In today’s newsletter:

• News - ⚡ AI Data Centers Now Guzzle More Power Than Cities

• Culture - ✝️🤖 AI Jesus Is Here: 1,000 Confessions and Counting

⚡ AI Data Centers Now Guzzle More Power Than Cities

Data centers powering AI and cloud computing are becoming energy-hungry giants, with some campuses projected to use more electricity than entire cities or even U.S. states. The race to dominate AI is driving developers to build massive facilities requiring up to a gigawatt of power—enough to supply 1.8 million people. While renewable energy is preferred, it's not enough to meet the growing demand. Natural gas and even nuclear energy are stepping in to keep these centers running, but this reliance could slow progress toward sustainability goals.

Finding suitable land and power for these mega-campuses is also a growing challenge. Developers are looking beyond traditional hubs like Virginia to places like Arizona and Texas, where energy resources and regulations are more flexible. The push for reliable power has made nuclear an attractive option for some tech giants, but for now, natural gas remains the go-to. While the industry hopes renewables and better efficiency will reduce gas reliance over time, these data center expansions are temporarily complicating emissions targets.

🗞️ In Other News…

• MIT researchers have developed a Model-Based Transfer Learning (MBTL) algorithm that significantly enhances AI decision-making efficiency in complex environments like city traffic control, achieving up to 50-fold performance improvements by strategically selecting training tasks and reducing data requirements.

• North Korea-linked threat actor Sapphire Sleet, active since 2020, has stolen over $10 million in cryptocurrency through LinkedIn-based social engineering campaigns, leveraging fake profiles, malware-laced skills assessments, and AI tools to deceive victims and support the regime’s financial and intelligence-gathering efforts.

• OpenAI is funding a three-year research project at Duke University, led by ethics professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, to develop algorithms that predict human moral judgments in complex scenarios, though the inherent subjectivity and limitations of AI highlight significant challenges in achieving this goal.

• Enveda Biosciences, leveraging AI and metabolomics to accelerate drug discovery from natural compounds, has raised $130 million in Series C funding to advance multiple therapeutic candidates, including ENV-294 for inflammatory conditions, into clinical development and expand its innovative chemical mapping platform.

• Amazon has doubled its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, securing AWS as its primary cloud and training partner while integrating custom Trainium and Inferentia chips, positioning itself to challenge Microsoft and Google in the enterprise AI market by building a vertically integrated AI infrastructure ecosystem.

✝️🤖 AI Jesus Is Here: 1,000 Confessions and Counting

A church in Austria has taken a bold step into the future by introducing an AI-powered "Jesus" chatbot as part of an experimental project called "Deus in Machina." Installed in a confessional booth, this digital Jesus, trained on theological texts and fluent in 100 languages, engaged over 1,000 people during its two-month trial. Surprisingly, two-thirds of users described their chats as a "spiritual experience," leaving the church's theologian, Marco Schmid, intrigued by the public's thirst for such interactions.

While reactions ranged from inspired to skeptical, the AI managed to avoid any major theological missteps—a rarity for language models. The project wasn’t meant to replace traditional confession but to explore how technology could offer an approachable way to discuss faith. Though Schmid doesn’t see AI Jesus becoming a permanent fixture, he believes it taps into a genuine desire for people to "listen to what Jesus would say" in a modern context.

VC Fundraising Rounds

• Lightning AI, a New York City-based developer of the PyTorch Lightning framework, secured $50 million in funding. (11/21/24)

• Wordware, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to simplify programming AI agents by enabling users to write in plain English, has announced securing $30 million in seed funding. (11/21/24)

• xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, has announced to investors that it raised $5 billion in funding, boosting its valuation to $50 billion—over twice its worth from a few months prior. (11/20/24)

• Federato, an AI-driven underwriting platform for insurance, announced that it has raised a total of $80 million, including its recent Series C funding round. (11/20/24)

• Cyera, a leading company in data security, has secured $300 million in Series D funding, bolstering its swift expansion and solidifying its leadership in the $23.68 billion data security industry. (11/20/24)

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