They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology.
Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the “woke” AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis. Some caused lawsuits, like a computer error by CrowdStrike that left thousands of Delta passengers stranded. And we also reaped failures among startups that raced to expand from 2020 to 2022, a period of ultra-low interest rates. Check out what made our list of this year’s biggest technology failures.
—Antonio Regalado
Antonio will be discussing this year’s worst failures with our executive editor Niall Firth in a subscriber-exclusive online Roundtable event today at 12.00 ET. Register here to make sure you don’t miss outf you haven’t already, subscribe!
AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent
If you drove by one of the 2,990 data centers in the United States, you’d probably think little more than “Huh, that’s a boring-looking building.” You might not even notice it at all. However, these facilities underpin our entire digital world, and they are responsible for tons of greenhouse-gas emissions. New research shows just how much those emissions have skyrocketed during the AI boom.
That leaves a big problem for the world’s leading AI companies, which are caught between pressure to meet their own sustainability goals and the relentless competition in AI that’s leading them to build bigger models requiring tons of energy. And the trend toward ever more energy-intensive new AI models will only send those numbers higher. Read the full story.
—James O’Donnell