#大佬观点

Satya Nadella: Microsoft’s latest Wisconsin AI data center keeps yearly water consumption no higher than that of 1 local restaurant. "The cooling loop is filled once and the data centre can operate effectively with zero water consumption. Daily water usage across a year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use" The mechanism is mainly about replacing evaporative cooling with closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling, so water moves like coolant inside a sealed machine rather than being boiled off into the air. Hot GB200-class AI racks produce too much heat for normal air cooling, so cold liquid is pushed through pipes into the servers and across metal cold plates touching the hottest chips. The liquid enters the rack cool, absorbs heat from the chips through cold plates, then exits the rack at a higher temperature and carries that heat through pipes to a huge cooling system outside the compute floor. Microsoft says Fairwater sends that hot water to cooling “fins” beside the datacenter, where 172 20-foot fans blow air across the fins and dump the heat into the outside air. The important detail is that the air cools the water through metal surfaces, so the water does not need to evaporate the way many older datacenters use cooling towers. The cooled liquid then returns to the servers, repeats the loop, and keeps absorbing heat from the chips. In older data centers, heat is often removed partly through cooling towers. Hot water meets moving air, some water evaporates, and that phase change carries heat away. Effective, but it consumes fresh water continuously. But Firwater is a closed loop because the same coolant keeps circulating through sealed pipes: it absorbs heat from the chips, releases that heat through radiator-like fins, then flows back to the chips again. For Wisconsin Fairwater, Microsoft says more than 90% of the facility uses closed-loop liquid cooling, while the remaining portion uses outside air and switches to water only on the hottest days. ---- From "Microsoft" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

Cache reads with Fable 5.1 cost 75% less than Fable 5’s So the savings get larger as the workload becomes more agentic. Agents constantly revisit the same context, plans, tool outputs, and working state, so cheaper cache reads make persistent reasoning dramatically less expensive; that’s how a 75% cut in one component can become ~45% off the entire workload. The economic question in many enterprises are now “How long can an agent keep working before the job stops making financial sense?” So this curve need to keep falling.

我们推出 Claude Fable 5.1 和 Claude Mythos 5.1。 它们是全球最先进的编程和知识工作模型。

one real issue I have with various agents now is "where is this code going to run" - does it need access to my local filesystem - can I fire it off from my phone and if so does it run on the cloud or needs my Mac mini fired up / synced? The current UX metaphors around this seem to need work.

I just used instinct and stripe link to buy my niece a hot pink piano… entirely from the messaging interface 🤯🤯 Instinct was even kind enough to find me a 15% off discount!!!!

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

Nature is healing. Any politician opposed to data centers is unqualified to hold public office. Data centers are revitalizing small towns all over America, a godsend for blue collar workers, lowering electricity costs, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy and use negligible amounts of water.

An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science. We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

Bill Gates just warned AI could trigger mass unemployment In a super long (6,000-word) post that @BillGates just published, he says "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" Some takeawys - AI is moving too fast for the usual technology-transition playbook. Unlike PCs, AI already runs on devices people own, communicates in natural language, and can learn from the same materials used to train humans, so adoption does not require decades of new hardware, software, and user retraining. - He would probably support a credible global effort to slow AI development, but does not believe geopolitical and economic competition will allow one. - His biggest economic fear is permanent job destruction, not temporary unemployment. Gates argues that AI can substitute directly for human cognition, putting entry- and mid-level work in sales, customer support, software engineering, paralegal work, finance, healthcare and other fields at risk, while increasingly capable robots could start competing for construction and hospitality tasks before 2030. - The decisive point comes when AI becomes reliable enough to work without human checking, because removing the human then becomes economically attractive. - He sees AI as a force multiplier for both attackers and powerful institutions. Lower-skill criminals could gain capabilities for cyberattacks, fraud, deepfakes and potentially biological threats, while governments could use cheaper autonomous weapons, surveillance and opinion manipulation; beyond misuse by humans, - Gates also leaves open the longer-term risk that increasingly capable AI systems could act against human interests. - He worries that always-available, agreeable AI companions could reduce the difficult social interactions through which children build resilience, while heavy reliance on AI for intellectual work could weaken critical thinking; at the same time, he argues that carefully designed AI tutors could improve education by preserving the student's own cognitive effort instead of simply supplying answers. - He also proposes a "Human Reserved" category for work society deliberately keeps human, and taxes on AI tokens and robots to slow some automation.