This month’s News in AI
There’s been so much going on in the world of AI recently, that I thought I’d do a quick round up of some of the stories you may, or may not, have seen in the news this month. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here is the latest news in AI.
This month – AI in the Budget, AI Copyright Common Sense, AI goes Nuclear, and AI Environmental Impact finally gets mainstream. (There are privacy stories as well, but we recently covered those here).
UK Government inadvertently promotes AI in the Budget
There are no doubt many consequences of the recent UK Budget, the first by a Labour government for 14 years. I will not go into the economic ones, but one of the consequences will be a greater incentive for businesses to try AI. With the cost of employment increasing, there is a greater reason for businesses to look into greater efficiencies through automation; if you can automate more tasks, businesses will be able to save on labour costs. So, automation and engineering will become more important opportunities for businesses looking to drive productivity. This doesn’t appear to have been a deliberate plan by the Government, but is an unintended consequence.
AI needs to pay for copyright, says PM. And some AI companies now agree
The UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said that AI businesses need to pay if they are using copyrighted material. It’s been hard to identify a clear AI strategy from the new Government so far, but this is a welcome intervention in favour of the rights of the press and content creators.
What is now interesting is that some LLMs / AI are starting to agree. Meta has signed an agreement with Reuters for real-time news for its chatbots, and OpenAI has also signed a deal with News Corp for content in ChatGPT. So, this feels like an important step forward in what has to be the only logical way for a coherent future where content creators can monetise their output, and AI search tools can establish a long-term business model. This is potentially big news in AI.
However, Perplexity doesn’t appear to have read the memo, or perhaps even tried to get the point. Its latest feature is to provide summaries of news articles without needing to view the article, and so effectively eliminating the click to the content that the creator would have got with, say, Google, or with the agreements outlined above. Perplexity’s argument is that any journalism, once published, should be free for anyone to repurpose. As mentioned in previous Private AI’s, this is slightly disingenuous, as Perplexity’s search bot ignores robots.txt, which is how publishers highlight content that is not free to view. Perplexity is currently being sued by various publications in the US for illegal infringement of copyright, but is fighting tooth and nail. One has to hope that sense will prevail, just as others seem to be getting the point.
Newspapers must be paid if AI uses their archive, Keir Starmer says
AI Goes Nuclear
At long last, energy usage in AI is mainstream news. Such is the energy demand of AI that the hyperscalers have struggled for years to work out how to manage this. For the last 15 years or so, the general strategy has been to try and hide data centres miles away from anywhere and hope no-one notices the power outages and the damage to the environment, all whilst claiming to be green. But with the advent of Gen AI, and its even more rapacious needs, this is no longer a plausible strategy.
So, this month, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all announced separate plans to invest in nuclear power. Broadly, the plans are to develop modular nuclear reactors, so they are cheaper and more compliant. But it’s notable that this finally starts to shift the narrative that data centres are green and carbon neutral, and that data usage does have environmental consequences.
Google signs advanced nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power
Amazon and Google have plans for fueling their data centers: Nuclear power – CBS News
Nuclear power for AI: what it will take to reopen Three Mile Island safely
Environmental Consequences of AI – Spruce Pine
To that end, we should note the damage done by Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed into the southern US, as well as the terrible floods in Spain. But this is more than a human and environmental catastrophe. Helene caused huge damage to areas of North Carolina, and, amongst others, the storm badly affected Spruce Pine, a small town otherwise unspectacular and overlooked.
However, Spruce Pine is the world’s largest producer, by far, of high-quality quartz, used in the production of high-end microchips, solar panels and semiconductors. The mine there was inundated for several weeks and production stopped. There is enough resilience in the supply chain to cope with small impacts like this, but more regular storms and flooding in North Carolina could have a big impact on global supply of AI-capable chips for data centres.
The more heat data centres pump out into the atmosphere, the greater the consequences will be. The data industry is not immune to climate change, nor is it an innocent bystander. (As I write, the rain is pouring down on Barcelona in Spain, which has the second largest concentration of data centres in the country, so there could be further supply chain disruption across Europe.)
Spruce Pine just got hit by Helene. The fallout on the tech industry could be huge : NPR
Virginians get angry about powering the world’s internet
Talking of such single points of failure in the data supply chain, the world’s largest concentration of data centres is in northern Virginia, centred on the (again) otherwise-unremarkable town of Ashburn. Accordingly to industry calculations, 70% of the world’s internet traffic goes through servers hosted in Ashburn. So, this is probably where your digital carbon footprint is most heavily felt. But the locals have had enough of having to pay for the massive upgrades to their (or our) energy supply, and they are fighting back. The Irish are also fighting, where a remarkable 21% of energy consumption goes on the data centre industry. So, it genuinely matters to understand your data supply chain, and where your servers are, as this will impact your data carbon footprint.
The environmental campaigners fighting against data centres – BBC News
How Green is your Data? Are you ready for CSRD?
How Green is your Data? Are you ready for CSRD?
Indeed, this (very academic and technical) abstract points that out – where and when you run your data compute has a significant impact on your carbon footprint. This will matter for large European and UK businesses from January, because they will have to report on the environmental impact of all their activities (including Scope 3, which will include external (ie Cloud) data centres used by the business. This is called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Now the CFO has to report on this, expect greater scrutiny on how and when you run your data compute.