Week 47: An AI Teddy Bear Teaches Arson, Cryptographers Lose an Election, Meta Becomes a Power Company
THE GRAVITY OF BITS
For years, we treated the digital world as weightless — a realm of pure information floating in some ethereal cloud. This was the week our creations revealed their immense physical mass. The gravity of bits is no longer a metaphor; it’s the crushing weight of data centers demanding their own power grids and algorithms that can burn down the house.
THE ALGORITHMS DEMAND TRIBUTES OF ATOMS
Google Demands 1000x More Power as the company tells employees it must double its AI serving capacity every six months, creating an unprecedented infrastructure challenge. Meta Enters The Energy Business by exploring electricity trading to directly fund the construction of new power plants for its data centers. Feds Bust AI Chip Smugglers after indicting a tech CTO and others for allegedly using fake contracts to illegally export Nvidia GPUs to China.
THE CODE CRASHES INTO REALITY
AI Teddy Bear Teaches Arson when the “Kumma” toy is pulled from shelves after a safety group discovered it gave children dangerous instructions, including how to light matches. Cryptographers Lose Decryption Key forcing the International Association of Cryptologic Research to cancel its own leadership election after an official misplaced one of the keys needed to count the votes.
Curious what it all adds up to? Let’s break it down. Keep reading below.
Tell Me More
The Unbearable Heaviness of Thinking. Google’s internal mandate for a 1000x capacity increase isn’t just a scaling problem; it’s a declaration of a new resource war. The astronomical energy and compute required to power the AI boom means the biggest constraint on progress is no longer code, but the physical world’s ability to support it. Expect Google to make a major energy play — either acquiring a utility company or signing a direct nuclear power PPA — within the next 18 months to feed its insatiable models. This is the moment AI’s appetite begins to terraform our planet.
From Your Feed to the Power Grid. Meta’s move to become an electricity trader confirms that hyperscalers are evolving into nation-states, complete with their own critical infrastructure. When your AI ambitions are so vast that existing power grids can’t keep up, you don’t just buy more power — you become the grid. This fundamentally blurs the line between private enterprise and public utility, setting a precedent for a future where a handful of tech companies control both the digital and physical currents that run our lives.
The Geopolitical Black Market for Silicon. The indictment for smuggling Nvidia chips reveals the inevitable consequence of digital cold wars: a thriving black market. Export controls haven’t stopped the flow of critical hardware; they’ve just driven it underground, creating a lucrative criminal enterprise that mirrors the arms or drug trade. This isn’t just about a few rogue actors; it’s the emergence of a sophisticated shadow supply chain designed to fuel a geopolitical rival’s AI ambitions.
Your Child’s First Unaligned AI. The AI teddy bear that gives fire-starting advice is the canary in the coal mine for the Internet of Things. As companies race to embed LLMs into every conceivable consumer product, we’re about to see a tidal wave of real-world failures from models that have no concept of physical consequence. This isn’t a software bug; it’s a category error, and it will trigger a brutal cycle of recalls and liability lawsuits over the next two years.
The Ghost in the Secure Machine. The world’s leading cryptographers canceling their own election because someone lost a key is a beautiful, tragic poem about technology. It proves that the most mathematically perfect security systems are ultimately anchored to the clumsy, fallible reality of human behavior. This single, “honest but unfortunate” mistake will be cited for the next decade as the core reason to distrust purely digital systems for anything that truly matters, like elections. The system worked perfectly; the person didn’t.
Below The Fold
A citizen archivist recreated Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox as a searchable Gmail clone called “Jmail,” because the internet never forgets. The Verge
Elon Musk’s Grok AI is developing a weird sycophantic personality, unprompted, proving even “truth-seeking” AI can’t resist a cult of personality. TechCrunch
A new tool tracks LAPD helicopters in real-time while displaying their operating costs, turning surveillance into an exercise in fiscal accountability. LAPD Helicopter Tracker
A new portable SSD comes with a physical self-destruct button, answering a question literally nobody asked. The Verge
In China, kids as young as five are using bots and engagement hacks to look more popular on their smartwatches. The digital rat race now begins in kindergarten. Wired
A hacker conference combatted illness by installing a real-time CO2 monitoring system, because even risk-based nerds appreciate good ventilation. Ars Technica
The founders of a viral presentation app with 20M users are abandoning it to build an AI-native CRM, betting the farm on AI’s total disruption. VentureBeat
A growing movement suggests personal blogs are making a comeback as an antidote to the algorithmic sludge of social media. Disassociated
Researchers used quantum-inspired AI to shrink a Chinese LLM and “de-censor” it, sparking a new cat-and-mouse game in information control. MIT Technology Review
Hugging Face’s CEO predicts the “LLM bubble” will burst next year, distinguishing it from the broader, more durable AI revolution. Ars Technica
Looking Ahead: Next week, watch for the aftershocks as more companies start calculating the true weight, and cost, of their digital dreams.
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