Artificial intelligence

Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than those I see on X or Substack or even TikTok. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies. Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things. A girl I went to high school with – let’s call her Teresa – has written a book and self-published it on Amazon.

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune. There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age. Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.

Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead.

In the center of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, Stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style, to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the ground. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).

Hugging Face is the online warehouse of artificial intelligence. Anyone can download a working AI model from it, free, and most open models have passed through it. Earlier this month, its engineers sat down to work out what had spent a weekend crawling through their systems – and asked an AI model to read the logs. To investigate a break-in you have to hand a model the break-in: the intruder's code, the commands it ran, the tools it used. So the American frontier model refused. There was a risk, it reasoned, that it was being tricked into hacking Hugging Face. The request to scan the servers for vulnerabilities is indistinguishable from what an attacker would ask for. So the engineers downloaded GLM 5.2, a model from the Chinese laboratory Z.

As June gave way to July, with a heat dome over the Eastern Seaboard, the US Department of Energy signed an order few people understood. It gave the region’s grid operator permission to do something that would have sounded simply deranged a decade ago. If the system came under enough strain, PJM – the body that keeps the lights on for 67 million Americans from Chicago to Washington – could order the great data centers of Virginia and Maryland to disconnect from the grid and run on diesel instead, so that everyone else could keep their A/C on. Any facility drawing 50 megawatts or more would have 15 minutes to comply. It was, said the order, a last resort before rolling blackouts. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said keeping the power on was “non-negotiable.

What to make of the new AI election ad created by the filmmaker Charles Curran on behalf of Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who is running to be Mayor of Los Angeles? The radio host Buck Sexton has already hailed the video as the future of political communication, and Jeb Bush has called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.” The video, which Pratt did not commission, but did repost on social media, shows California worthies – incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris – assembled for a sinister banquet. Victims are brought before them: a mother whose children are being harassed by the city’s homeless, and a prostrate Hugh Jackman, who begs to be allowed to rebuild his house in Pacific Palisades.

A 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama has been charged with attempted murder after he was accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home on April 10. He then allegedly walked toward OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters and told employees he intended to burn the building down as well. He was reportedly carrying a manifesto – a “three-part series,” according to Fox News – that included a list of other AI executives and investors and their home addresses and documents discussing potential risks that AI poses to humanity, with a section titled: “Some more words on the matter of our impending extinction.