They’re Compensating For Something

“A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium. Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centers at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialized computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence. The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain.” And the whole thing is being built for one customer. NYT (Gift Article): At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for AI. (If the history of computing is any indicator, you’ll probably be able to fit this amount of computing power into your pocket in at some point.)

+ In ancient times (about two years ago), everyone was advising young people to prepare for the job market of the future by learning to code. But then the tech industry coded those jobs into oblivion. The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. “Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.”