Fears about AI data centers' water use have exploded. Experts say the reality is far more complicated than people think. Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a town near Santiago, Chile, could require "more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population"--a figure which, thanks to a unit misunderstanding, appears to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000. In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruism organization in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her attention. Masley has spent the past several months questioning some of the numbers and rhetoric common in popular media about water use and AI on his Substack.

Large language models lie at the center of recent advances in artificial intelligence.

President Donald Trump's controversially announced plans for the US to'take over and own' Gaza last night. While the proclamation drew criticism for'bringing more suffering to the region,' users on social media have used AI to transform the city into a gentrified metropolis with a large building featuring a'Trump Tower' sign glowing in lights at the city center. The rubble-filled streets were transformed into paved roadways lined with towering skyscrapers and areas where buildings had crumbled featured a green golf course surrounded by resorts. The AI-generated images were met with amusement, but others angered at the insensitivity of the creations and warned how'it would be the biggest blackpill ever if a great Biblical city was paved over.' Trump, who spent his career as a property developer, has long talked up Gaza's coastal location and pleasant climate as a perfect holiday vacation. In his vision, US reconstruction would create thousands of jobs and spare Palestinians the pain and expense of rebuilding once again.

Despite a growing interest in diffusion-based language models, existing work has not shown that these models can attain nontrivial likelihoods on standard language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we take the first steps towards closing the likelihood gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based language models, with the goal of building and releasing a diffusion model which outperforms a small but widely-known autoregressive model. We pursue this goal through algorithmic improvements, scaling laws, and increased compute. On the algorithmic front, we introduce several methodological improvements for the maximum-likelihood training of diffusion language models. We then study scaling laws for our diffusion models and find compute-optimal training regimes which differ substantially from autoregressive models. Using our methods and scaling analysis, we train and release Plaid 1B, a large diffusion language model which outperforms GPT-2 124M in likelihood on benchmark datasets and generates fluent samples in unconditional and zero-shot control settings.

From delivering food to your door, serving us coffee and even removing cancerous tumors, robots can already complete a range of impressive tasks. But now a robot has taken on the golf course, being able to navigate itself to a ball and even sink a putt. Thanks to a 3D camera, the impressive robot dubbed Golfi can find golf balls and wheel itself into place before taking a shot. The camera uses an algorithm to detect hard-coded objects, scan the area and find the ball. Golfi (pictured) was created by the Paderborn University in Germany.

Delivery robots continue to expand their market while helping golf clubs' technological makeover. Autonomous robot delivery platform startup Neubility has launched what it says is "the world's first" self-driving robot service on a golf course. As part of that first start, Neubility has concluded an agreement with Korean Food Service Company, Samsung Welstory to provide autonomous delivery robots and plans to commercialize such delivery services for golf courses starting October. To this end, it will offer delivery robots to many locally renowned golf courses in Korea. Neubility has test-operated delivery robots since last March and have completed preliminary tests with flawless results.

The phrase "the future of transportation" tends to conjure up visions of hyperloops, self-driving cars, and flying taxis whizzing through and between cities. But what if the next chapter of urban mobility instead gives a starring role to … the golf cart? In 2015, researchers at Harvard Business School investigated whether Tesla, the poster child of automotive innovation, offered a truly disruptive model for transportation. Their conclusion: A "souped-up golf cart"--not a Tesla--offered the most transformative potential. Indeed, these puttering vehicles, most often associated with leisure and affluence, just might provide a pathway toward safe, affordable, and entertaining rides for the masses.

The Supreme Court has dealt a major blow to the Biden administration, ending a White House requirement that employees at large businesses get a vaccine or test regularly and wear a mask on the job. The court's conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. At the same time, the court is allowing the administration to proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the U.S., resulting in a mixed decision for the administration. Reacting to the ruling, Psaki hailed the decision allowing mandates for health care workers as "good news," saying the administration will continue to enforce it. On the OSHA ruling, Psaki said the White House will "continue to call on businesses to immediately join those those who have already stepped up, including one third of Fortune 100 companies, to institute vaccination requirements to protect their workers, customers and communities."

Wealth advisors used to succeed by making insightful lunch conversation, being fun on the golf course and winning referrals. These days, effectively leveraging big data is a better bet for successful marketing. The growing hoard of wealth invested with robo-advisor platforms is forcing advisers to change how they operate. By the end of 2017, $160 billion of assets will be invested in digital advice platforms, up from $65 billion a year ago, according to research by Aite Group and Broadridge. That number will swell to $400 billion by the end of 2018.