But research is showing that AI generation may be even more resource-intensive than originally thought. Imagine that you want to ask an AI program to write up a 100-word email for you. You get an almost instant response, but what you don’t see are the intensive computing resources that went into creating that email. At the AI data center, generating just two of those emails could use as much energy as a full charge on the latest iPhone. And according to a Pew Research Center study, that 100-word email could use up a whole bottle of water for the cooling that’s needed at data centers.

Or as the Meta founder prefers it: “We are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.” Go on. “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” Historically, of course, there has always been another way to feel truly present with another person, which is to be truly present with another person. But this is not what the emperor would wish for his citizens. He prefers the world atomised, mediated via his machines.

Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking.

The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.

This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.

Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will "trickle down" and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich.

Dans une récente mise à jour de ses conditions d’utilisation, Steam précise que les « gamers achètent une licence et non le jeu lui-même. » La manœuvre est destinée à se mettre en conformité avec les dispositions d’une nouvelle loi californienne contre la publicité mensongère. Le tableau ravive le débat sur la notion de propriété numérique à l’ère des abonnements qui tuent les copies physiques.

"What people realized early on, and this is the whole reason Comic Sans took off, is that a paragraph looks different depending on what font you put it in: serious or funny or whatever. You should be grateful to Comic Sans. The one great thing that it did is it introduced people to the debate about typefaces. In a twisted way, Comic Sans contributed to the growth of fonts in general."

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.