The plummeting price of batteries is making them attractive to homeowners as well as grid companies. CC-licensed photo by Ben Paulos on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why AI isn’t going to make art • The New Yorker
Ted Chiang:
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Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative AI deserves closer examination.
When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference.
So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.
…It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like.
Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
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Chiang writes fabulous stories (his short story “The Story Of Your Life” became Arrival, one of the very best SF films) but is clearly intrigued by this technology. Not enough to let it take over, though.
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Misinformed about misinformation • FT
Tim Harford:
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Not only does misinformation represent a small fraction of online traffic, it is a small fraction which disproportionately attracts a small minority. A paper published in Science in 2019 by Nir Grinberg, Lisa Friedland and others examined Twitter behaviour during the 2016 election and concluded that “only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures . . . individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news”. In other words, the audience for fake news on Twitter in 2016 was a tiny minority of users, most of whom would have voted for Trump in any case.
None of this is to suggest that misinformation is a trivial problem. If 5% or 10% of social media “news” is wrong, that’s a serious concern. I warned last summer that a classic disinformation tactic is to blame a real heinous crime on an entirely innocent group — exactly the kind of lies that circulated after the murder of children in Southport. Lies that circulate among a small minority can still do a lot of harm, especially if that minority enthusiastically turns to intimidation and violence.
And I remain worried about the possibility of a co-ordinated disinformation attack, which if well-timed and well-aimed could swing a close election, and which demands forethought and defensive measures that liberal democracies have been slow to embrace.
These problems are all real. But they require focused attention, not pearl-clutching about fake news. Most of us only hear about the latest online lies because they are being repeated by political elites, or by mainstream news sources — sometimes in a well-meaning but risky “fact-checking” exercise. When it comes to misinformation, social media companies surely have a case to answer. But they are not the only ones who should be looking in the mirror.
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The lightbulb of the 21st century: the battery revolution illuminates a new era • EL PAÍS English
Ignacio Fariza:
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“[Batteries’] impact on demand for fossil fuels is going to be enormous,” says Francisco Blanch, head of global commodities and equity derivatives at Bank of America. “Until now, there was only one way to store energy: in the form of hydrocarbons. That’s no longer the case: clean energy can now be stored in batteries. This will drastically reduce gas and oil consumption,” he adds, on the phone with EL PAÍS from New York City. “When electric cars soon offer ranges of [620 miles] and very fast recharges at affordable prices… who’s going to want a car [with an internal combustion engine]?” he asks rhetorically.
In China, the world leader in this area, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that two out of three battery-powered passenger car models are already cheaper than their petrol-powered equivalents.
Adrián González, a specialist at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), notes that, in the field of transportation, batteries will be “indispensable for light road traffic and a [viable energy] alternative, with potential for heavy traffic, air and sea [transit].”
…Even without public subsidies, the enormous — and growing — price volatility between lunchtime (when there’s more sun) and breakfast and dinnertime (when the UV index is minimal or non-existent and household demand, contrastingly, soars) already makes arbitrage profitable in many countries: buying electricity when it’s cheap, storing it in a battery, and selling it when it’s expensive. A game in which households are also starting to participate, as they use small batteries to store the surplus energy from their solar panels, so as to not have to draw on the grid at night.
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All of which is creating more demand for batteries, which pulls in supply, which drops the price.
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Empowering farmers in Central Europe: the case for agri-PV • Ember
Paweł Czyżak and Tatiana Mindekova:
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Several years of intensive research across Europe and beyond has shown that agri-PV [the combined use of land for food production and solar electricity generation] can increase crop yields by up to 16% in the case of fruits or berries. With less shade-tolerant crops like wheat, yield losses are kept below 20% thanks to vertical solar panels with wide row spacing. The added revenues from the sale of electricity far outweigh the reduced revenues from grains. A case study shows that an annual profit of €1268 per hectare is possible from combined electricity and wheat sales. This contrasts with traditional wheat production (without agri-PV) that is estimated to be generating net losses in 2024.
Ember’s analysis reveals that Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia could deploy a total of 180 GW of agri-PV and almost triple Central Europe’s annual renewable electricity production from 73 TWh to 191 TWh. Using just 9% of that generation could cover the entire electricity needs of farming and food processing. Consequently, agri-PV would significantly contribute to the 2030 solar capacity targets set in the revised National Energy and Climate Plans. These equate to 60 GW for the four countries combined, compared to the current 25 GW of total installed solar capacity.
Introducing legislation to enable agri-PV would benefit both energy and food security across Central Europe and beyond.
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The idea that you can share fields between crops and solar panels will blow the minds of all the Green Party MPs and NIMBFs (Not In My Back Fields) who keep bitterly opposing solar farms.
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Why I changed my mind on self-driving cars • Exponential View
Azeem Azhar:
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While it’s not clear what proportion of Waymo’s 100,000 weekly rides happens in San Francisco alone, the city is their most mature market, so it is likely the bulk of rides.
That gives us a direct comparison with Uber’s staffed rideshare service, which runs approximately 200,000 rides a day in San Francisco. Given Waymo’s 100,000-a-week figure, the company likely offers 10,000 or more rides a day in the city, a 5%-ish or more market share. This is close to the tipping point of an S-curve of adoption of 6%.1
Waymo’s ride numbers would also give San Francisco a justifiable claim to be the world’s first “driverless city”. Waymo has a larger number of rides per day in San Francisco than Baidu does in Wuhan – despite the Chinese city having a population ten times larger. Wuhan, however, leads by driving the cost of robotaxi journeys down. A 10-kilometre ride in a robotaxi in Wuhan is between a fifth and half the price of a ridesharing equivalent. Anecdotally, a ride in Waymo in San Francisco costs around 20% more than an Uber.
Without driver fatigue, the number of rides a robotaxi can run a day can be greater than that of its non-automated predecessor. In Wuhan, robotaxis complete up to 20 rides a day, which matches or even exceeds the average of 13.2 for human taxi drivers in the city.
What about the economics? Baidu operated around 336,000 Apollo Go rides in July. This means that Baidu Apollo could be netting $200,000 to $800,000 a month or $2.5-10 million a year. The Apollo, costing only $28,000 to build, is much cheaper than Waymo’s cars, which are estimated to cost $150,000.
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Previously a sceptic, Azhar thinks the computing and economics have flippped in favour of self-driving taxis, and after them cars more generally.
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The AI chip startup that could take down Nvidia • Freethink
Kristin Houser:
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Etched, a startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, also thinks specialization is the best approach to building AI chips, developing Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that runs just one type of AI — transformers — very, very well.
Transformers are one of the newest kinds of AI systems, having been introduced by Google researchers in just 2017. They were created to improve AI translation tools, which, at the time, worked by translating each word in a sentence one after another.
Google’s transformer model was able to look at the entire sentence before translating it, and this additional context helped the AI better understand the meaning of the sentence, which led to more accurate translations.
Transformers soon proved to be useful for far more than language translation. They have played a pivotal role in the generative AI explosion of the past few years, putting the big “T” in “ChatGPT” and enabling the creation of AI models that can generate text, images, music, videos, and even drug molecules.
“It’s a general method that captures interactions between pieces in a sentence, or the notes in music, or pixels in an image, or parts of a protein,” Ashish Vaswani, co-author of Google’s transformer paper, told the Financial Times in 2023. “It can be purposed for any task.”
In 2022, Etched’s co-founders decided to put all their chips on transformers (so to speak), betting that they would be important enough to the future of AI that a microchip optimized to run only transformer-based models would be incredibly valuable.
“There aren’t that many people that are connected enough to AI companies to realize the opportunity and also crazy enough to take the bet — that’s where a couple 22-year-olds can come in and give it a swing,” Etched co-founder Robert Wachen told Freethink.
“When we started, this was incredibly crazy,” he continued. “Now it’s only mildly crazy.”
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Raised $120m in funding recently. One to watch.
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Apple stands by decision to terminate account belonging to WWDC student winner • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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Apple is standing by its decision to terminate the Apple Developer Account of Appstun, a mobile app company created by one of Apple’s own Worldwide Developer Conference 2021 student winners. According to an announcement published on Appstun’s website, Apple moved to terminate the developer’s account after multiple rejections of its app that Apple says violates its App Store guidelines.
Apple’s decision to shut down the developer’s account was recently highlighted on X by Apple critic and 37Signals co-owner and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, where he celebrated how much better web developers had it, noting they could run their businesses without the involvement of big tech gatekeepers.
“No fear on [sic] capricious rejections that might suddenly kill the business overnight,” he remarked.
…The company went back and forth with App Review, receiving multiple rejections over an app for designing Apple Watch faces. In addition to a more standard watch face, Appstun also came up with a workaround that would allow it to offer more highly customizable watch faces. But these weren’t actually watch faces in the traditional sense, but rather custom images and animations that run independently of the App Watch face system. Essentially, the app would take over the screen showing an image that was similar to a watch face, allowing Appstun to offer more customization. Of course, running a custom animation in this way could drain the Apple Watch battery faster.
Apple was also concerned that customers wouldn’t understand that they weren’t running a normal watch face, and that Appstun deceived them by suggesting that’s what it was offering.
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Hansson’s comment doesn’t really apply for Apple Watch faces, does it? Apple is dead set against third-party apps for Watch faces, so this is totally unsurprising.
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Inside China’s race to lead the world in nuclear fusion • Nature
Gemma Conroy:
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China is fast pouring resources into its fusion efforts. The Chinese government’s current five-year plan makes comprehensive research facilities for crucial fusion projects a major priority for the country’s national science and technology infrastructure. As a rough estimate, China could now be spending $1.5bn each year on fusion — almost double what the US government allocated this year for this research, says Jean Paul Allain, associate director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences in Washington DC. “Even more important than the total value is the speed at which they’re doing it,” says Allain.
“China has built itself up from being a non-player 25 years ago to having world-class capabilities,” says Dennis Whyte, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
Although no one yet knows whether fusion power plants are possible, Chinese scientists have ambitious timelines. In the 2030s, before ITER will have begun its main experiments, the country aims to build the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), with the goal of producing up to 1 gigawatt of fusion power. If China’s plans work out, a prototype fusion power plant could follow in the next few decades, according to a 2022 road map.
“China is taking a strategic approach to invest in and develop its fusion energy programme, with a view of long-term leadership in the global field,” says Yasmin Andrew, a plasma physicist at Imperial College London.
…the International Atomic Energy Agency says that fusion could generate four times more energy than does fission, per kilogram of fuel.
It’s a particularly tantalizing prospect for China where, between 2020 and 2022, several regions experienced massive power outages owing to skyrocketing demand for electricity during frigid winters. Despite rapid progress in renewable energy, the country still generates more than half of its electricity from coal and remains the biggest contributor to global carbon emissions.
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It still seems to me to be chasing a mirage. But perhaps if you chase it with enough money, the mirage becomes reality.
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The far-reaching ripple effects of a discredited cancer study • WSJ
Nidhi Subbaraman:
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Four years ago, a team of researchers led by a heavyweight in the field of microbiology made a stunning claim: Cancers have unique microbial signatures that could one day allow tumors to be diagnosed with a blood test.
The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors.
A prestigious journal published the research. More than 600 papers cited the study. At least a dozen groups based new work on its data. And the microbiologists behind the claim launched a startup to capitalize on their findings.
Since then, the work has suffered multiple setbacks.
The paper was retracted in June following criticisms by other scientists who questioned the methodology and said the findings are likely invalid. Support for the startup has dried up. And published research that relied on the study’s data might have to be corrected or retracted.
The events illustrate the far-reaching ripple effect of flawed science.
“It has polluted the literature,” said Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, whose critique, written with other colleagues in the field, led to the study’s retraction.
…Salzberg, the computational biologist, and a team analyzed a handful of the cancer types and didn’t find most of the bacteria reported in the Nature study. Their analysis, published in October 2023 in the journal mBio, stated that the “near-perfect association between microbes and cancer types reported in the study is, simply put, a fiction.”
Among the errors, according to the critique, the UC San Diego team had incorrectly deployed a genomic tool built by Salzberg’s lab to match tumor data to microbial sequences.
“It wasn’t a close call,” Salzberg told The Wall Street Journal. “This data is completely wrong.”
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End of the road: an AnandTech farewell • Anandtech
Ryan Smith:
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It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.
For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.
A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.
The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.
Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.
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Future, the publisher, says it will keep the site online “indefinitely”. Which is a long time. Ditto for the forums, which is an even tougher challenge.
The site’s name came from its founder, then 17-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi: Apple hired him in 2014 for its hardware division (believed to be the chipmaking part).
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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 