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Saturday, August 23, 2025

The Obtain: Google’s AI power expenditure, and handing over DNA knowledge to the police


Google has simply launched a report detailing how a lot power its Gemini apps use for every question. In complete, the median immediate—one which falls in the midst of the vary of power demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electrical energy, the equal of working a regular microwave for about one second. The corporate additionally supplied common estimates for the water consumption (5 drops per question) and carbon emissions related to a textual content immediate to Gemini.

It’s probably the most clear estimate but from a Huge Tech firm with a preferred AI product, and the report contains detailed details about how the corporate calculated its last estimate.

Earlier this 12 months, MIT Know-how Evaluate printed a complete collection on AI and power, at which era not one of the main AI firms would reveal their per-prompt power utilization. Google’s new publication, finally, permits for a peek behind the scenes that researchers and analysts have lengthy hoped for. Learn the total story.

—Casey Crownhart

I gave the police entry to my DNA—and possibly a few of yours

Final 12 months, I added my DNA profile to a personal genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked “Sure” to permit the police to go looking my genes.

In 2018, police in California introduced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a person who had eluded seize for many years. As soon as the police had “matches” to a couple kin of the killer, they constructed a big household tree from which they plucked the seemingly suspect.

This course of, known as forensic investigative genetic family tree, or FIGG, has since helped clear up a whole lot of murders and sexual assaults.

However I wasn’t actually pushed by some urge to seize distantly associated serial killers. Reasonably, my spit had a much less gallant and extra quarrelsome motive: to troll privateness advocates whose fears round DNA I believe are overblown and unhelpful. By giving up my saliva for inspection, I used to be going towards the view that an individual’s DNA is the individualized, sacred textual content that privateness advocates generally declare. Learn the total story.

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