Daily Archives: March 8, 2024

The Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 commercial versions will be minor spec bumps, according to sources familiar with Microsofts plans. Microsoft will also offer an OLED display on the Surface Pro 10 for consumers, which the company is expected to reveal later this spring.

The Surface Laptop 6 may include a new design

The new Surface Laptop 6 could be the most interesting device, thanks to a new design that will reportedly include thinner display bezels, rounded corners, a haptic touchpad, and two USB-C and one USB-A ports. Microsoft is rumored to be shipping both Intel Core Ultra and Snapdragon X Elite-based models of its latest Surface hardware, with Intel models expected in April and the Arm ones in June.

The event page for Microsofts March event simply says tune in here for the latest in scaling AI in your environment with Copilot, Windows, and Surface, suggesting this will be a rather low-key event thats focused on Microsofts big AI PC push.

Microsoft is also working on a new AI Explorer experience for Windows 11, thats designed as a far more advanced version of its AI assistant. Windows Central reports that it will catalog everything you do on your PC so you can search for moments in a timeline using natural language. Microsoft tried to bring this same idea to life as a Timeline feature in Windows 10, but the lack of app support meant it never really took off and was eventually removed years later.

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Microsoft confirms Surface and Windows AI event for March 21st - The Verge

Adobe has released a new app for Adobe Express, its cloud-based mobile design platform, bringing the same creative, editing, and Firefly-powered generative AI features enjoyed by desktop users to iOS and Android devices. Available to try for free today in beta, the new Adobe Express app allows users to easily produce creative assets like social media posts, posters, and website banners, with Creative Cloud members able to access and edit Photoshop and Illustrator files directly within the mobile app.

The Adobe Express beta is a free download, with Premium features (which will eventually require a $9.99 monthly subscription) like the erase and remove background tools available at no additional cost while the app is in testing. Firefly-powered generative AI features like Generative Fill and Text to Image effects, however, will require Adobes generative credits. Adobe Express beta users will receive 25 credits per month. The number of monthly credits received will be tied to the users' subscription tier when the mobile app is generally available.

Adobe Express users wont see their projects from the existing mobile app in the new beta app on day one. However, when the new app leaves beta, it will then have all the historical data from the old app carried over in a seamless migration, according to Ian Wang, vice president of product for Adobe Express, on a call with The Verge.

The new Express mobile beta shares the same platform as the desktop version that was updated last year, which means collaborative workflows have been restored if youre using the beta app allowing teams to work together on the same creative projects across both desktop and mobile devices. Anyone still using the current Adobe Express mobile app wont be able to use these features.

The processing for generative AI features is cloud-based rather than on the device itself, but not every smartphone is compatible with the new beta. You can find a list of supported devices here. The Adobe Express mobile app beta is available on the Google Play Store for Android, but iOS users will need to sign up here due to restrictions Apple places on the number of beta users.

Adobes Firefly AI features have been available as standalone web apps since September 2023 (and are very much accessible on mobile devices), which are good enough to experiment with but inconvenient to use in design workflows. By contrast, the new Express beta is the first mobile app to feature them alongside other design tools, giving it a much-needed leg up over Canva a rival design platform that hasnt made its own Magic Studio AI features available to mobile users.

Correction, March 7th, 4:00PM ET: Adobes original press release said that premium features are available at no cost during the Express beta. The company informed us after publication that these premium features do not include generative AI tools, which use a separate credit-based system.

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Adobes new Express app brings Firefly AI tools to iOS and Android - The Verge

AI continues to generate plenty of light and heat. The best models in text and imagesnow commanding subscriptions and being woven into consumer productsare competing for inches. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all, more or less, neck and neck.

Its no surprise then that AI researchers are looking to push generative models into new territory. As AI requires prodigious amounts of data, one way to forecast where things are going next is to look at what data is widely available online, but still largely untapped.

Video, of which there is plenty, is an obvious next step. Indeed, last month, OpenAI previewed a new text-to-video AI called Sora that stunned onlookers.

But what about videogames?

It turns out there are quite a few gamer videos online. Google DeepMind says it trained a new AI, Genie, on 30,000 hours of curated video footage showing gamers playing simple platformersthink early Nintendo gamesand now it can create examples of its own.

Genie turns a simple image, photo, or sketch into an interactive video game.

Given a prompt, say a drawing of a character and its surroundings, the AI can then take input from a player to move a character through its world. In a blog post, DeepMind showed Genies creations navigating 2D landscapes, walking around or jumping between platforms. Like a snake eating its tail, some of these worlds were even sourced from AI-generated images.

In contrast to traditional video games, Genie generates these interactive worlds frame by frame. Given a prompt and command to move, it predicts the most likely next frames and creates them on the fly. It even learned to include a sense of parallax, a common feature in platformers where the foreground moves faster than the background.

Notably, the AIs training didnt include labels. Rather, Genie learned to correlate input commandslike, go left, right, or jumpwith in-game movements simply by observing examples in its training. That is, when a character in a video moved left, there was no label linking the command to the motion. Genie figured that part out by itself. That means, potentially, future versions could be trained on as much applicable video as there is online.

The AI is an impressive proof of concept, but its still very early in development, and DeepMind isnt planning to make the model public yet.

The games themselves are pixellated worlds streaming by at a plodding one frame per second. By comparison, contemporary video games can hit 60 or 120 frames per second. Also, like all generative algorithms, Genie generates strange or inconsistent visual artifacts. Its also prone to hallucinating unrealistic futures, the team wrote in their paper describing the AI.

That said, there are a few reasons to believe Genie will improve from here.

Because the AI can learn from unlabeled online videos and is still a modest sizejust 11 billion parameterstheres ample opportunity to scale up. Bigger models trained on more information tend to improve dramatically. And with a growing industry focused on inferencethe process of by which a trained AI performs tasks, like generating images or textits likely to get faster.

DeepMind says Genie could help people, like professional developers, make video games. But like OpenAIwhich believes Sora is about more than videosthe team is thinking bigger. The approach could go well beyond video games.

One example: AI that can control robots. The team trained a separate model on video of robotic arms completing various tasks. The model learned to manipulate the robots and handle a variety of objects.

DeepMind also said Genie-generated video game environments could be used to train AI agents. Its not a new strategy. In a 2021 paper, another DeepMind team outlined a video game called XLand that was populated by AI agents and an AI overlord generating tasks and games to challenge them. The idea that the next big step in AI will require algorithms that can train one another or generate synthetic training data is gaining traction.

All this is the latest salvo in an intense competition between OpenAI and Google to show progress in AI. While others in the field, like Anthropic, are advancing multimodal models akin to GPT-4, Google and OpenAI also seem focused on algorithms that simulate the world. Such algorithms may be better at planning and interaction. Both will be crucial skills for the AI agents both organizations seem intent on producing.

Genie can be prompted with images it has never seen before, such as real world photographs or sketches, enabling people to interact with their imagined virtual worldsessentially acting as a foundation world model, the researchers wrote in the Genie blog post. We focus on videos of 2D platformer games and roboticsbut our method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger internet datasets.

Similarly, when OpenAI previewed Sora last month, researchers suggested it might herald something more foundational: a world simulator. That is, both teams seem to view the enormous cache of online video as a way to train AI to generate its own video, yes, but also to more effectively understand and operate out in the world, online or off.

Whether this pays dividends, or is sustainable long term, is an open question. The human brain operates on a light bulbs worth of power; generative AI uses up whole data centers. But its best not to underestimate the forces at play right nowin terms of talent, tech, brains, and cashaiming to not only improve AI but make it more efficient.

Weve seen impressive progress in text, images, audio, and all three together. Videos are the next ingredient being thrown in the pot, and they may make for an even more potent brew.

Image Credit: Google DeepMind

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A Google AI Watched 30,000 Hours of Video GamesNow It Makes Its Own - Singularity Hub

Almost immediately, the preprint garnered interest, particularly from Andrew Sutherland, a research scientist at MIT who is one of the managing editors of the LMFDB. Sutherland realized that 3 million elliptic curves werent enough for his purposes. He wanted to look at much larger conductor ranges to see how robust the murmurations were. He pulled data from another immense repository of about 150 million elliptic curves. Still unsatisfied, he then pulled in data from a different repository with 300 million curves.

But even those werent enough, so I actually computed a new data set of over a billion elliptic curves, and thats what I used to compute the really high-res pictures, Sutherland said. The murmurations showed up whether he averaged over 15,000 elliptic curves at a time or a million at a time. The shape stayed the same even as he looked at the curves over larger and larger prime numbers, a phenomenon called scale invariance. Sutherland also realized that murmurations are not unique to elliptic curves, but also appear in more general L-functions. He wrote a letter summarizing his findings and sent it to Sarnak and Michael Rubinstein at the University of Waterloo.

If there is a known explanation for it I expect you will know it, Sutherland wrote.

They didnt.

Lee, He and Oliver organized a workshop on murmurations in August 2023 at Brown Universitys Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM). Sarnak and Rubinstein came, as did Sarnaks student Nina Zubrilina.

Zubrilina presented her research into murmuration patterns in modular forms, special complex functions which, like elliptic curves, have associated L-functions. In modular forms with large conductors, the murmurations converge into a sharply defined curve, rather than forming a discernible but dispersed pattern. In a paper posted on October 11, 2023, Zubrilina proved that this type of murmuration follows an explicit formula she discovered.

Ninas big achievement is that shes given a formula for this; I call it the Zubrilina murmuration density formula, Sarnak said. Using very sophisticated math, she has proven an exact formula which fits the data perfectly.

Her formula is complicated, but Sarnak hails it as an important new kind of function, comparable to the Airy functions that define solutions to differential equations used in a variety of contexts in physics, ranging from optics to quantum mechanics.

Though Zubrilinas formula was the first, others have followed. Every week now, theres a new paper out, Sarnak said, mainly using Zubrilinas tools, explaining other aspects of murmurations.

Jonathan Bober, Andrew Booker and Min Lee of the University of Bristol, together with David Lowry-Duda of ICERM, proved the existence of a different type of murmuration in modular forms in another October paper. And Kyu-Hwan Lee, Oliver and Pozdnyakov proved the existence of murmurations in objects called Dirichlet characters that are closely related to L-functions.

Sutherland was impressed by the significant dose of luck that had led to the discovery of murmurations. If the elliptic curve data hadnt been ordered by conductor, the murmurations would have disappeared. They were fortunate to be taking data from the LMFDB, which came pre-sorted according to the conductor, he said. Its what relates an elliptic curve to the corresponding modular form, but thats not at all obvious. Two curves whose equations look very similar can have very different conductors. For example, Sutherland noted that y2 = x3 11x + 6 has conductor 17, but flipping the minus sign to a plus sign, y2 = x3+ 11x + 6 has conductor 100,736.

Even then, the murmurations were only found because of Pozdnyakovs inexperience. I dont think we would have found it without him, Oliver said, because the experts traditionally normalize ap to have absolute value 1. But he didnt normalize them so the oscillations were very big and visible.

The statistical patterns that AI algorithms use to sort elliptic curves by rank exist in a parameter space with hundreds of dimensions too many for people to sort through in their minds, let alone visualize, Oliver noted. But though machine learning found the hidden oscillations, only later did we understand them to be the murmurations.

Editors Note: Andrew Sutherland, Kyu-Hwan Lee and the L-functions and modular forms database (LMFDB) have all received funding from the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent publication. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage. More information is available here.

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Elliptic Curve Murmurations Found With AI Take Flight - Quanta Magazine

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nations creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.

When you look at the numbers, it is staggering, said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.

A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.

The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid the network of transmission lines and power stations that move electricity around the country. Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy, particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times for hookups.

The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.

The nations 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the countrys total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

Data center operators are clamoring to hook up to regional electricity grids at the same time the Biden administrations industrial policy is luring companies to build factories in the United States at a pace not seen in decades. That includes manufacturers of clean tech, such as solar panels and electric car batteries, which are being enticed by lucrative federal incentives. Companies announced plans to build or expand more than 155 factories in this country during the first half of the Biden administration, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a research and development organization. Not since the early 1990s has factory-building accounted for such a large share of U.S. construction spending, according to the group.

Utility projections for the amount of power they will need over the next five years have nearly doubled and are expected to grow, according to a review of regulatory filings by the research firm Grid Strategies.

In the past, companies tried to site their data centers in areas with major internet infrastructure, a large pool of tech talent, and attractive government incentives. But these locations are getting tapped out.

Communities that had little connection to the computing industry now find themselves in the middle of a land rush, with data center developers flooding their markets with requests for grid hookups. Officials in Columbus, Ohio; Altoona, Iowa; and Fort Wayne, Ind. are being aggressively courted by data center developers. But power supply in some of these second-choice markets is already running low, pushing developers ever farther out, in some cases into cornfields, according to JLL, a commercial real estate firm that serves the tech industry.

Grid Strategies warns in its report that there are real risks some regions may miss out on economic development opportunities because the grid cant keep up.

Across the board, we are seeing power companies say, We dont know if we can handle this; we have to audit our system; weve never dealt with this kind of influx before, said Andy Cvengros, managing director of data center markets at JLL. Everyone is now chasing power. They are willing to look everywhere for it.

We saw a quadrupling of land values in some parts of Columbus, and a tripling in areas of Chicago, he said. Its not about the land. It is about access to power. Some developers, he said, have had to sell the property they bought at inflated prices at a loss, after utilities became overwhelmed by the rush for grid hookups.

It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances that previously ran on fossil fuels. A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.

Planners are increasingly concerned that the grid wont be green enough or powerful enough to meet these demands.

Already, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina.

In Georgia, the states major power company, Georgia Power, stunned regulators when it revealed recently how wildly off its projections were, pointing to data centers as the main culprit.

The demand has Georgia officials rethinking the states policy of offering incentives to lure computing operations, which generate few jobs but can boost community budgets through the hefty property taxes they pay. The top leaders of Georgias House and Senate, both Republicans, are championing a pause in data center incentives.

Georgia regulators, meanwhile, are exploring how to protect ratepayers while ensuring there is enough power to meet the needs of the states most-prized new tenants: clean-technology companies. Factories supplying the electric vehicle and green-energy markets have been rushing to locate in Georgia in large part on promises of cheap, reliable electricity.

When the data center industry began looking for new hubs, Atlanta was like, Bring it on, said Pat Lynch, who leads the Data Center Solutions team at real estate giant CBRE. Now Georgia Power is warning of limitations. ... Utility shortages in the face of these data center demands are happening in almost every market.

A similar dynamic is playing out in a very different region: the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon, Portland General Electric recently doubled its forecast for new electricity demand over the next five years, citing data centers and rapid industrial growth as the drivers.

That power crunch threw a wrench into the plans of Michael Halaburda and Arman Khalili, longtime data center developers whose latest project involves converting a mothballed tile factory in the Portland area. The two were under the impression only a couple of months ago that they would have no problem getting the electricity they needed to run the place. Then the power company alerted them that it would need to do a line and load study to assess whether it could supply the facility with 60 megawatts of electricity roughly the amount needed to power 45,000 homes.

The Portland project Halaburda and Khalili are developing will now be powered in large part by off-the-grid, high-tech fuel cells that convert natural gas into low-emissions electricity. The technology will be supplemented by whatever power can be secured from the grid. The partners decided that on their next project, in South Texas, theyre not going to take their chances with the grid at all. Instead, they will drill thousands of feet into the ground to draw geothermal energy.

Halaburda sees the growth as good for the country and the economy. But no one took into consideration where this is all going, he said. In the next couple of years, unless there is a real focus on expanding the grid and making it more robust, we are going to see opportunities fall by the wayside because we cant get power to where it is needed.

Companies are increasingly turning to such off-the-grid experiments as their frustration with the logjam in the nations traditional electricity network mounts. Microsoft and Google are among the firms hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, with Microsoft even putting AI to work trying to streamline the burdensome process of getting plants approved. Microsoft has also inked a deal to buy power from a company trying to develop zero-emissions fusion power. But going off the grid brings its own big regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States. Fusion power does not yet exist.

The big tech companies are also exploring ways AI can help make the grid operate more efficiently. And they are developing platforms that during times of peak power demand can shift compute tasks and their associated energy consumption to the times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid, according to Google. But meeting both their zero-emissions pledges and their AI innovation ambitions is becoming increasingly complicated as the energy needs of their data centers grow.

These problems are not going to go away, said Michael Ortiz, CEO of Layer 9 Data Centers, a U.S. company that is looking to avoid the logjam here by building in Mexico. Data centers are going to have to become more efficient, and we need to be using more clean sources of efficient energy, like nuclear.

Officials at Equinix, one of the worlds largest data center companies, said they have been experimenting with fuel cells as backup power, but they remain hopeful they can keep the power grid as their main source of electricity for new projects.

The logjam is already pushing officials overseeing the clean-energy transition at some of the nations largest airports to look beyond the grid. The amount of energy they will need to charge fleets of electric rental vehicles and ground maintenance trucks alone is immense. An analysis shows electricity demand doubling by 2030 at both the Denver and Minneapolis airports. By 2040, they will need more than triple the electricity they are using now, according to the study, commissioned by car rental giant Enterprise, Xcel Energy and Jacobs, a consulting firm.

Utilities are not going to be able to move quickly enough to provide all this capacity, said Christine Weydig, vice president of transportation at AlphaStruxure, which designs and operates clean-energy projects. The infrastructure is not there. Different solutions will be needed. Airports, she said, are looking into dramatically expanding the use of clean-power microgrids they can build on-site.

The Biden administration has made easing the grid bottleneck a priority, but it is a politically fraught process, and federal powers are limited. Building the transmission lines and transfer stations needed involves huge land acquisitions, exhaustive environmental reviews and negotiations to determine who should pay what costs.

The process runs through state regulatory agencies, and fights between states over who gets stuck with the bill and where power lines should go routinely sink and delay proposed projects. The amount of new transmission line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when 4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even 1,000 new miles a year. The slowdown has real consequences not just for companies but for the climate. A group of scientists led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins warned in a report that by 2030 the United States risks losing out on 80 percent of the potential emission reductions from President Bidens signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the pace of transmission construction does not pick up dramatically now.

While the proliferation of data centers puts more pressure on states to approve new transmission lines, it also complicates the task. Officials in Maryland, for example, are protesting a plan for $5.2 billion in infrastructure that would transmit power to huge data centers in Loudoun County, Va. The Maryland Office of Peoples Council, a government agency that advocates for ratepayers, called grid operator PJMs plan fundamentally unfair, arguing it could leave Maryland utility customers paying for power transmission to data centers that Virginia aggressively courted and is leveraging for a windfall in tax revenue.

Tensions over who gets power from the grid and how it gets to them are only going to intensify as the supply becomes scarcer.

In Texas, a dramatic increase in data centers for crypto mining is touching off a debate over whether they are a costly drain on an overtaxed grid. An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. Unlike data centers operated by big tech companies such as Google and Meta, crypto miners generally dont build renewable-energy projects with the aim of supplying enough zero-emissions energy to the grid to cover their operations.

The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie analysis, is that cryptos drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth, such as factories that produce zero-emissions green hydrogen fuel or industrial charging depots that enable electrification of truck and bus fleets.

But after decades in which power was readily available, regulators and utility executives across the country generally are not empowered to prioritize which projects get connected. It is first come, first served. And the line is growing longer. To answer the call, some states have passed laws to protect crypto minings access to huge amounts of power.

Lawmakers need to think about this, Hertz-Shargel said of allocating an increasingly limited supply of power. There is a risk that strategic industries they want in their states are going to have a challenging time setting up in those places.

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Amid record high energy demand, America is running out of electricity - The Washington Post