The race for AI dominance, plus Groundhog Day
Greetings! Another week has come and gone, and we’re roughly 8% done with the year. If you want to achieve a specific goal in 2025, now is a good time to start. - You’ve probably heard about The Stargate Project, but in case not, here’s a refresher. It is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI (artificial intelligence) infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, with $100 billion available immediately. The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. President Donald Trump said he was going to do what he could through emergency declarations to expedite the building process and try to stay ahead of China.
Stargate plans to build massive data centers throughout the U.S. One is already under construction in Texas at a site that was originally destined for Bitcoin production. Eleven other states—including Wisconsin! —are being considered as potential sites for a 5GW (gigawatt) data center. To give an idea how much energy that is, 5GW is equivalent to the output of around five nuclear reactors—the amount of power you’d need to run a major city like Miami.
It is estimated that each plant would require 30 million square feet, 14,000 construction workers, 2 million GPUs (graphic processing units, as in high-powered chips), and $100 billion in investment, and would bring in $40 billion in annual revenue.
The race for AI is certainly heating up, as China made headlines Monday with the release of its DeepSeek AI model. This language learning model is seemingly just as sophisticated as ChatGPT but can be produced at a fraction of the cost, using less sophisticated microchips than the Nvidia microchips OpenAI and other American tech companies have been using.
Of course, the possibilities for AI are endless, whether it’s detecting cancer early and creating a patient-specific treatment, performing precise surgery, determining the most efficient transportation routes, teaching and learning, planning your next vacation, or assisting in agriculture, such as analyzing soil samples and other data in real time to optimize nutrient levels.
However, as I’ve noted before, AI also has the capacity for great harm. If all the information a user receives is being filtered through one source, it’s only as good as that source. As an example, users of DeepSeek reported that the chatbot restricted answers to questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. No shocker there. The point is, the model can easily by tweaked to only reveal what the creators, or in this case government leaders, want the people to know.
Americans also fear that the vast amount of data collected from DeepSeek will be analyzed and weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party in keeping with their policy of civil-military fusion, “in the same way that TikTok is a Chinese psyop that is designed to draw enormous amounts of American data to it,” wrote Ben Shapiro for The Daily Wire.
Other dangers of AI include a lack of a moral compass and that it can never replace genuine human connection. AI has been used to generate a large amount of nonconsensual explicit content such as pornography derived from user submitted photos, as I’ve written about before. When it comes to the news
Striking a
Chord...
industry, as AI becomes more and more able to convincingly recreate a person’s likeness, it could become nigh impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.
Tech company CEOs are understandably excited about all the potential AI holds.
“All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI (advanced general intelligence)—for the benefit of all of humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity,” concluded a press release from OpenAI announcing The Stargate Project.
However, for the rest of us common people, at least the people I’ve talked to, the rapid advancement of AI brings with it more than a little apprehension. As a society we’ve taken the genie out of the bottle now and we can’t put it back. We’ll have to watch and see how it all unfolds. - And, for today’s dose of activist insanity… if some people at PETA have their way, Pennsylvania’s annual weather prognosticator could soon be out of a job. People at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) reported they had sent a letter to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club telling them to ditch Punxsutawney Phil for Groundhog Day this year and instead use a vegan “weather reveal cake” to determine if there would be six more weeks of winter or not. “You batter believe that for Phil, Groundhog Day is no piece of cake,”PETA President Ingrid Newkirk wrote in a letter loaded with bad puns. “Groundhogs are shy prey animals who, when allowed, actively avoid humans. Yet, year after year, Phil is transported to Gobler’s Knob, whisked on stage, and subjected to a noisy announcer, screaming crowds, and flashing lights against all his natural instincts,” Somehow I don’t think Phil is suffering too much. He lives in a climate-controlled burrow in a local library and is fed every day by A.J. Dereume, a member of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club Inner Circle.
“Sleep and eat is basically his two favorite pastimes,” said Dereume. “His favorite food is bananas.”
Phil draws around 20,000 fans each year, and seemingly gets excited when he sees all the people.
“He’s a ham for the camera, and people always say, ‘Well, how do you get Phil to be so happy to greet the crowd?’ And I don’t do anything; I just hold him up. He does everything; I’m just lucky enough to hang out with him,” said Dereume.
Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like Phil is going anywhere anytime soon.
Happy early Groundhog Day and have a good week!
