THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them.The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.[Read: The $10,000 MacBook Pro is here]The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has… [TheTopNews] Read More.

If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In Act III, Scene ii: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” And later in that same scene: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place. In one version, the Y is additive: It focuses, intensifies, or expands on the X. An annual review by Citizens Financial Group reported that growth in its private-banking division was “not just a win for the private bank—it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” In another variant, the Y supplants the X as the preferred descriptor. “The target was never a man. The target was the truth,” Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump adviser, wrote in a March X post.Then there are constructions like No A, no B, just C, which especially seem to crop up in AI-generated fiction. Lines such as “No bag, no things, no armor, just me” helped to fuel accusations of AI writing in the horror novel Shy Girl, which was pulled by its publisher this year. (The book’s author denied using AI to write it. Citizens Financial Group has previously said that its communications team “leverages the technology in a number of areas.” Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.)The prevalence of this device isn’t just anecdotal—it’s measurable. (Sorry.) Barron’s reported that its appearance in corporate communications more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2025. Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing. Elyas Masrour, a founding engineer at Pangram, told me that all of the major chatbots—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and various open-source models—rely on it to varying degrees.Many other well-known chatbot tells—such as the usage of delve—have come and gone as AI companies honed their models and worked out kinks. Last fall, ChatGPT became obsessed… [TheTopNews] Read More.

This summer’s lineup of sporting events has been an embarrassment of riches. This morning, the No. 1 men’s tennis player in the world (Jannik Sinner) and the winningest men’s tennis player of all time (Novak Djokovic) played in the semifinal of the biggest tennis tournament in the world (Wimbledon). In the afternoon, Spain and Belgium are kicking off their World Cup quarterfinal match. If that wasn’t enough, the evening brings a full slate of Major League Baseball games, plus NBA Summer League debuts for half the league’s rookies. All of this comes after a packed June in which, at one point, the World Cup, the NBA finals, and the NHL finals all briefly overlapped.If it feels like there is more sports to watch than ever before, that’s because there is. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, the tournament having jumped from 32 teams to 48. It may come around only every four years, but the sports calendar no longer stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games over the past few years. In 2020, the NFL tacked on two extra playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular-season game for the first time in nearly 50 years. Since then, it has colonized ever more calendar territory, rescheduling games from its standard Sunday slate to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and a number of late-season Saturdays. Every major league has expanded over the past few years, Stephen Master, an adjunct professor of sports media at NYU and the former global head of sports at Nielsen, told me: “There’s not a league that hasn’t been touched by it.” And while this isn’t the first time these leagues have grown, the recent across-the-board expansion surge is unusual, the experts I spoke with all said.If you’re a sports fan like me, more games to watch can seem like a good thing. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding out for a miraculous draw against the mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs—as, say, the MLB did in 2022—they give more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to root for. But the glut of games can also be overwhelming, even if you aren’t someone who binges three different leagues. There’s simply too much.The feeling of excess has to do in part with… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about AI. “🇺🇸AI is changing how we work and live,” one message read. “You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure—that’s normal.” I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course from the Labor Department created to help workers succeed in the ChatGPT economy. The weeklong program, created in partnership with an AI start-up and delivered by text message, was supposed to equip Americans with “foundational AI skills,” according to an agency press release. But the government’s texts were not reassuring. One message encouraged me to ask a bot for “side hustle ideas.” Another suggested that I brush up on my AI skills by doodling: “Grab a friend and see whose drawing of a hippo AI can recognize … and whose it mistakes for a lumpy potato. 🥔.”When it comes to AI’s threat to jobs, America has acted like a deer in headlights. For all the catastrophic messaging about looming layoffs, efforts to prepare for a major transition have lagged. After speaking with a roster of the nation’s top business and political leaders, my colleague Josh Tyrangiel concluded earlier this year that no one seemed to have a plan for how to proceed. Government efforts to shore up the labor market have been largely underwhelming. AI-literacy courses like the one I took are hardly a sufficient response if you believe that mass job loss is forthcoming; the Trump administration announced a goal last year to expand apprenticeship programs, but progress on that front has been middling. Meanwhile, the tech industry has barreled ahead in its efforts to develop more capable models. Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei warned that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”But over the past several weeks, politicians and tech executives have started to make a show of more seriously preparing the country for a future of AI layoffs. As promising as these new efforts are, many of them also end up serving the interests of Silicon Valley.Consider a flashy proposal for state ownership of AI companies. Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the federal government a 50 percent stake in major AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI. The act would also give an appointed commission voting shares to help “stop bad decisions that will reap massive job loss,”… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she’d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she’d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. “Now I only have what’s on here.”Stange, who is 29, is part of a recent “analog” movement in which people—usually those in Gen Z—opt for less distracting alternatives to their “everything” device. Those alternatives are not always, in fact, analog, but are in many cases older digital devices: an iPod, a digital Canon PowerShot, a DVD player. Tiffany Ng, the 25-year-old author of the newsletter Cyber Celibate, now has a first-generation iPhone, an 11-year-old iPod, two CD players, a Walkman radio, and a 1986 Macintosh Plus that takes 45 seconds to load the “Welcome to Macintosh” screen.Ng lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 20 years ago, the word analog would’ve conjured hipsters getting into vinyl. The argument then was that a record player produced real, textured music in a way an iPod’s digital files could not. But today, people are “going analog,” as they call it, to escape devices that offer endless options, in favor of those that offer a modicum of constraint.The iPod’s original tagline—“1,000 songs in your pocket”—suggested that you could dance like the carefree silhouettes in the ads because you didn’t have to lug around CDs. This was the era when technology was “convenient, but not connected,” Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president at Apple who is known as the “father of the iPod,” told me; then the iPod became the iPhone, which soon had an app store, and convenience and connectivity became inextricably linked. People had their library of songs, but now they also had app notifications and Angry Birds and Instagram posts from that girl they went to middle school with. Eventually, streamable Apple Music replaced iTunes, and tens of thousands of songs became 100 million songs. “I can’t go through all of it,” Stange said.Stange could still carve out her own corner of Spotify through playlists, but on her Nano, she truly has only music she chooses, with artist photos she uploads manually. For many people, that little bit of added friction is part… [TheTopNews] Read More.