The Download: Google's AI mission, and America's reliance on natural gas

If you want to know where AI is headed, this year's Google I/O has you covered. The company's annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you'd expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event. But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive 10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana.