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. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana. Stretching for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity. To power the data center, a Meta contractor called Entergy will build ... Read full article.