Epstein's shadow: Why Bill Gates pulled out of Modi's AI summit Microsoft founder Bill Gates has cancelled his keynote speech at India's flagship AI summit just hours before he was due to take the stage on Thursday. Gates, who has faced renewed scrutiny over his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, withdrew to "ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit's key priorities", the Gates Foundation said in a statement. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi had billed the summit as an opportunity for India to shape the future of AI, drawing high-profile attendees, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Instead, it has been dogged by controversy, from Gates's abrupt exit to an incident in which an Indian university tried to pass off a Chinese-made robotic dog as its own innovation. So, what exactly went wrong at India's flagship AI gathering and why has it drawn such intense scrutiny?

U.S. philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates attends an event in New Delhi on March 19, 2025. NEW DELHI - Bill Gates pulled out of India's AI Impact Summit hours before his scheduled keynote address on Thursday, dealing another blow to a flagship event already marred by organizational lapses, a robot bungle and delegate complaints over traffic disruptions. The Gates Foundation said the billionaire would not deliver his address to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit's key priorities. Only days ago, the foundation had dismissed rumors of his absence and insisted he was on track to attend. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

This week, Casey Crownhart, senior reporter for energy at MIT Technology Review and Pilita Clark, FT's columnist, consider how China's rapid renewables buildout could help it leapfrog on AI progress. In the age of AI, the biggest barrier to progress isn't money but energy . That should be particularly worrying here in the US, where massive data centers are waiting to come online, and it doesn't look as if the country will build the steady power supply or infrastructure needed to serve them all. For about a decade before 2020, data centers were able to offset increased demand with efficiency improvements . Now, though, electricity demand is ticking up in the US, with billions of queries to popular AI models each day--and efficiency gains aren't keeping pace. With too little new power capacity coming online, the strain is starting to show: Electricity bills are ballooning for people who live in places where data centers place a growing load on the grid.

Look at the big picture instead. Why focusing on the energy system and large companies is more important than policing individual behavior. Picture it: I'm minding my business at a party, parked by the snack table (of course). A friend of a friend wanders up, and we strike up a conversation. It quickly turns to work, and upon learning that I'm a climate technology reporter, my new acquaintance says something like: "Should I be using AI? I've heard it's awful for the environment." We did the math on AI's energy footprint.

The State of AI: Is China about to win the race? In this conversation, the FT's John Thornhill and MIT Technology Review's Caiwei Chen consider the battle between Silicon Valley and Beijing for technological supremacy. Viewed from abroad, it seems only a matter of time before China emerges as the AI superpower of the 21st century. Here in the West, our initial instinct is to focus on America's significant lead in semiconductor expertise, its cutting-edge AI research, and its vast investments in data centers. The legendary investor Warren Buffett once warned: "Never bet against America." He is right that for more than two centuries, no other "incubator for unleashing human potential" has matched the US.

Why he thinks near-term targets can be a distraction, and what technologies he expects to power our future grid. Bill Gates doesn't shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. "Well, who's the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?" he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. "If there's someone else, I've never met them." The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he's thinking about the state of climate tech right now.

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What our latest list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch says about this moment. On Monday, we published our 2025 edition of Climate Tech Companies to Watch . This marks the third time we've put the list together, and it's become one of my favorite projects to work on every year. In the journalism world, it's easy to get caught up in the latest news, whether it's a fundraising round, research paper, or startup failure. Curating this list gives our team a chance to take a step back and consider the broader picture. What industries are making progress or lagging behind?

Harvard University Figure 1: T o visualize how topics evolve in real time, we create a rotatable embedding space where time is encoded along the Z-axis. We provide three preset views to help users explore topic clusters from different perspectives: (A) Front View (overall clusters), (B) Iso View (clusters over time), and (C) Side View (clusters over time). Here, each point represents an image from a dataset of Picasso's paintings, batched into 5-year intervals. Many real-world datasets - from an artist's body of work to a person's social media history - exhibit meaningful semantic changes over time that are difficult to capture with existing dimensionality reduction methods. To address this gap, we introduce a visualization technique that combines force-based projection and streaming clustering methods to build a spatial-temporal map of embeddings. We demonstrate the utility of our approach through use cases on text and image data, showing how it offers a new lens for understanding the aesthetics and semantics of temporal datasets.

In 2002, artificial intelligence was still in winter. Despite decades of effort, dreams of bestowing computers with human-like cognition and real-world understanding had not materialized. To look for a way forward, a small group of scientists gathered for "The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium." AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was the central presence, along with his protégé Pushpinder Singh. After the symposium, Minsky, Singh, and renowned philosopher Aaron Sloman published a paper on the group's ideas for how to reach human-like AI.