A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has said. Drive in almost any direction from almost any American city, and soon enough you'll arrive at a data center--a giant white box rising from graded earth, flanked by generators and fenced like a prison yard. Data centers for artificial intelligence are the new American factory. Packed with computing equipment, they absorb information and emit A.I. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, they have begun to multiply at an astonishing rate. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said. The leading independent operator of A.I. data centers in the United States is CoreWeave, which was founded eight years ago, as a casual experiment. In 2017, traders at a middling New York hedge fund decided to begin mining cryptocurrency, which they used as the entry fee for their fantasy-football league. To mine the crypto, they bought a graphics-processing unit, a powerful microchip made by the company Nvidia. The G.P.U. was marketed to video gamers, but Nvidia offered software that turned it into a low-budget supercomputer. "It was so successful, from a return-of-capital perspective, that we started scaling it," Brian Venturo, one of CoreWeave's co-founders, told me. "If you make your money back in, like, five days, you want to do that a lot." Within a year, the traders had quit the hedge-fund business and bought several thousand G.P.U.s, which they ran from Venturo's grandfather's garage, in New Jersey.

She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity. In "Die My Love," Lawrence, as Grace, vibrates with boredom and fury. The novel "Die, My Love," by the Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz, is narrated by a wife and new mother who is living in rural France and seems to be losing her mind. Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a "sodomising rodent" with "bullet-wounds for eyes," and thinks, "When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung." One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, "I'll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I'll contain my madness, I'll use the bathroom. I'll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favor of a better life." Martin Scorsese saw a brief review of the novel in the some years ago and decided to pick up a copy. He found it to be a "powerful mosaic of the mind," he told me recently. Scorsese is a member of a book club of sorts, with a few other filmmakers, who read with an eye toward adaptation. For "Die, My Love," he imagined casting Jennifer Lawrence in the lead. He'd been amazed by her performance in Darren Aronofsky's bewildering 2017 fantasia, "Mother!" In that surreal film--it's like an allegory set inside an oil painting--Lawrence plays a woman living with her poet husband in an old farmhouse, which is gradually, then apocalyptically, invaded by strangers. "She really is feeling everything that's happening, in what appears to be a dream of some kind," Scorsese said. He and Lawrence had discussed adaptations before. They considered "The Awakening," Kate Chopin's 1899 novel of female liberation, which ends with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, walking into the sea. "Die, My Love" was like "The Awakening" if it began with Edna already underwater.

Kant's life was famously dull, but he was less of a hermit than is often supposed.

Ebeyer published posts about famous people who had realized that they were aphantasic: Glen Keane, one of the leading Disney animators on "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast"; John Green, the author of "The Fault in Our Stars," whose books had sold more than fifty million copies; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome; Blake Ross, who co-created the Mozilla-Firefox web browser when he was nineteen. Ebeyer also wanted the Aphantasia Network to be a place where aphantasics could find recent scientific research. For instance, estimating the strength of a person's imagery had been thoroughly subjective until Joel Pearson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, devised tests to measure it more precisely. In a paper from 2022, Pearson reported that when people with imagery visualized a bright object their pupils contracted, as though they were seeing a bright object in real life, but the pupils of aphantasics imagining a bright object stayed the same. Another study of his had shown that, although aphantasics had the same fear response (sweating) as typical imagers to a frightening image shown on a screen, when exposed to a frightening story they barely responded at all.

Thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to rebuild the economy around AI. I set out to see how they're actually doing it. Earth, it's said, is home to more than 10,000 AI startups. The figure is a guess, of course--startups come, startups go. But last year, more than 2,000 of them got their first round of funding. As investors shovel their billions into AI, it's worth asking: What are all these creatures of the boom doing? I decided to approach as many recent AI founders as I could. The goal was not to try to pick winners but to see what it's like, on the ground, to build AI products--how AI tools have changed the nature of their work; how terrifying it is to compete in a crowded field.

Once in a while, LLMs turn evil--and no one quite knows why. The AI company Anthropic has made a rigorous effort to build a large language model with positive human values. The $183 billion company's flagship product is Claude, and much of the time, its engineers say, Claude is a model citizen. Its standard persona is warm and earnest. When users tell Claude to "answer like I'm a fourth grader" or "you have a PhD in archeology," it gamely plays along. It makes threats and then carries them out. And the frustrating part--true of all LLMs--is that no one knows exactly why. Consider a recent stress test that Anthropic's safety engineers ran on Claude. In their fictional scenario, the model was to take on the role of Alex, an AI belonging to the Summit Bridge corporation.

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.

I talked to the scholars who literally wrote the book on tech bubbles--and applied their test. AI may not simply be "a bubble," or even an enormous bubble. It may be the ultimate bubble. What you might cook up in a lab if your aim was to engineer the Platonic ideal of a tech bubble. Since ChatGPT's viral success in late 2022, which drove every company within spitting distance of Silicon Valley (and plenty beyond) to pivot to AI, the sense that a bubble is inflating has loomed large. There were headlines about it as early as May 2023 .

When the AI bubble bursts, the nerds will do their best work. Suddenly, and not long ago, our dearest tech industry leaders began to suggest caution. Sam Altman said that AI is in a bubble "for sure," albeit one formed around "a kernel of truth." Mark Zuckerberg said an AI bubble "is quite possible," though "if the models keep on growing in capability year over year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse, or something." Even Eric Schmidt is saying to calm down about artificial general intelligence and focus on competing with China .

If done right, the AI revolution will free us from their merciless tyranny. Instead, you activate various wearables embedded in your body and have a series of conversations with inanimate objects. You make -style gestures in the air. Things power on, tasks get done, the day begins. It turns out you have no need for a smartphone at all.