Whilst Europe struggles through its third heatwave in 3 months, big tech emissions have risen 42% 2020-25. *Because of AI*. In contradiction of their own climate pledges and planetary boundaries. How much of this increase is justifiable vs AI shoved down our throats? www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesm...

Trump: "We had 11 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan"

In which @meredithmeredith.bsky.social tells @theatlantic.com that her team had to block Windows AI agents from screenshotting desktop Signal conversations. This is - chillingly - impossible with macOS podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/t...

France’s environment minister canceled a train trip from the south of France back to Paris and took a plane instead. During last week’s heatwave. As the French say, (I’m so shocked) it makes my arms fall off 😳😳😳

Hmm. So does this mean: - the Trump administration is stupid? OR: - we just don’t *need* models as huge and resource-consuming as Fable 5? 🤔

In Stellantis (Peugeot etc)’s Mulhouse factory, metal workers sweltering in 40 degree factories get two bottles of water. *The robots have their own AC…* whose heat rejections make the humans even hotter 🥵🥵🥵 (article in French) flip.it/8Pvbs_

Heatwaves are killing more and more people. The solution, re. @oxfamfrance.bsky.social, is simple: tax the rich. 17 months of profits of petrol company TotalEnergies would fix the problem, re. the NGO reporterre.net/Les-vagues-d... (article in French)

New NBER report says that in order to become profitable, AI needs to drive productivity x2.7. Previous NBER report said AI is driving productivity… 1.4% More in my "Responsible AI” column, in La Machine: www.frenchtechjournal.com/la-machine-8...

Spot on, @theverge.com. Just adding to the murderous list: the countless numbers of (black) people whose lives Musk is shortening by running his Memphis supercomputers on methane generators, almost doubling local nitrous oxide levels. Pure evil environmental racism www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...

Congrats to my country for banning social media for under-16s. Whether effective or not (apparently not in Australia) it sends a clear message: GAFAM does not get to decide what's law or not (the current under-13 rule comes from their intense lobbying) www.cnet.com/tech/service...

Not to do with AI this time apparently: more with Project Nimbus, whereby Google and Amazon support the Israeli military. Fact remains: Gen Z are mega pissed with big tech

Called this 1-2 months ago. All hail "tokenminimising"… about f’ing time, too cc @sashamtl.bsky.social www.theinformation.com/articles/tok...

Anthropic: Mythos is too powerful to release 🤔 Trump: Agreed. Non-Americans can now no longer access it 🤯 Or when your own myth-marketing backfires in your own face

Similar to that FT graph that shows app creation is skyrocketing but quality and usage is crumbling. Stop the slop!

Yeah great job improving water consumption AWS. Your electricity usage still grew 46%, so logically your emissions did proportionately (60% of data centre power worldwide is still fossil-fueled, and you are the world’s biggest cloud provider). So nice try, but nah cc @ketanjoshi.co

Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich.

More essential work from the incredible @ketanjoshi.co. 20GW in just one country is an obscene amount of energy (= 20 nuclear power stations). Why, once again, can’t they make smaller, less energy-sucking models? Scaling at all costs is totally incompatible with a viable planet and has to stop now

Fable 5, Anthropic’s new model, is at least c. 2-3x bigger than its previous biggest, Opus 4.8. This means it could consume as many more resources. And yet it only scores 11% better on coding benchmark SWE-bench. Crazy, right? To #QuitBigAI, walk this way: bettertech.blog/frugal-ai-sw...

Brilliant. Apple, disappointed about having to *follow EU law*, blames EU law for Siri AI being unreleasable in Europe. So it’s not their fault that imposing one model (Gemini) on all of its clients, with no guarantee of data safety, is illegal. That’s all clear then 🙄 www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

AI now costs so much even the hyperscalers can’t afford it. - $121 billion in bonds in 2025, versus a $28 billion annual average 2020-24 (x4) - Tech now = 10% of credit market, vs 2% in 2005 (x5) flip.it/FT7SHE (Interestingly, those multiples are similar to AI’s electricity & water increases 🤭)

This means that Doctolib, the app practically everyone in France uses to book medical appointments - and has received lots of state money as the founder is BFFs with Macron - is sending appointment notes taken by its AI assistant to Meta, Google & co to train their f’ing future models. Nice, eh?

Stupid is as stupid does flip.it/IwX7Aj

“We're using $300m of Anthropic [Claude Code] this year (…) The vast majority of those tokens don't need to go to Anthropic. There needs to be some intermediary layer that's saying, oh, that one has to go to Anthropic, but these ones can be handled by smaller models…" - Marc Benioff, Salesforce

"Destroy AI!", Ronny Chieng tells Harvard grads youtube.com/shorts/0z7Q0... via @404media.co

One French person in SIX consulted an AI service before deciding whom to vote for in the recent local elections. FIVE percent changed their minds. Do they know about bias, transparency, how these things are trained (by well off US white dudes)? 🤯 www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/p...

China will add more than six times as much electricity generation capacity as the US over the next five years, re. BloombergNEF. Much of that extra capacity will be in the form of renewables such as solar and wind. The US is SO screwed #QuitBigAI flip.it/lpcVTA

"Anti tech violent extremism” - AI’s new “jagged edge”? Could this get really nasty? Or is Trumptown prepping a lefty-bashing excuse? 🤔 gizmodo.com/the-feds-and... (WIRED got the scoop but it’s paywalled)

HEY EVERYONE - I've got a new report out today! It's with @greenpeaceap.bsky.social and it just an absolutely huge and lovely exploration of - False claims of renewable energy use - Growing links bw tech and gas - Our call for a moratorium (!!) Read it here! www.greenpeace.org.au/greenpeace-r...

Interesting. Next steps: work out which companies he’s taking pops at with each of the "do not"s. Then working out why he invited Anthropic…

No other comment than thank you @privateeyenews.bsky.social 🙏🏻

“AI Hate Wave” - new buzzword? @axios.com recaps: - AI boosters booed at graduations; 18% of young people feel hopeful re. AI - 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast - Data centre construction blockages are at record levels - AI leaders: hold my beer www.axios.com/2026/05/17/a...

This made my day (after Musk said they totally could go in the water) via @numb.comfortab.ly

💯😅

Nine gigawatts. The equivalent of nine nuclear power stations. Except the Box Elder data centre, in Utah, is going to run on *fossil fuels*. And it was voted in by three old dudes, on behalf of celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary. To the disgust of (pictured) locals www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05...

“Resource effects”, including environmental impacts, are by far the number one reason 70% of Americans oppose data centres. Fascinating (I thought it was primarily an electricity cost thing) 💚

Lo and behold, AI annotation work is now a western thing too. And as @karenhao.bsky.social explains here, it’s always precarious work, often for those whom big tech has fired 🥶 youtube.com/watch?v=aooi...

Twice in one week! Now officially a trend. And the fact that Eric Schmidt, AI booster-in-chief, didn’t expect this sort of reaction speaks loudly about the executive disconnect. C levels who don’t consider Gen Z’s FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete) with regards AI will themselves become obsolete

Nobody here needs me to tell them not to do this but Jesus Christ in a Cadillac do not do this.

Update: it’s now 46 methane generators. Ever-bigger and more powerful, re. this: mississippitoday.org/2026/05/11/x... Remember when Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman to ensure AI remains responsible? And when Anthropic said it would never release an unsafe model? All of that is now down the 🚽

Gloria Caulfield: “The rise of AI is the next Industrial Revolution” Students: BOOOOOOOO! GC: “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” Students: WOOOOOOO! Gen Z’s deep fear and hatred of AI is totally underestimated by older generations and AI boosters. The backlash will sting

Re. Gartner, "Companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes… as they were to generate any meaningful return on investment (ROI). The conclusion? Layoffs don't create returns, they just create vacancies.” Well I never www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/20...

So you know all those new data centres we supposedly need to do *all the AI*? Well, half of them probably won’t get made. And the cited article blames hardware shortages more than local community opposition. Put the two together, and it’s not looking great… futurism.com/science-ener...

The world’s "safest" AI provider now runs on the world’s dirtiest data centre: Musk’s Colossus. Powered by 35 methane generators, most unauthorised. A massive slap in the face to locals - led by @keshaunpearson.bsky.social & co - and to all those who thought Claude was the responsible choice 🙄🤢

Another genius takedown of big AI. As most users will soon be paying per token, the open bar era (free, subsidised tokens) will soon be over. The fallout will be apocalyptic. Especially as AI labs are currently *not telling many users how many tokens they’re actually using*…

You know how Kegsbreath told the House Armed Services Committee that the Iran Epstein distraction has cost $25 Billion? Easiest perjury conviction ever iran-cost-ticker.com

Happy May Day to workers in fields, mines, sweatshops, kitchens, delivery bikes, factories, homes, on the street & beyond. To freedom fighters, caregivers & the ancestors who make our work possible. May we work for freedom, for a world with no rulers, no kings, where all labor & lives are valued.

War profits season is officially on people! Total's profits grew a third due on higher oil and gas prices due to the illegal war on Iran. This is as HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE face power cuts and fuel rationing, btw www.reuters.com/business/ene...

The green transition, when framed as a national security imperative rather than a moral one, commands the attention of people who have resisted it for 30 years. The audience for that… isn’t Greenpeace. It’s defense ministries, central banks & sovereign wealth funds 💡 #greenswan flip.it/ZI8uO0

"The Mythos breach didn't require a sophisticated attack; just a contractor, a URL pattern, & a day-1 guess (…) the 'controlled release' model failed." Next time your CEO asks you to deploy a big, hyped, "too dangerous to release" model, show them this article > www.theregister.com/2026/04/22/a...

Scary. And exactly how the quintessentially brilliant book “Ministry for the Future” begins…