As AI companies work furiously to improve the intelligence and usefulness of their products, their demand for cheap, plentiful energy has skyrocketed. This gold rush has been extremely profitable for an unlikely beneficiary: Bitcoin miners. In recent months, major Bitcoin mining companies have started to swap out some of their mining equipment in favor of rigs used to run and train AI systems. These companies believe that AI training could provide a safer and more consistent source of revenue than the volatile crypto industry. And so far, these pivots have been warmly received by investors, leading to the market cap of 14 major bitcoin mining companies jumping in value by 22%, or 4 billion, since the beginning of June, J.P. Morgan reported on June 24. This transition reflects several trends of the moment: the roaring hype cycle of AI; the dwindling access to power, and a tenuous bitcoin mining landscape following the bitcoin halving.

Blake Lemoine, an AI researcher at Google, is convinced the company has created intelligence. The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google "collaborator", and the company's LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system. Lemoine, an engineer for Google's responsible AI organization, described the system he has been working on since last fall as sentient, with a perception of, and ability to, express thoughts and feelings that was equivalent to a human child. "If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics," Lemoine, 41, told the Washington Post. The transcript published by Lemoine is fascinating, but I, and many of his peers, think he is fundamentally wrong in viewing it as evidence of intellect, let alone sentience. You can read the whole thing online, but the section that has sparked many people's interest is when he asks LaMDA to describe its own sense of self: If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind's eye, what would that abstract picture look like?

What the heck is going on in the land of cryptocurrency and NFTs? This week, Devindra and Engadget UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith chat with Manda Farough, co-host and producer of the Virtual Economy podcast, about the massive crypto crash. They discuss how the fall of the Luna cryptocurrency and its sibling, TerraUSD, sent shockwaves through the industry. Also, they dive into ICE's surprisingly robust (and scary) surveillance system, as well the DHS's stalled misinformation board. Stay tuned for the end of the show for our chat with Tim Miller and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the co-creator and animation director for Netflix's Love, Death & Robots.

A military drone may have autonomously attacked humans for the first time without being instructed to do so, according to a recent report by the UN Security Council. The report, published in March, claimed that the AI drone – Kargu-2 quadcopter – produced by Turkish military tech company STM, attacked retreating soldiers loyal to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. The 548-page report by the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya has not delved into details on if there were any deaths due to the incident, but it raises questions on whether global efforts to ban killer autonomous robots before they are built may be futile. Over the course of the year, the UN-recognized Government of National Accord pushed the Haftar Affiliated Forces (HAF) back from the Libyan capital Tripoli, and the drone may have been operational since January 2020, the experts noted. "Logistics convoys and retreating HAF were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2," the UN report noted.

NVIDIA wasn't joking when it warned that its performance for the quarter ending in January 27th, 2019 will fall short of expectations. The chipmaker's earnings report for the period shows that it posted a $2.2 billion revenue, which sounds impressive until you realize that it's down 24 percent from the year before. That figure is also down 31 percent from the previous quarter, which saw NVIDIA posting $3.18 billion in revenue. In addition, the company made $294 million in operating income, down a whopping 73 percent year-on-year and down 72 percent from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, its operating expenses went up by 25 percent from the same period a year before.