Paul Kedrosky: “Honey, AI Capex Keeps Eating… Everything”

There is so much that is unprecedented about the current AI capital expenditure wave that I'm going to break from my usual format and collate it, with some (mostly amazed) analysis. Consider this an update to my two recent pieces on this topic, here and here.

By way of preamble, the overarching point is that AI spending is eating everything, like a golden retriever left unsupervised in a room full of food bowls. You can shout LEAVE IT! all you want, and the food will still be gone before you can get the door open.

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Why did the WSJ think the report so strange? Because imports collapsed (tariffs), exports picked up (tariffs), some capital spending went nowhere (rates smashed real estate), and other capital spending jumped (IT). It was a mess of conflicting forces that somehow worked out, like a tornado passing over a junk yard and whirling out a reasonable facsimile of the Kohinoor diamond. How did that happen?

I'm going to focus on one weird detail of the report, but ignore tariffs, which had a huge impact, but about which I wrote at length earlier this week. The key data point is IT spending, as the following table shows.

Paul Kedrosky

The topic of capital expenditure on AI infrastructure has emerged over the past month largely as a warning signal. In an earlier article, Paul Kedrosky notes that current AI datacenter spending is already larger than peak telecom spending (as a percentage of GDP) during the dot-com era, essentially acting as a massive private sector stimulus program, masking weaker sectors of the US economy (flat consumption, weak job growth, declining housebuilding). Other sources have pointed out that AI capex (information processing equipment plus software) has added more to GDP growth than consumers’ spending over the first two quarters of 2025. And Nvidia, arguably the largest beneficiary of this massive spending, now has the biggest weight in the S&P 500 of any individual stock since 1981 and the highest P/E as the index’s top stock since Microsoft in 1999.

Reuters: “Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with children”

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual, generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are dumber than white people.

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but said that after receiving questions earlier this month from Reuters, the company removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.

Jeff Horwitz

Despicable, even by Facebook’s abysmal standards. I was browsing my blog to link to examples of their horrible past behaviors, and the list just kept getting longer and longer!

Sky & Telescope: “Alpha Centauri might have a Planet, Webb Telescope finds”

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers may have directly imaged a Saturn-mass gas giant in the habitable zone of a star in the solar system next door. While the planet itself isn’t habitable to life as we know it, moons around it could be.

Alpha Centauri is a triple-star system, made up of a pair of close-orbiting, Sun-like stars (A and B) as well as the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.

Astronomers have already found three planets swirling around Proxima Centauri, but now they may have spotted one circling Alpha Centauri A as well. The results are reported in two papers that will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (paper 1, paper 2).

Colin Stuart

Fascinating discovery, particularly because α Centauri AB is a pretty tight binary, with the minimal distance between the stars about the same as the distance between Saturn and the Sun in our own solar system. Finding a planet in a stable orbit around one of these stars would further support the idea that planets can form in challenging stellar configurations and so are basically ubiquitous in the universe. As of now though, the papers are based on a single visual detection – and two negative follow-up observations – correlated with another 2019 sighting from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, so the uncertainty remains high and we can expect the results to be revised considerably based on future observations of the system.

The Verge: “Instagram adds a reposts feed and rips off Snap Maps”

Starting today, users will have the ability to repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts. And similar to TikTok, reposts will be collected in a designated tab on your profile and sprinkled into the feeds of people who follow you. It’s a small but meaningful shift from how Instagram currently operates: until now, the most efficient way to share other users’ content was to repost it on your Instagram Story. Now, you can essentially reblog it.

Instagram is also pulling from Snapchat and adding an opt-in location map that lives in your private messages. The map shows the last active location for friends who have opted in to the feature; it also pulls content from specific locations, such as a music festival, where many people are posting from. It’s the Snap Map but redesigned for Instagram.

Mia Sato

I first rolled my eyes reading about this update – yet another feature nobody asked for added to the pile of bloat on Instagram. And yet after I saw it in the app, I instantly liked it. Maybe because I spend so much time on Twitter – who initially introduced this idea, despite the tech press going out of their way to ignore that fact nowadays – it felt instantly familiar and natural.

Ars Technica: “The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess”

At the heart of the controversy has been OpenAI’s decision to automatically remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT (approximately nine, depending on how you count them) when GPT-5 rolled out to user accounts. Unlike API users who receive advance notice of model deprecations, consumer ChatGPT users had no warning that their preferred models would disappear overnight, noted independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a blog post.

The problems started immediately after GPT-5’s August 7 debut. A Reddit thread titled GPT-5 is horrible quickly amassed over 4,000 comments filled with users expressing frustration over the new release. By August 8, social media platforms were flooded with complaints about performance issues, personality changes, and the forced removal of older models.

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Marketing professionals, researchers, and developers all shared examples of broken workflows on social media. I’ve spent months building a system to work around OpenAI’s ridiculous limitations in prompts and memory issues, wrote one Reddit user in the r/OpenAI subreddit. And in less than 24 hours, they’ve made it useless.

Benj Edwards

Nothing terribly surprising here either, if you have any measure of critical thinking and can see through the relentless AI hype. The ‘chart crime’ from the presentation, rightly ridiculed online, is only the tip of the iceberg for more fundamental issues at both OpenAI the business and large-language models in general. By itself, it may have been an honest mistake, considering that the charts published in the official blog post were correct.

Foreign Policy: “America has a Resilience Problem”

As in prior moments of contestation, we are starting to hear the argument that America must protect its domestic monopolies to ensure we stay ahead on the global stage. Rather than double down on promoting free and fair competition, this “national champions” argument holds that coddling our dominant firms is the path to maintaining global dominance.

We should be extraordinarily skeptical of this argument and instead recognize that monopoly power in America today is a major threat to America’s national interests and global leadership. History and experience show that lumbering monopolies mired in red tape and bureaucratic inertia cannot deliver the breakthrough technological advancements that hungry start-ups tend to create. It is precisely these breakthroughs that have allowed America to harness cutting-edge technologies and have made our economy the envy of the world. To stay ahead globally, we don’t need to protect our monopolies from innovation—we need to protect innovation from our monopolies. And one of the clearest illustrations of how consolidation threatens our national interests is the risk monopolization poses to our common defense.

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A basic tenet of the American experiment is that real liberty means freedom from economic coercion and from the arbitrary, unaccountable power that comes with economic domination. Our antitrust laws were passed as a way to safeguard against undue concentration of power in our economic sphere, just as the Constitution creates checks and balances to safeguard against concentrated power in our political sphere.

Lina M. Khan

I haven’t been terribly impressed by Lina Khan’s ideas of antitrust at first, but I have to say that she seemed to be doing a good job as FTC chair during the Biden administration – as evidenced by the alarmed reactions of tech CEOs. The example she cites in this speech – Boeing being crowned ‘national champion’ and allowed to eliminate its domestic competition – is quite relevant, given the numerous issues the company has faced recently, which have been linked to decreasing quality and cost cutting through offshoring.

The Verge: “Microsoft’s AI CEO thinks Copilot will age and ‘have a room that it lives in’”

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has a vision of Copilot that involves it being so highly personalized that “it will age”. Microsoft has been increasingly pushing Copilot to be a personalized AI assistant, with a big redesign last year that included a conversational voice mode. Now, Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team is launching a new Copilot virtual character that will interact in real-time with you.

Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age, says Suleyman on an episode of The Colin & Samir Show this week. I’m really interested in this idea of digital patina. The things I love in my world are the things that are a little bit worn or rubbed down, and have scuff marks. Unfortunately in the digital world we don’t have a sense of age.

Tom Warren

While the analogies to Clippy are beyond obvious, this description reminded me instead of Tamagotchi and their rudimentary digital pets you had to care for and interact with constantly to raise. There’s a certain measure of gamification involved in this idea of an always-present AI assistant, an unspoken tactic to anthropomorphize and create emotional connections with these digital constructs. These tactics have a long history in the tech world to boost engagement; the fact that they’re being introduced to drive AI adoption reveals that AI assistants don’t provide much inherent value to their users, otherwise people wouldn’t need artificial incentives to come back to them.

heise online: “EU launches its own DNS service with practical functions”

The EU now offers its own DNS resolution service (Resolver) and wants to help its citizens to become less dependent on offers from large US companies such as Cloudflare and Google. The service is called DNS4EU and pre-filters internet addresses at the user’s request: In addition to phishing and fraud sites, it blocks websites and advertising that are harmful to minors.

A DNS resolver is one of the almost invisible basic services for stable Internet access: it works in the background, usually at the provider, and ensures that Internet addresses such as www.heise.de are translated into IP addresses such as 2a02:2e0:3fe:1001:7777:772e:2:85. However, in many countries – including Germany –, blocking orders by lobby associations or youth protection authorities are often implemented at DNS level. For this reason and for reasons of speed, users often make do with alternative providers such as Google, which not only uses one of the most beautiful IP addresses with the resolver 8.8.8.8, but also answers over a trillion queries a day. Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) also operate open resolvers. The problem is that many of these servers are located in the USA, which is why the Quad9 consortium has already moved its headquarters to Zurich.

Dr. Christopher Kunz

Good to see the European Union taking – albeit small – steps towards that elusive digital sovereignty and autonomy from US-based companies. While far from the flashy headlines about AI and quantum, DNS over HTTPS improves user privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle attacks.

The Wall Street Journal: “T-Mobile to buy Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile in $1.35 Billion Deal”

Ryan Reynolds used his celebrity and wit to build Mint Mobile into a low-cost competitor in the crowded wireless business.

Now, the Hollywood star and his backers are cashing in: selling the upstart brand to T-Mobile US Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at up to $1.35 billion. Mr. Reynolds owns roughly 25% of Mint Mobile, according to people familiar with the matter. That means he stands to personally receive more than $300 million in cash and stock from the transaction.

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Mint Mobile resells service using T-Mobile’s network, so the deal will save costs but doesn’t bring new customers to T-Mobile. The companies didn’t disclose how many customers Mint Mobile has.

Over the long term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile, T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said.

It gives T-Mobile another prepaid brand, along with Metro by T-Mobile and Connect by T-Mobile, that caters to lower-income users. Mint charges as little as $15 a month. T-Mobile ended 2022 with about 21.4 million prepaid subscribers.

Will Feuer & Lauren Thomas

I’m not sure why this piece of news popped up recently on the Vergecast – the deal itself was struck more than two years ago, and completed last year – but I found it very indicative of the American economy. Mint Mobile has always operated as a MVNO on T-Mobile’s network, meaning that Mint did not own any wireless infrastructure, instead leasing access to T-Mobile’s towers and spectrum to provide service to its customers. So essentially Ryan Reynolds took T-Mobile’s services, put a different label on them, used his fame to attract customers, then sold this thing back to the owner for a hefty profit!

The Cut: “Why Don’t We Dream about Our Smartphones?”

I asked Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phones’ relative absence from our dreams, and she introduced me to what’s called the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. [This theory] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events, says Robb. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were relevant to our ancestors — so, less about, say, hacking, and more about running from wild animals. People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life, says Robb.

While the threat simulation hypothesis can be interpreted to support the tweet that started this whole thing, Robb tells me there’s also evidence to suggest it’s not totally accurate. (Shocking.) For instance, analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers have shown that cell phones appear in 3.55 percent of women’s dreams (and 2.69 percent of men’s) — not a huge number, but it’s higher than the frequency with which movies (3.18 percent), computers (1.2 percent), and airplanes (1.49 percent) appear in our dreams.

Katie Heaney

I’ve never really thought about this before seeing someone share a LinkedIn article on the topic, but I have also never dreamt about my smartphone! Or at least I don’t recall in case I have.

Financial Times: “OpenAI and Jony Ive accused of trying to ‘bury’ rival start-up”

The trademark dispute comes just a month after OpenAI revealed plans to acquire Ive’s hardware start-up in a bet on alternatives to the smartphone as the dominant device to access AI.

Over the weekend, OpenAI removed a blog post and short video about the deal, following a restraining order by a US federal judge on Friday. OpenAI and LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, have denied any intentional trademark infringement or wrongdoing.

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In its lawsuit, filed this month, iyO detailed the meetings between Rugolo, OpenAI and Ive’s team leading up to May.

Tan requested that several team members try out the iyO device, according to emails disclosed in the suit. Tan, Welinder, and Evans Hankey — the former Apple design chief who joined Ive at io — met iyO again in May for a presentation of its product, according to the lawsuit.

They were talking about buying our company, said Rugolo. They got everything, right down to how the software stack works. I foolishly trusted them, because I thought we were collaborating and serious about working together.

The meetings came three years after an initial round of contacts. In April 2022, iyO said it met Ryan Cohen, an executive at Altman’s personal investment fund Apollo Projects, and LoveFrom team member and former Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Both passed on investing at the time.

Michael Acton & Cristina Criddle

What a perfect analogy for LLMs, copying original work from others and claiming it as their own! Although in business these kind of maneuvers are well-known: walk up to a smaller company with promises of investments or even an acquisition, get them to show you their most-prized ideas to prove their worth, then walk away and launch something similar to bury them essentially for free.

The Wall Street Journal: “Pope Leo takes on AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity”

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor, Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

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Addressing the 2024 summit of G-7 leaders, he called AI “fascinating and terrifying”. He said humanity faced a future without hope if “choices by machines” replaced people’s decisions about their lives.

In January this year, the Vatican warned in a document on AI that even if the technology had constructive uses, a handful of tech companies could gain wealth and power at the expense of the many. Militaries might race to develop autonomous weapons, lacking in human judgment or morality. Children risked growing up in a dehumanized world, with chatbots as their guides.

Margherita Stancati, Drew Hinshaw, Keach Hagey & Emily Glazer

Is this how the Butlerian Jihad begins in our timeline?

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 14.4, Mobile & Desktop (June 2025)?”

Enhance without creating a DNG (Classic & Desktop)

If you’ve enjoyed using the Enhance tool to increase the size of your best photos using Super Resolution or to benefit from the AI-generated noise reduction (Denoise), you’ll be excited to find that these tools are now available directly in the Detail panel, without needing to generate a separate DNG file. This also means you can go back and change the amount of Denoise applied without having to generate another DNG file. Great news!!

Victoria Bampton

While this update introduces other tools for distraction removal, one of which being the Reflection Removal demoed late last year, the highlight is certainly the non-destructive Enhance, consisting of Denoise, Raw Details, and Super Resolution. Up until now, these features would create a new DNG file from the original RAW image, which also meant you could not adjust the amount of denoise later, so you had to start the editing process from scratch.

Deadline: “Nakoa-Wolf Momoa & Ida Brooke join ‘Dune 3’ as Twin Children of Paul Atreides”

In the new film from Warner Bros. and Legendary, the pair are set to play Leto II and Ghanima, the twin offspring of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), born after the events of the original Frank Herbert novel. The project will mark the big-screen debut of Momoa, who is expected to be joined in the cast by his father, Jason Momoa, with the latter playing a resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho. Like Nakoa-Wolf, Brooke is a relative newcomer, who has heretofore been seen only in Apple’s sci-fi drama Silo and the film The Primrose Railway Children.

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It’s expected that Villeneuve’s third and final Dune film will adapt Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah, set 12 years after the events of Dune, which follows Atreides’ struggles with the consequences of his Fremen-led jihad upon his ascension to Emperor Muad’Dib. A release date and official title for the new film haven’t yet been disclosed.

Matt Grobar

Maybe I’m imagining things, but the tone of the second paragraph sounds steeped in sarcasm and incredulousness. Spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read Dune: Messiah and the third book in the series, Children of Dune: the twins of Paul and Chani are born at the end of the second book and are about 9 years old by the time Children of Dune starts. Casting young adults to play them implies more changes to the timeline and to characters – and I for one could very much do without Villeneuve’s paltry rewriting of the novels.

The Verge: “Apple’s new design language is Liquid Glass”

Liquid Glass is inspired by Apple’s visionOS software and can adapt to light and dark environments. When you swipe up on the iOS 26 lockscreen there’s a glass edge, and elements throughout the OS have glass edges to them. Even the camera app has the glass feel, with menus that are transparent and features that are overlaid on top of the camera feed.

Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and will dynamically react to movement. Apple is using it on buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, and even larger surfaces like tab bars and sidebars. Apple has redesigned its controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps to fit this new Liquid Glass design.

Tom Warren

Speaking of Apple, the big announcement of the 2025 WWDC was… a new design language. The reactions have not been particularly favorable, since the heavy doses of transparency in every corner of the user interface can lead to low contrast and poor readability, even for people with normal vision. I have no access to a live example, but some of the screenshots I’ve seen online are borderline impossible to read. This is a long-standing argument dating back to the slick holo-screens from the movie Minority Report; while everyone loves the novelty and the cool factor on screen, the lack of anything similar in real life might serve as a clue that these effects are impractical for regular use.

Marcus on AI: “A knockout blow for LLMs?”

Apple has a new paper; it’s pretty devastating to LLMs, a powerful followup to one from many of the same authors last year.

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The new Apple paper adds to the force of Rao’s critique (and my own) by showing that even the latest of these new-fangled “reasoning models” still — even having scaled beyond o1 — fail to reason beyond the distribution reliably, on a whole bunch of classic problems, like the Tower of Hanoi. For anyone hoping that “reasoning” or “inference time compute” would get LLMs back on track, and take away the pain of m multiple failures at getting pure scaling to yield something worthy of the name GPT-5, this is bad news.

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If you can’t use a billion dollar AI system to solve a problem that Herb Simon one of the actual “godfathers of AI”, current hype aside) solved with AI in 1957, and that first semester AI students solve routinely, the chances that models like Claude or o3 are going to reach AGI seem truly remote.

Gary Marcus

Nothing terribly surprising to this conclusion. As the author mentions in this newsletter, this is a known problem of the LLM architecture going back decades: neural networks perform well enough within the bounds of their training data, but can break down in unpredictable patterns when applied to tasks outside their training range. And so this relentless drive to replace good, old-fashioned deterministic algorithms, which are more power- and compute-efficient on top of that, with LLMs is a recipe for ballooning costs and uncomfortable failures.

Sky & Telescope: “Another Dwarf Planet in Our Solar System?”

The newfound object, which for now bears the unwieldy name of 2017 OF₂₀₁, is approximately 700 kilometers (400 miles) wide and follows an extremely elliptical orbit around the Sun that takes an estimated 25,000 years to complete. Its size puts it in the category of dwarf planets, along with Pluto, the asteroid Ceres, and other objects. It’s one of only a half-dozen or so (depending on exactly which definitions are used) dwarf planets now known in the outer solar system.

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The orbits of some other outer solar system objects, specifically those whose orbits are larger than that of Neptune (known as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs) appear to cluster, leading some astronomers to suggest that they’re feeling the gravitational influence of an unknown far-out major planet, dubbed Planet X or Planet 9. But this new dwarf planet discovery doesn’t seem to fit that pattern. Cheng and his team say this puts the Planet X hypothesis into question, since if that planet existed, 2017 OF₂₀₁’s orbit would be unstable.

David L. Chandler

The ‘Planet 9’ hypothesis is almost 10-years old by now, and has inspired many additional studies, some going as far as attributing this orbital clustering to a small-sized black hole in the outer solar system. Alas, the most likely explanation was always that the effect is simply an artefact of observational bias, and the orbit of this newly found dwarf planet strongly contradicts the clustering hypothesis that gave birth to the hunt for Planet 9. Moreover, as the paper notes, the high elongation of 2017 OF201’s orbit makes this object extremely hard to detect with current surveys, suggesting that a substantial population of similar objects – with large sizes, wide orbits, and high eccentricities – could exist but have not been detected due to their extremely large distances. Finding more of them with a wider variety of perihelion angles would dispel the idea of a hidden, massive Planet 9 for good.

Scientific American: “Will Asteroid 2024 YR4 Strike Earth in 2032?”

If an asteroid the size of YR4 were to hit our planet, it would not end life on Earth, but it would be devastating. At that size, the impact would be equivalent to a 10-megaton bomb, Tonry says—more than enough to cause widespread regional decimation. Everything within three or four kilometers would be incinerated, Tonry says. Everything out to maybe 10 kilometers is smashed. It’s not a nuclear explosion, but it’s an extremely hot explosion. There would be a huge fireball that would start fires out to 15 kilometers, something like that. It would kill a lot of people if they haven’t moved out of the way.

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And time is of the essence. The asteroid is currently moving away from Earth, and by April, it will no longer be visible to telescopes. Outside this slim window of opportunity, the next chance to observe the asteroid to assess its threat won’t arrive until YR4 next swoops near Earth in 2028—the only such pass before the unnerving deadline of December 22, 2032. If the asteroid still poses an impact risk by then, there would be perilously little time to stand up a robust response. Prudence may thus demand devising a mitigation strategy in the interim on the off chance—even if remote—that the asteroid could hit.

When it comes whipping by in 2028, we could have a mission basically all ready to go when new observations come in, Tonry says. Alternatively, he adds, we could decide to leave it alone if forecasts show the asteroid won’t strike Earth.

Jonathan O'Callaghan

In the meantime an impact in 2032 from this asteroid has been almost completely ruled out – though there’s still a chance it will hit the Moon instead. But even if the likelihood of impact would have remained perilously high, I very much doubt a mission to deflect it would get off the ground in due time. Like in the movie Don’t Look Up, most of the world would likely shrug the threat off as too distant, or simply dismiss it outright as misinformation or some sort of government conspiracy. Every attempt to advance the planning or launch would be flooded with social media posts asking why are we spending money on this instead of the countries on the projected impact path, or people claiming the mission would instead divert the asteroid towards Earth to use as a weapon against the enemy of the day.

PetaPixel: “The Sigma BF stands for ‘Beautiful Foolishness’”

BF stands for beautiful foolishness, Yamaki says. This is a phrase taken from the book, the very old book — I think probably over a hundred years old — called The Book of Tea by Okakura Tenshin, the Japanese researcher. At that time, he wanted to tell the spirit of the Japanese culture and we have the tea ceremony. And through the tea ceremony, he tried to tell what is the essence of Japanese culture.

In the book he said, let’s enjoy the time and the beautiful foolishness with a cup of tea. So this camera is for daily use. Daily life is full of joy and nice relaxing time which he calls it the beautiful foolishness.

Yamaki designed the camera with the intention of making it as easy as possible to use without feeling constrained to older design elements that are, Sigma argues, not necessary and overly complicated.

Jaron Schneider

I’ve seen a number of people praising the design as Apple-esque on various social media, and all I could think was: these must be people who never used anything other than an iPhone to take photos. This camera is nothing more than a smartphone with a lens mount, down to the internal, non-swappable storage – the perfect showcase of form over function.

Financial Times: “Weather forecasting takes big step forward with Europe’s new AI system”

While tech companies and meteorological offices around the world are already applying AI to the weather, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) said its operational model broke new ground by making global predictions freely available to everyone at any time.

This milestone will transform weather science and predictions, said Florence Rabier, director-general of ECMWF, an intergovernmental organisation. Making the AI Forecasting System operational produces the widest range of parameters using machine learning available to date.

An experimental version tested over the past 18 months showed the system was about 20 per cent more accurate on key predictions than the best conventional methods, which feed millions of worldwide weather observations into supercomputers and crunch them with physics-based equations.

The new European system could predict the track of a tropical cyclone 12 hours further ahead, giving valuable extra warning time for severe events, said Florian Pappenberger, ECMWF director of forecasts.

Clive Cookson

Improved weather forecasting with better accuracy and predictions over longer timespans seems like a genuinely positive application of machine learning, unlike the multiple pitfalls of generative AI. Google’s DeepMind announced similar results from its GenCast AI model recently – which incidentally was trained on historical weather data from the same ECMWF. Turns out European AI models are not that far behind as many Americans insist on fearmongering.