The influx of streaming services has made a dent in broadcast and cable – but far from displaced them, new data shows. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about search and chatbots.
The Overspill is going on holiday for two weeks. Returning June 17.
A selection of 10 links for you. Goggle eyed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US slows plans to retire coal-fired plants as power demand from AI surges • FT
Amanda Chu:
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The staggering electricity demand needed to power next-generation technology is forcing the US to rely on yesterday’s fuel source: coal.
Retirement dates for the country’s ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants are being pushed back as concerns over grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand force operators to keep capacity online.
The shift in phasing out these facilities underscores a growing dilemma facing the Biden administration as the US race to lead in artificial intelligence and manufacturing drives an unprecedented growth in power demand that clashes with its decarbonisation targets. The International Energy Agency estimates the AI application ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google Search.
An estimated 54 gigawatts of US coal powered generation assets, about 4% of the country’s total electricity capacity, is expected to be retired by the end of the decade, a 40% downward revision from last year, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights, citing reliability concerns.
“You can’t replace the fossil plants fast enough to meet the demand,” said Joe Craft, chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners, one of the largest US coal producers. “In order to be a first mover on AI, we’re going to need to embrace maintaining what we have.”
Operators slowing down retirements include Alliant Energy, which last week delayed plans to convert its Wisconsin coal-fired plant to gas from 2025 to 2028.
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That delta between ChatGPT and Google Search is bananas. If Google’s AI Overview is using anything like it.. wow.
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The Terraformer Mark One • Terraform Industries Blog
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The Terraformer is a carbon-neutral drop-in successor to drilling for fossil fuels.
The Terraformer is designed to integrate directly with a standard 1 MW solar array. No grid connection, no interconnection queue. The Terraformer gets solar energy to market as energy dense, clean, cheap, carbon neutral synthetic natural gas.
The Terraformer produces 1000 cubic feet of natural gas per hour of operation. It is optimized for 25% utilization, typical for utility scale solar arrays, and in this configuration produces 6,000 cubic feet/day.
Operating the equivalent of 2190 hours per year, one Terraformer produces over 2 million cubic feet of natural gas. At $10/Mcf [million cubic feet] sale price and $54/Mcf for IRA PTCs (45V, 45Q, 45E) each unit produces up to $150,000 of annual revenue.
A gigawatt-scale solar array integrated with 1,000 Terraformers will produce enough natural gas to supply 20,000 homes.
A self-funding global fleet of 400 million Terraformers, rolled out over the next two decades, will provide all of humanity with permanent unconditional energy abundance for the first time in history, completing the mission of the industrial revolution.
Production starts Q2 2024.
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Ben Thompson interviewed Casey Handmer, the chief executive of this company, at Stratechery. I thought it sounded barmy: why pull carbon dioxide out of the air in order to burn it? But the carbon-neutral approach is interesting. It demands 2,000 litres of water per day. That’s not free, but it’s not that expensive either – about £5 per day. Perhaps it could work. The problem is always scale. One isn’t enough, and a thousand would require a lot of solar power and space – all to produce a version of something that’s otherwise cheap (absent swingeing carbon taxes).
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US poised to invest millions in mRNA bird flu vaccine amid H5N1 scare • Daily Telegraph via Yahoo
Maeve Cullinan and Paul Nuki:
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The US government is poised to announce a multimillion-dollar investment in mRNA vaccines for H5N1 bird flu. The move comes as the virus continues to spread in mammals, threatening a new pandemic if it makes the jump to humans.
The US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is understood to be nearing an agreement with Moderna to finance human trials for its experimental mRNA bird flu vaccine. The deal would include a commitment to stockpile millions of vaccines if the trials were successful, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Senior officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva welcomed the news, amid fears the H5N1 outbreak, which has killed millions of animals in the last two years, could yet spread to humans.
Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the WHO, said investing in mRNA jabs for H5N1 was “an important step forward”, while Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said it demonstrated “active pandemic preparedness” on the part of the Americans. The recent progress of H5N1 into US cattle was “concerning,” she added.
H5N1, which has a human case fatality rate of 50%, has been circulating for more than 20 years, causing thousands of human infections and more than 400 deaths primarily in people working with animals over that period.
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Also: most recent H5N1 case detected in US farm worker shows the virus has mutated in a manner “associated with viral adaptation to mammalian hosts”.
Just a watching brief.
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OpenAI is rebooting its robotics team • Forbes
Kenrick Cai:
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Over the past year, OpenAI’s in-house startup fund has invested in several well-capitalized companies trying to develop humanoid robots, including Figure AI (raised $745m), 1X Technologies ($125m) and Physical Intelligence ($70m). It hinted at a possible robotics reboot in a February press release for Figure’s latest fundraise; And one month later, Figure debuted a video of its robot demonstrating rudimentary speech and reasoning skills supported by a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI. “We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” vice president Peter Welinder, previously a member of OpenAI’s robotics team, said.
Two sources told Forbes that OpenAI intends to coexist rather than compete against such companies, building technology that the robot makers will integrate into their own systems. And the listing notes that engineers hired for the position would be tasked with collaborating with “external partners” as well as training AI models. Sources said it’s unclear whether OpenAI plans to develop robotics hardware, which it struggled to do several years ago. Its widening ambitions have recently been marked by some turbulence — a series of high-level safety team departures and an accusation from actress Scarlett Johansson that it appropriated her voice for its ChatGPT product “Sky.”
The narrower focus for the robotics team this time around may nevertheless have some overlap with companies it hopes to engage in business. Companies like Covariant, started by former OpenAI robotics team members, are also attempting to train their own robotics models. And, two sources said, OpenAI has already gone head to head with companies in this space for a limited pool of talent.
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Can’t have a robot apocalypse without robots *looks at camera, taps temple*. But at least they’ll strangle you with a flirty laugh.
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Twelve Angry Trump Jurors • The Washington Post
Alexandra Petri:
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[Twelve jurors are assembled in a deliberation room while a fan spins lazily overhead. Jurors open windows, fan themselves and make small talk.]
Juror 3: Hot in here.
Juror 11: Hottest day of the year, they say.
Juror 5: Well, we won’t be in here long. Which is good, because I have to go to a lecture about the presidency of Grover Cleveland.
Juror 7: Sounds skippable.
Juror 5: It’s his second term, not his first term.
Juror 1: Okay, gentlemen. We can do this a number of ways. We can discuss and then vote. Or we can take a preliminary vote, see where we stand and then discuss. Our result has to be 12 to nothing, either way.
Juror 3: Let’s do a preliminary vote. Maybe we can all go home.Juror 1: All right. Show of hands: Who thinks he is guilty?
[Eleven hands go up. All heads swivel to Juror 8, sitting at the end of the table with his hand firmly on its surface.]
Juror 1: No?
Juror 8: I’m just not convinced.
Juror 1: Oh, boy.
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Petri writes wonderfully funny columns. Enjoy!
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OpenAI says its tools were used in foreign influence campaigns • Axios
Ina Fried:
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OpenAI said Thursday that it has seen several foreign influence campaigns tap the power of its AI models to help generate and translate content, but has yet to see novel attacks enabled through its tools.
Supercharging misinformation efforts has been seen as a key risk associated with generative AI, though it has been an open question just how the tools would be used and by whom.
OpenAI said in a new report that it has seen its tools used by several existing foreign influence operations, including efforts based in Russia, China, Iran and Israel.
For example, the Chinese network known as “Spamouflage” used OpenAI’s tools to debug code, research media and generate posts in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean.
The Russian “Doppelganger” effort, meanwhile, tapped OpenAI models to generate social media content in several languages as well as to translate articles, generate headlines and convert news articles into Facebook posts.
Meanwhile, an Iranian operation known as the International Union of Virtual Media used OpenAI tools to both generate and translate long-form articles, headlines and website tags, while an Israeli commercial company called STOIC ran multiple covert influence campaigns around the world, using OpenAI models to generate articles and comments that were then posted to Instagram, Facebook, X, and other websites.
OpenAI said it also detected and disrupted a previously unknown Russian campaign dubbed “Bad Grammar” that operated on Telegram. The effort targeted Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States and the United States and used OpenAI models both to debug code for a Telegram bot and to create short, political comments in Russian and English.
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IRS plans to make its free tax filing program permanent • CNN Politics
Katie Lobosco:
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The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday that it will continue and expand its free tax filing program in 2025.
A pilot version of the online program, known as Direct File, launched earlier this year. It provides step-by-step guidance to taxpayers filing their federal tax returns.
Direct File was available to people with certain simple tax returns in 12 states during the 2024 tax filing season. More than 140,000 people successfully filed their federal tax returns using Direct File, exceeding the agency’s expectations.
Next year, the IRS plans to open the program to some taxpayers in all states and Washington, DC.
The Biden administration is touting the pilot program – which was funded by the Democrat-backed Inflation Reduction Act – as a win. The legislation, which passed in 2022, provided the IRS with a massive, 10-year investment meant to modernize taxpayer services and crack down on wealthy tax cheats. Republicans, concerned that small businesses and the middle class could be targeted by IRS auditors, have made several efforts to chip away at the agency’s funding.
…The pilot program has cost nearly $32m so far. About $75m has been budgeted for Direct File during fiscal year 2025, though the cost will depend on how many people ultimately use the program.
…A government survey found that 90% of Direct File users said their experience with the tax filing system was “excellent” or “above average.” Nearly half of the survey respondents had paid to file their federal tax returns the previous year.
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This is a free replacement for the widely hated and paid-for Intuit Turbotax, which rakes in billions (not all from US personal tax filings). A rare and encouraging example of Americans leaning on government to replace a private software offering, and doing it better, creating real consumer surplus.
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Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real • The Verge
Mia Sato:
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A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents from Google filled with details about data the company collects is authentic, the company confirmed on Wednesday. Until now, Google had refused to comment on the materials.
The documents in question detail data that Google is keeping track of, some of which may be used in its closely guarded search ranking algorithm. The documents offer an unprecedented — though still murky — look under the hood of one of the most consequential systems shaping the web.
“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told The Verge in an email. “We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”
The existence of the leaked material was first outlined by search engine optimization (SEO) experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King, who each published initial analyses of the documents and their contents earlier this week. Google did not respond to The Verge’s multiple requests for comment yesterday about the authenticity of the leak.
The leaked material suggests that Google collects and potentially uses data that company representatives have said does not contribute to ranking webpages in Google Search, like clicks, Chrome user data, and more. The thousands of pages of documents act as a repository of information for Google employees, but it’s not clear what pieces of data detailed are actually used to rank search content — the information could be out of date, used strictly for training purposes, or collected but not used for Search specifically. The documents also do not reveal how different elements are weighted in search, if at all.
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So why did Google take so long to confirm this? The documents have been around for days. One has to suspect that it was trying to run down the clock – had it confirmed them at once, that would make the story bigger in the wider tech journalism world – and to find a sufficiently minimal response. Notice how it doesn’t say that the information itself is out of context, outdated or incomplete. Just that if you ever found stuff that was, you should be wary.
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Why publishers are preparing to federate their sites • Digiday
Sara Guaglione
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At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement. This comes at a time when walled gardens like Facebook and X are becoming less reliable for driving readers to publishers’ sites.
The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.
The fediverse allows users from different platforms and services to interact with one another without creating individual accounts for each platform, letting followers from one platform like and comment on a post on another platform. In other words, it lets social media networks that are independent from one another “talk” to each other.
But now publishers want in on the interoperability. The Verge, Vox Media’s tech news publication, and start-up tech site 404 Media are eager to federate their sites — they’re just waiting on the tech to support that functionality to become available to them.
“As an independent publisher, we are really excited about anything we can do to reach readers directly without needing to rely on social media platforms owned by massive tech companies who can take away access to our audience on a whim,” Jason Koebler, 404 Media co-founder, said in an email.
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Have to love the lacuna between the headline, which promises a land grab, and the bathos of the opening phrase of “at least two”. But the principle is sound: Google and search engines which used to provide so much traffic are going to dry up, so get ahead of that shift.
However I think that if we’re talking about “social media platforms owned by massive tech companies”, Threads.. might fall into that category?
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Nielsen launches the Media Distributor Gauge – the first convergent TV comparison of its kind • Nielsen
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Across the primary viewing categories [in the US]:
• Cable was the only category in The Gauge to escape decline as it achieved a second consecutive monthly increase in share, moving up from 28.3% of TV in March to 29.1% (+0.8 pt.) in April. Cable sports viewing increased 28% vs. March, bolstered by NCAA basketball tournament coverage, NBA playoffs and the NFL draft. Women’s NCAA basketball finals and semifinals coverage accounted for four of the top six cable telecasts in April, and the WNBA draft notched 17th. While cable viewing increased about 1% on a monthly basis, a year-over-year comparison shows viewing has declined 8.2% vs. April 2023, and its share has lost 2.4 points.
• Broadcast viewing was down 3% in April, which equated to a 22.2% share of TV (-0.3 pt.). Similar to cable, women’s sports were the bright spot in the broadcast category this month. The NCAA women’s basketball championship game drew 17.6 million viewers on ABC (plus over 1 million more tuned in on ESPN), making it the top broadcast telecast in April by a large margin. The drama genre accounted for 29% of broadcast viewing, driven by Tracker, NCIS and Young Sheldon on CBS, and Chicago Fire and Chicago Med on NBC.
• Streaming viewership declined 1.9% from March to April, prompting the category to lose just 0.1 share point to account for 38.4% of total television. Amazon Prime Video saw the largest increase among streaming services this month with a 12% monthly increase for 3.2% of TV (+0.4 pt.). Prime Video’s April success was driven by its original series Fallout, which also topped all streaming titles this month with over 7 billion viewing minutes. YouTube, despite a 3% monthly decline in viewing, added a 15th month to its streak as the top streaming platform in The Gauge with a 9.6% share of TV in April.
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There’s also a graphic of how time is spent watching what sort of TV. Note that YouTube TV is counted in Streaming – making up 10% of that category, or 3.8% overall – and comes ahead of Netflix. But for all the billions spent on streaming channels, they’re less than 40% of all viewing, and cable plus broadcast still accounts for over 50% of viewing time.
This is the US, of course. Other countries might be even more resilient against streaming.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 