The modern version of the Apollo moon missions, called Artemis, is wildly expensive – and might kill the crew on reentry. Why is it going ahead? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill 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.
A selection of 10 links for you. The real moonshot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024, AI startup set to lose $5bn – report • DCD
Sebastian Moss:
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OpenAI is set to spend billions of dollars on training and inference this year, and may be forced to raise more money to cover growing losses.
The Information reports that, as of March, the company was set to spend nearly $4bn this year on using Microsoft’s servers to run inference workloads for ChatGPT.
A person familiar with the matter told the publication that OpenAI has the equivalent of 350,000 servers containing Nvidia A100 chips for inference, with around 290,000 of those servers used for ChatGPT. The hardware is being run at near full capacity.
Training ChatGPT as well as new models could cost as much as $3bn this year, according to financial documents seen by the publication. The company has ramped up the training of new AI faster than it had originally planned.
For both inference and training, OpenAI gets heavily discounted rates from Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has charged OpenAI about $1.30 per A100 server per hour, way below normal rates.
The company now employs about 1,500 people, which could cost $1.5bn as it continues to grow, The Information estimates – OpenAI had originally projected workforce costs of $500m for 2023 while doubling headcount to around 800 by the end of that year.
The company is bringing in about $2bn annually from ChatGPT, and could be set to bring in nearly $1bn from charging access to LLMs.
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The Information’s numbers might be off a little, but they’d have to be a long way off for this not to be in the ballpark. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.
Unanswered question: how does OpenAI ramp up its income and reduce its costs?
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AOC’s deepfake AI porn bill unanimously passes the Senate • Rolling Stone
Lorena O’Neil:
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The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence.
The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday. The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.
The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.
“Current laws don’t apply to deepfakes, leaving women and girls who suffer from this image-based sexual abuse without a legal remedy,” Durbin posted on X after the bill’s passage. “It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back. I urge my House colleagues to pass this bill expediently.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised the bill’s passage, commending Durbing for his work. “This isn’t just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem,” said Schumer.
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This is interesting, and impressive – AOC getting absolutely everyone in the Senate to pass a bill? Sure, it has plenty of hurdles to jump in the lower House, but the mark of a good politician is being able to get legislation passed. On that measure, she’s extraordinary, succeeding where (as the story points out) others have failed.
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Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests • The Guardian
Harry Davies and Stephanie Kirchgaessner:
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The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.
Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology.
Documents suggest the seizures were part of an unusual legal manoeuvre created by Israel to block the disclosure of information about Pegasus, which the government believed would cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to the country.
Pegasus allows NSO clients to infect smartphones with hidden software that can extract messages and photos, record calls and secretly activate microphones. NSO’s clients have included both authoritarian regimes and democratic countries and the technology has been linked to human rights abuses around the world.
Since late 2019, NSO has been battling a lawsuit in the US brought by WhatsApp, which has alleged the Israeli company used a vulnerability in the messaging service to target more than 1,400 of its users in 20 countries over a two-week period. NSO has denied the allegations.
The removal of files and computers from NSO’s offices in July 2020 – until now hidden from the public by a strict gag order issued by an Israeli court – casts new light on the close ties between Israel and NSO and the overlapping interests of the privately owned surveillance company and the country’s security establishment.
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Hard not to think that the Israeli government finds the existence of NSO Group, and Pegasus in particular, very useful for its own purposes.
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The lunacy of Artemis • Idle Words
Maciej Cieglewski:
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If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.
But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3bn (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10bn). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission’s scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven’t been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder what’s going on here. If we can put a man on the moon, then why can’t we just go do it again? The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960’s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. It took NASA eight years to go from nothing to a moon landing at the dawn of the Space Age. But today, 20 years and $93bn after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever.
Articles about Artemis often give the program’s tangled backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical design, because there’s just so much to drink in. While NASA is no stranger to complex mission architectures, Artemis goes beyond complex to the just plain incoherent. None of the puzzle pieces seem to come from the same box. Half the program requires breakthrough technologies that make the other half unnecessary. The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon. And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.
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That’s not the worst of it: the heat shield has a flawed thermal model and might simply kill the crew on reentry.
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Wexton makes history as first member to use AI voice on House floor • CNN via MSN
Danya Gainor and Haley Talbot:
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Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia made history Thursday as the first lawmaker to use an artificial intelligence-generated model of her voice to speak for her on the House floor.
“My battle with progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, has robbed me of my ability to use my full voice and move around in the ways that I used to, rather than striding confidently onto the House floor to vote,” Wexton said on the floor through the AI model.
Wexton had announced in September that she will not seek reelection, citing her health challenges, which she said she anticipates will worsen.
“I rely on a walker to get around and in all likelihood before my term ends, I will appear on the House floor for votes in a wheelchair,” she said Thursday.
Wexton is the first member to use an augmentative and alternative communication device on the House floor.
When she first heard the AI rendition of her voice, Wexton called it “music to my ears.”
“It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and I cried tears of joy,” she said.
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A very scary disease; a good use for AI voice recreation.
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How music lost its value • Fast Company
Joe Berkowitz:
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A new documentary from Paramount+, How Music Got Free, tells the inside story of how albums shed their exoskeletons and became something more ethereal and less profitable. Produced by LeBron James and Eminem, who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights, the film explores the music industry’s spectacular implosion about two seconds later. But while it traces the overarching business story in forensic detail, How Music Got Free doesn’t quite capture what it felt like to be a music fan living through this extraordinary moment as it unfolded.
Well before Steve Jobs promised to put a thousand songs in our pockets — and well, well before a thousand songs seemed like a relative pittance next to the infinite expanse of a Spotify account — the peak of musical mobility was a book of CDs. It was the only way to bring along a curated sample of your entire library of albums wherever you went. In the early days of the pandemic, I found an old book of CDs I’d collected during the era that How Music Got Free spans: half of them bought, half burned. Revisiting it in 2020 revealed all we’ve lost since it was my main source for music—and may explain why some older music formats are making a comeback.
…Deep inside my old book of CDs lay the first burned one I ever acquired. A friend had copied for me the new (and ultimately final) studio album from Rage Against the Machine, 1999’s Battle of Los Angeles, in exchange for burning one of mine for himself. Listening in 2020, I felt all over again the palpable excitement of getting a brand-new album for free from a band I’d adored. It had felt like getting away with something on a deeper level than Columbia House — because it was.
That excitement had been short-lived, though. I never had the album art for Battle of Los Angeles. Not even the usual CD-face art adorning all its neighbors in the CD book. The band’s name and album title were instead scrawled in my squiggly teenage handwriting. In place of the vibe its cover was meant to conjure, I had information; instead of enjoyment, I had ingestion; in place of the connection forged by trading money for art, I had the fading flash of attainment.
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Smear campaigns and false narratives: how the crypto lobby seeks to influence US politics • Amy Castor
Jake Donoghue:
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Earlier this month, crypto skeptic Molly White launched a website – followthecrypto.org – providing real-time data of crypto election campaign financing. It shows that, to date, the cryptocurrency sector has raised more than $187m for the ironically named “Fairshake” super PAC and its affiliates.
These committees have wasted no time putting these funds to use, with their notable outgoings including a successful $10m smear campaign against progressive Democrat Katie Porter to keep her out of the Senate.
Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, is the biggest contributor to Fairshake’s war chest, with $46.5m in donations. They’re also leading the lobbying charge on another front: In 2023, the industry behemoth hired market research firm Morning Consult to find out how many Americans own cryptocurrencies. As soon as the results came in, [crypto market] Coinbase sprang into action, launching a major campaign to “mobilize 52 million crypto owners into an army of one million advocates for change.”
This spurious and misleading figure – which equates to 20% of the nation’s entire adult population – is at stark variance with data from the US Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s Economic Well-Being of US Households survey.
Published in May, the Fed’s report not only showed the percentage of US crypto holders to be far lower than that cited by Coinbase – 7% of the population, nearly two-thirds less than Morning Consult’s findings – but also that the number of holders is actually in decline, having fallen by 5% from 2021.
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As much as anything, this goes to show that crypto advocates are desperate to make people think there are more of them than there are. But also that a few of them have a ridiculous amount of money.
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From online drug lord to crypto entrepreneur, Blake Benthall is back in business • The New York Times
Ryan Mac and Kashmir Hill:
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At a cryptocurrency convention in Austin in May, Blake Emerson Benthall hustled for investor money alongside scores of other entrepreneurs. But none of them, it is safe to say, could pitch their experience as the leader of a multimillion-dollar criminal drug enterprise.
In the convention’s “Deal Flow Zone,” Mr. Benthall, 5-foot-4, cleanshaven and wearing a gray tee with his start-up’s logo, turned his laptop around at a lunch table and began giving his spiel to a bespectacled potential investor.
“I’m a lifelong entrepreneur,” Mr. Benthall said as he clicked through a presentation that detailed how he had run Silk Road 2.0, the second iteration of the infamous online bazaar where 1.7 million anonymous customers signed up and used Bitcoin to buy methamphetamine, heroin and other illegal substances. He recounted his eventual arrest by the F.B.I. and the years he spent in the punitive employ of the federal government.
Now, with his sentence served and probation ended, Mr. Benthall, 36, is promoting a new business: a two-year-old start-up, Fathom(x), which aims to provide businesses and government agencies with software to track digital currency transactions and ensure legal compliance.
Mr. Benthall knows it’s rich for an ex-con to school companies about compliance. But in an industry crawling with hucksters and overnight experts, Mr. Benthall says his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX, the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange whose founder is in prison.
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“Trust me, I’ve been dishonest” is quite the pitch.
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Ulez expansion led to significant drop in air pollutants in London, report finds • The Guardian
Gwyn Topham:
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Levels of harmful air pollutants have dropped significantly since the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) was enlarged to cover Greater London last year, according to a report from city hall.
Analysis covering the first six months since the Ulez expansion found that total emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from cars across London were 13% lower than projected had the scheme remained confined to inner London, while NOx from vans was 7% lower.
Levels of particulate pollution in the form of PM2.5 exhaust emissions from cars in outer London are an estimated 22% lower than without the expansion. The total change was equivalent to removing 200,000 cars from the road for one year, the report said.
London’s air quality was continuing to improve at a faster rate than the rest of England, with the capital’s pollution rapidly approaching levels seen across the country, it found.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, extended Ulez from the inner London boroughs across the whole of London in August 2023. The move was bitterly opposed by many in outer London with a number of Conservative-led councils taking legal action.
The most polluting cars must normally pay a £12.50 charge each day they are driven in the capital. Only a minority of cars on the road are affected, with most petrol cars under 19 years old and diesel cars under nine years old exempt.
The proportion of non-compliant vehicles entering the expanded Ulez halved to less than 4% in February, compared with more than 8% detected on London’s roads last June. About 90,000 fewer non-compliant vehicles were detected daily on average each day in the zone.
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The full report (with spreadsheet) is on the London government page. Vehicle pollution has halved over the past 10 years.
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“Brat” explained by a veteran journalist who has to accept whatever assignment we give him • I Might Be Wrong
Jacob Fuzetti, who “wrote an award-winning biography of Lech Walesa and whose dispatches from Afghanistan are considered the definitive account of that war, and who now works for a man who thinks that it’s hilarious to photoshop fake breasts onto ET”, under the instruction, so to speak, of Jeff Maurer:
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This week, Benjamin Netanyahu toured the U.S., a software failure threw the global economy into chaos, and a singer called Kamala Harris “brat”. I begged my editor to assign me to one of the first two stories, but he assigned me to the “brat” story. So, I will attempt to elucidate the meaning of “brat”, place that meaning into context, and to do all that without collapsing into utter despair over the state of journalism and also my life.
“Brat” — pronounced like the word meaning “unruly child”, and not like the German sausage — is a word repurposed by a British “popular music” star known as Charli [sic] XCX. Despite the masculine first name, Ms. XCX is female, and her honorific is pronounced “ex, see, ex” — the letters do not connote Roman numerals. Last month, Ms. XCX released a record album entitled “Brat”, and The Guardian reports that “brat” also refers to “a lifestyle inspired by noughties excess.” The meaning of that phrase could not be determined as of press time.
I feel compelled to report that I consider the information in the preceding paragraph undersourced. My primary source is my grand-nephew Stewie, who was kind enough to talk to me on the phone even though he was “tripping balls on edibles”.
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I mean, this is how a lot of the coverage read.
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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 