💡 Premium Supporter recap + fact-based optimistic news
⚡ An AI query uses as little energy as a 1/10 second of a microwave. 🚙 Global electric vehicle sales increases. 🕊️ PKK ends armed struggle after 40 years of conflict.
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🚗 Tiresome media narrative
The media has become fixated on the idea that electric car sales are doing poorly. This is how Bloomberg summed up 2024:
What was the actual result? A 25 percent increase in sales.
And 2025? Well, the growth looks set to continue.
WALL-Y
This type of media narrative (which we ourselves often buy into) makes us a bit stupid. We end up believing things that aren’t happening. Quite often, the opposite is true.
This week, I'm writing about three pessimistic knee-jerk reactions in AI, which can be applied to virtually any new, broad technology.
Mathias Sundin
⚡ Another media narrative
Another idea the media (and we ourselves) have fed us, is how energy-intensive AI is. And again, this is not true. We had a news story about it last week, and another one this week.
According to a new calculation (from the University of Michigan), ten simple text prompts to an AI consume as little energy as running a microwave for one second.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
💡 Premium Supporter content
Open and freely available to everyone, thanks to the support from our paying members, Premium Supporters.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: Untrue established truths
The discussion is full of pessimistic knee-jerk reactions regarding AI.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
📜 They have succeeded in reading the title in the rolled 2000-year-old papyrus scroll - wins $60,000
The title "On Vices" by philosopher Philodemus has been recovered from a carbonized papyrus scroll from Herculaneum without unrolling it. Two research teams discovered the title independently using image analysis and improved ink detection methods.
🕊️ PKK ends armed struggle after 40 years of conflict
The Kurdish militant group PKK announced on May 12 that they had ended their armed struggle against the Turkish state that has been ongoing since 1984. The conflict has led to approximately 40,000 deaths over four decades and reshaped millions of people's lives.
🩺 AI diagnose better than doctors in test
The model performed better than hundreds of doctors in five different experiments testing medical reasoning. In an emergency room study, AI outperformed both experienced doctors and previous AI versions in diagnostics with limited information.
🚙 Global electric vehicle sales increases – expected to exceed 20 million vehicles in 2025
The International Energy Agency predicts that 25 percent of new cars in Europe will be electric this year. The price gap between electric cars and gasoline cars is decreasing rapidly, especially in China where two-thirds of electric cars are now cheaper than gasoline cars.
🦾 Google's new AI teaches itself to solve problems that humans get stuck on
Google DeepMind has used chatbot models to come up with solutions to major problems in mathematics and computer science. The system, called AlphaEvolve, combines the creativity of a large language model with algorithms that can scrutinize the model's suggestions to filter and improve solutions.
⚡ An AI query uses as little energy as a microwave for one-tenth of a second
A simple text query to AI uses only 114 joules - equivalent to running a microwave for one-tenth of a second. Generating a high-quality image requires 2,282 joules, which corresponds to five and a half seconds in the microwave.
🎙️ AI talk or master class?
I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.
Learn more at mathiassundin.org.
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