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The Latest From Our Columnists | | |
| |  | | Joanna Stern, at a sprawling data center. PHOTO: DAVID HALL/WSJ | | | | |
Joanna Stern: How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use? I Went to a Data Center to Find Out. | |
| What I wanted to know was, how much power do my AI tasks actually use? The equivalent of charging a phone? A laptop? Cooking a steak on an electric grill? Powering my house? After digging into the research, visiting a data center, bugging just about every major AI company and, yes, firing up that grill, I got some answers. But not enough. Tech companies need to tell us more about the energy they're using on our behalf. 👉 Read Joanna's full column here and 🎬 watch her video here. | |
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| |  | | ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/WSJ, ISTOCK | | | | |
Tim Higgins: Why Tech Billionaires Want Bots to Be Your BFF | |
| Big Tech now sees the way to differentiate AI offerings by creating the perception that the user has a personal relationship with it. Or, more weirdly put, a friendship—one that shares a similar tone and worldview. The race to develop AI is framed as one to develop superintelligence. But in the near term, its best consumer application might be curing loneliness. 👉 Read Tim's full column here. | |
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| |  | | Samples of Superwood. PHOTO: CHARLOTTE KESL | | | | |
Christopher Mims: It's Bulletproof, Fire-Resistant and Stronger Than Steel. It's Superwood. | |
| A strange new substance will begin rolling off the assembly line in a cavernous Maryland warehouse: soft wood transformed at the molecular level into something stronger than steel yet one-sixth the weight. Its name is, maybe, a bit on the nose: Superwood. 👉 Read Christopher's full column here. | |
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| |  | | PHOTO: REUTERS, EAGLEVIEW, BLOOMBERG NEWS, ZUMA PRESS | | | | |
| Bezos Bucks: Jeff Bezos used to drive a 1997 Honda Accord and repurposed surplus wooden doors as desks. This week, he had a lavish wedding in Venice. Here's a look at the Amazon.com founder's wealth. Copy Right: A federal judge found that Anthropic's use of books to train its AI models was legal in some circumstances, a ruling that could have broad implications for AI and intellectual property. Define 'General': The future of the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership—one of the most storied in tech history—hinges in part on the meaning of artificial general intelligence, an amorphous AI buzzword that divides many in the industry. | |
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| |  | | ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/WSJ, ISTOCK | | | | |
The Mysterious Billionaire Behind the OnlyFans Porn Empire | |
| Leo Radvinsky has a bare-bones personal website that describes him as a company builder, angel investor and an aspiring helicopter pilot. His personal foundation website highlights his commitment to open-source software and philanthropic giving to causes like the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Buried, however, is any mention of the main source of Radvinsky's wealth: the pornography-fueled subscription site OnlyFans that he built into an online sex powerhouse. 👉 Read Sam Schechner and Katherine Sayre's full report here. | |
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| |  | | ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/WSJ, WARNER BROS/APPLETV+ | | | | |
Can Brad Pitt's 'F1' Finally Deliver Apple a Big-Screen Hit? | |
| When the team behind this week's Brad Pitt movie "F1" first pitched their idea around Hollywood, nearly every major entertainment company wanted in and a bidding war quickly erupted. Then Apple bigfooted them all. 👉 Read Ben Fritz and Joe Flint's full report here. | |
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- Decoding Tesla's New 'Fully Autonomous' Car Video—and What It Isn't Telling You (Gizmodo)
- Google Convinces OpenAI to Use TPU Chips in Win Against Nvidia (The Information)
- Inside 'AI Addiction' Support Groups, Where People Try to Stop Talking to Chatbots (404 Media)
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| 🎧 Nvidia's Move Into Cloud Computing Is Making Things Awkward in Silicon Valley Nvidia looms over the world of AI thanks to its supply of chips–a critical component of data centers that power AI models. WSJ Heard on the Street columnist Asa Fitch explains that the chip giant's foray into cloud computing is starting to threaten industry stalwarts. | | | | |
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| |  | | PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: JOHNNY SIMON/WSJ, ISTOCK | | | | |
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| The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Deputy Tech & Media Editor Wilson Rothman and Tech Editor Bradley Olson. You can reach them by replying to this newsletter. | |
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