science

In 1961, a physicist at IBM named Rolf Landauer asked a question that seemed almost philosophical: What is the minimum energy required to perform a computation? The answer he found wasn't philosophical at all. It was thermodynamics. And it set an absolute floor beneath all possible computing—a

In 2020, OpenAI trained GPT-3. It took approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 120 American homes for a year. The cost: somewhere between $4 million and $12 million, depending on how you count. In 2023, GPT-4 training consumed an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours. That's not a

Every thought you think costs calories. Every AI response burns watts. Every calculation, biological or silicon, requires energy—and that energy has to come from somewhere. This isn't a metaphor. Intelligence is expensive, and the bill comes in joules. We're used to thinking about intelligence as

In September 2024, Microsoft announced it was restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Yes, that Three Mile Island—the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979. The company signed a twenty-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy, the plant's owner. A month later,

If you can't grow a brain in a dish—or don't want to deal with the complications of keeping tissue alive—there's another option: build silicon that acts like a brain. This is the neuromorphic computing approach. Instead of cramming biological neurons into a

In 2022, a company called Cortical Labs published a paper with an audacious title: "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world." They had grown a small cluster of human neurons in a dish. They connected it to electrodes. They fed it signals