🧠 Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) helps doctors make better diagnoses, scientists create new materials, farmers grow crops more effectively and all of us driving cars - and millions of other applications. This topic also covers subsets of AI such as machine learning (ML), deep learning and neural networks.
👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave
A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.
🦾 Medra builds autonomous lab, robots controlled with everyday language
Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot lab in the Bay Area. Scientists can direct the robots with everyday language, much like writing to ChatGPT. The robots work around the clock on drug research for partners such as Genentech and Addition Therapeutics.
📚 AI deciphers handwriting and makes 350,000 hidden books searchable – saves ten years of work
Uppsala University Library has used AI to digitize a handwritten book catalog. The work corresponds to more than ten years of manual labor and has been completed in a much shorter time. The material is now easier to find and use for researchers and the general public.
🦾 Startups that learned to use AI correctly generated 1.9 times higher revenue
Startups that learned how other companies had reorganized their operations around AI found 44 percent more use cases for the technology. The startups that received this information had 1.9 times higher revenue and were 18 percent more likely to acquire paying customers.
🤷 How can baseless claims about AI spread so widely?
Despite being incorrect or greatly exaggerated, claims about AI are spreading far and wide, both in the news media and among individuals. Is it a conspiracy? No, something even more powerful.
🧮 AI solves math problem that researchers failed to crack for six years
An AI system has for the first time solved a problem from FrontierMath, a benchmark consisting of real research problems that mathematicians have failed to solve. Multiple AI models have now demonstrated the ability to solve the problem, including GPT-5.4 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.6.
📑 AI scientist produces increasingly better papers – and an AI system can review them as well as humans
The quality of scientific papers written by the AI system The AI Scientist increases predictably as the underlying AI models improve. An automated reviewer built by the same research group matches human reviewers' accuracy when evaluating scientific papers.
🤦 Here we go again: A new, very shaky claim about AI and heat is spreading fast
A non-peer-reviewed study with extreme claims about data centers and temperature increases is now spreading across both news and social media. Time to bring out the vaccine!
🚰 A single golf club uses more water than ChatGPT
On social media, the claim is spreading that a single prompt consumes a half-liter water bottle. That is completely wrong. In reality, very little water is used, especially compared to other activities like golf or agriculture.