AI & Society Articles - The Batch

Witch watching a bubbling cauldron connected to colorful tubes labeled ‘Brew Stewer’ under a night sky.

Tech & Society

No Work for Coders: Could coding assistants take over software development?

AI coding assistants are brewing codebases that once were the sole province of human programmers. Will AI systems take over software development?

Cartoon characters in costume contest: ghost wins 1st, mad scientist 2nd, hula girl 3rd.

Tech & Society

Innovation Can’t Win: Bureaucracy chokes AI growth as lawmakers tighten grip

Politicians and pundits have conjured visions of doom to convince lawmakers to clamp down on AI. What if terrified legislators choke off innovation in AI?

Person sitting by a campfire holding a stick, looking worried in a dark setting.

Tech & Society

AI Burns All the Energy: Will AI’s growing power demands drain the grid?

The globe’s growing AI infrastructure requires huge amounts of electricity, possibly more than power providers can generate responsibly. Could AI models suck energy resources dry?

Man pulls lever to electrify a robot maid holding cleaning tools, cartoon-style.

Letters

The Psychology of AI Doom: Why do people who are well informed about AI worry about unrealistic dangers? There are incentives for doomsaying.

Welcome to our special Halloween issue of The Batch, in which we probe fears, anomalies, and shadows of AI.

Nuclear power plant cooling towers emitting steam into the sky.

Tech & Society

AI Giants Go Nuclear: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft bet on nuclear power to meet AI energy demands

Major AI companies plan to meet the growing demand with nuclear energy.

Graph showing global warming with and without aerosol injection.

Letters

To Fight Climate Change, It’s Time to Consider Geoengineering: Hurricanes Helene and Milton took hundreds of lives, not to mention other disasters driven by climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection could save countless lives.

To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering

LLM leaderboard with Chinese models rising in ranks.

Tech & Society

A Year of Contending Forces: State of AI report highlights 2024’s major trends and breakthroughs

A new report documents the interplay of powerful forces that drove AI over the past year: open versus proprietary technology, public versus private financing, innovation versus caution.

Several legal documents from the Federal Trade Commission are spread out on a wooden surface.

Business

U.S. Cracks Down on AI Apps That Overpromise, Underdeliver: U.S. Federal Trade Commission launches Operation AI Comply to tackle deceptive business practices

The United States government launched Operation AI Comply, targeting businesses whose uses of AI allegedly misled customers.

Design layout of Sedenak Data Centre Park, Malaysia.

Business

Malaysia’s Data Center Boom: Malaysia emerges as an AI and cloud computing hub, drawing billions in investment

Malaysia’s location, natural resources, and investor-friendly government are perfect for data centers, turning part of the country into an AI-fueled boomtown.

Collage of various images featuring a baseball player, movie scenes, portraits, landscapes, and diverse wildlife.

Tech & Society

German Court Says LAION Didn’t Violate Copyrights: LAION wins copyright case in Germany

A German court dismissed a copyright lawsuit against LAION, the nonprofit responsible for large-scale image datasets used to train Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and other image generators.

Three people, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng, and Geoff Hinton, stand together at Hinton’s retirement party.

Letters

Nobel Prizes for AI!: Nobel committees for physics and chemistry honored AI researchers. How can the AI community itself can celebrate the next generation of innovators?

Congratulations to Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield for winning the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize!

California Senate Bill 1047 with a large veto stamp on top of the document.

Letters

A Victory for Innovation and Open Source: California’s governor vetoed SB 1047, which would have hurt innovation without making anyone safer. Now let’s work on mitigating AI’s real risks and realizing its potential benefits.

We won! California’s anti-innovation bill SB 1047 was vetoed by Governor Newsom over the weekend.