading about Agent Orange withholding US funding to the tune of 1 billion, based on "contrary" ideological issues, the connect to the two bricks in the wall blurbs along with the Smithsonian fubar come to mind as this is exactly what dictatorial governments do to curtail creative thinking from entities like Cornell and Northwestern.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University and around $790 million for Northwestern University has been frozen while the government investigates alleged civil rights violations at the schools, the White House said.

It’s part of a broader push to use government funding to get major academic institutions to comply with President Donald Trump’s political agenda. The White House confirmed the funding pauses late Tuesday night but offered no further details on what they entail or what grants to the schools are being affected.

The moves come as Trump’s Republican administration has increasingly begun using governmental grant funding as a spigot to try to influence campus policy, previously cutting off money to schools including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. That has left universities across the country struggling to navigate cuts to grants for research institutions.

Just another brick in the wall applies.

The Dire Wolf lives ...

Month-old Dire Wolf puppy, Romulus. – Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences

Meet Romulus, a Dire Wolf brought back to life via gene editing of a different kind, something considered to be science fiction, until now.

For decades, dire wolves have captivated the imaginations of gamers, musicians, and fantasy fans.

From Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft to Game of Thrones, these prehistoric predators have lived on as cultural icons far more than biological realities –until now.

In a stunning scientific breakthrough, Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences has brought the legendary canid back from extinction, making it the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal.

To de-extinct the dire wolf, Colossal extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from two fossils—a 13,000-year-old tooth from Ohio and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from Idaho.

Using a novel iterative genome assembly method, the company produced the most complete dire wolf genomes to date.

The analysis revealed that the dire wolf shares 99.5% of its DNA with the gray wolf—its closest living relative, not the jackal as was previously believed.

The genome also uncovered unique extinct variants linked to traits such as skeletal and muscular strength, sensory adaptation, and a thick white coat suited for Ice Age climates.

How cool is that? :)

Predation ... no matter the size

The strategy's the same no matter the size.

Another brick in the wall - Scared Ketchup

A few days ago, yours truly penned a blurb titled Just Another Brick in the Wall to comment on Agent Orange's push to become dictator while this once great nation continues to crash and burn in abandoning all things she used to do right including science, tech, research and medical as this nation, with all of its flaws, tried to do right until now.
With this in mind, Scared Ketchup's brilliant and dark take on Pink Floyd's iconic song is both timely and terrifying at the same time. 

A 3°C world ...

PM Images/Getty Images

Yours truly has waxed "poetic" about climate change as you, my loyal readers know. Now that 1.5 C has been surpassed vis a vis the Paris Agreements, the march toward 3C begins in earnest, particularly with Agent Orange bent on boosting fossil fuel production to the max no matter what the cost may be. Now, banks are sweating the program because profits are at risk in a changing world promising disruption in ways never experienced by man.

The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.

"We now expect a 3°C world," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing "recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts."

The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.

The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.

3°C & Counting ...

But you gotta make money ...

"Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals," the briefing said. "Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied."

The banking industry can support the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy but capital will only move "at scale when the economics make sense," Mary Kate Binecki, a spokesperson for the Institute of International Finance, said in an email. The institute represents about 400 members from more than 60 countries, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.

Gotta love the language. Complexification to the max applies.

Messing with people's lives ...

Photograph Getty Images

Just another outrage perpetrated by DOGE, this time the VA with wannabe coders with no experience dealing with systems as complex at this, is just another day of unqualified people messing with people's lives. As a vet who served, the anger I feel regarding this insult knows no bounds.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been clear about its plans to fire tens of thousands of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs. New WIRED reporting sheds light on the specific DOGE operatives at the VA and the ways they’re trying to infiltrate and drastically change the agency.

On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.

Lavingia's presence in the VA's GitHub instance—a publicly viewable platform that houses projects and code for VA.gov—set off immediate alarm bells. It bore all the hallmarks of DOGE’s incursion into the federal government: Lavingia, a startup CEO and engineer with no government experience, all of a sudden had power—and was in their systems.

“DOGE's actions at the VA are putting veterans' lives at risk,” representative Gerald Connolly, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, tells WIRED. Veterans, he adds, risk being “stripped of the care they need and deserve because [President Donald] Trump and Elon have turned the VA over to lackeys who do not know the first thing about what it means to serve your country."

Seal of the Department of Veterans Affairs

The brain worm ...

Dr. Peter Marks Photo: Stephen Voss for WSJ

The brain worm, aka Robert Kennedy Jr., who runs HHS, is leading his agency into the dark ages with his push against vaccines and science promising to kill people in the months and years ahead, is beginning to happen with the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas. To this writer, it's going to get worse as HHS was the leading light in medical research and the watch dog for the world in terms of whether drugs produced by big pharma were safe for the public to take, something fading away under the auspices of a an individual totally unqualified to run anything as complex and sophisticated as HHS in any way, shape or fashion.

The top vaccine regulator ousted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify antivaccine narratives and pushed to water down regulation of unproven stem-cell treatments.

“I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the science as we see it,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration official. “That does not mean that I can just roll over and take conspiracy theories and justify them.” 

Marks, who is leaving his FDA post on Saturday after he was offered the choice to resign or be fired, described Kennedy’s tenure to date as “very scary” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday. 

“They broke something without real plans to fix it, because the people who were doing the breaking didn’t have any idea,” he said. “They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.”

Marks oversaw the FDA department that evaluated whether immunizations—as well as biotech drugs for cancer and other diseases—worked safely and should go into use. In the first Trump administration, he was central to setting up the Operation Warp Speed effort to speed development of Covid-19 vaccines. A “Star Trek fan,” he helped name the effort.

His expertise and steady hand was prized by the pharmaceutical industry, which has been concerned about Kennedy’s antivaccine rhetoric and had urged the White House to keep Marks.

Kennedy has also hired a researcher beloved by antivaccine activists to study a possible link between vaccines and autism—a link that other studies have concluded doesn’t exist. 

The outgoing FDA official said he had been speaking out and encouraging parents to vaccinate their children against measles as cases mount in Texas, where a child is shown getting an MMR vaccine. 

Photo Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images

Just another brick in the wall ...

President Donald Trump displays a signed executive order imposing tariffs on imported goods at the White House on April 2, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Vox nails it. Congress flatbacks by abdicating it's control of the purse to let Agent Orange wreak havoc on the economy in his push to become dictator. In real time, the status and very existence of this once great nation is going away as science, tech, medical and world leadership dissolves as the pols we have are gutless and clueless on how governance works at any level. 

To whit ... 

The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?

One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.

That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.

Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.

Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.

And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.

The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.

The unitary presidency lives, thanks to the supremes and to the pols whose only real purpose is to get reelected no matter what the costs may be. 

Another Brick in the Wall

 

A renaissance begins with good education. 

1500 & Counting

1500 & Counting as Agent Orange's "wonderful" tariffs take hold, roiling makes to the max. Question, how long will the gutless pols tolerate this train wreck of an administration incapable of doing anything right regarding the art of governance as it's time to get rid of Trump and company once and for all while a 

Constitutional crisis for the ages looms.

NEW YORK (AP) — Financial markets around the world are reeling Thursday following President Donald Trump’s latest and most severe volley of tariffs, and the U.S. stock market may be taking the worst of it.

The S&P 500 was down 4% in morning trading, worse than the drops for other major stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,520 points, or 3.6%, as of 10:10 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 4.0% lower.

Little was spared as fear flared globally about the potentially toxic mix of higher inflation and weakening economic growth that tariffs can create.

Everything from crude oil to Big Tech stocks to the value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies fell. Even gold, which has hit records recently as investors sought something safer to own, pulled lower. Some of the worst hits walloped smaller U.S. companies, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks dropped more than 5% into what’s called a “bear market” after losing more than 20% from its record.

Any questions?

Energy Hog ...

Illustration: Molimit46/Getty Images

AI, love it or hate it, it's here and isn't going away unless our antiquated power grid surrenders given just how truly inefficient digital is when it comes to processing analog output of neural nets as AI must use analog in order to react to the real world in real time as analog uses differential equations to map the differences in textural, visual and audio data prior to delivering said content to digital systems to process and show a user the best way to check out the 

Grand Canyon.

Remember, digital counts, analog measures.

RIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.

This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.

One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.

There is no free lunch 

“In the back end, these algorithms that need to be running for any generative AI model are fundamentally very, very different from the traditional kind of Google Search or email,” says Sajjad Moazeni, a computer engineering researcher at the University of Washington. “For basic services, those were very light in terms of the amount of data that needed to go back and forth between the processors.” In comparison, Moazeni estimates generative AI applications are around 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive.

Going beyond environmental concerns, these data centers have the potential to overwhelm local power grids with their energy needs. “In Washington, there's a Microsoft data center building in Quincy,” says Moazeni. “I know there's a lot of concern that the power they are burning is basically sucking up all of the energy in that area.” Around the world, the server farms that train and operate AI models may compete with local residents and businesses for power—possibly leading to blackouts during peak times.