Weekly Progress Roundup

AI is becoming more efficient, rising cancer diagnoses signal progress, ChatGPT may replace your doctor.

AI energy demand may be smaller than expected

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the energy needs of data centers as the artificial intelligence industry takes off. However, the International Energy Agency projects only modest growth in energy demand from data centers in the near future. The key is efficiency gains. As the data scientist Hannah Ritchie writes, the energy intensity of AI chips is now “less than 1% of what it was in 2008.”

We’ve seen this dynamic before:

“If you were to take the expected growth in internet technologies since 2010 and assume that energy demand would follow, then you do get pretty scary numbers.

But energy demand did not follow in the same way … Between 2010 and 2018, global data centre compute increased by more than 550%. Yet energy use in data centres increased by just 6%.”

Rise in pancreatic cancer diagnoses signals progress

Pancreatic cancer diagnoses have become increasingly common since the beginning of the 21st century. It turns out this may be a good thing. According to a recent study, the reason is improvements in medical imaging, which have allowed doctors to detect and remove early-stage tumors before they become dangerous. This also explains why the rise in pancreatic cancer diagnoses in the United States has not been accompanied by an increase in pancreatic cancer deaths.

Consider ChatGPT the next time you need to see the doctor

In a recent experiment, researchers gave a group of doctors six case histories and graded their ability to accurately diagnose the patients and explain their reasoning. The doctors who used ChatGPT scored an average of 76 percent. The doctors who didn’t scored 74 percent.

ChatGPT alone scored 90 percent.

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Culture & Tolerance:

• Colombia Outlaws Child Marriage After 17-Year Campaign

• Drop In Death Penalty Support Led by Younger Generations

Food & Hunger:

• CRISPR Builds a Big Tomato That’s Actually Sweet

Energy & Environment:

• Scientists Discover World’s Largest Coral—Visible from Space

• Scientists Found a New Ally in the Fight to Clean Up CO2 Emissions

• China’s Desertified Land Shrinks by 4.3 Million Hectares Since 2012

• “Green-Listed” Scimitar Oryx Bounces Back

Health & Demographics:

• Semaglutide Reduces All-Cause Hospital Admissions

• Pancreatic Cancer Surge May Be Less Worrisome than It Seemed

• One Company Is Turning To Cadavers for Bone Marrow

• World’s First Fully Robotic Double Lung Transplant

• The Scientists Trying to Improve IVF Success Rate

Science & Technology:

• Amazon Developing Special Eye Glasses to Speed Up Deliveries

• SpaceX Completes Sixth Starship Test Flight but Calls Off Catch

• Robot Runs Marathon for the First Time in South Korea

• Solid-State Batteries Enter Pilot Production

• Marine Biologists Discover New Sea Slug Species off Pacific Coast

• Scientists Map Out the Human Body One Cell at a Time

Tweets:

• How can we harness the Earth’s heat?

• Poverty in the United States has virtually disappeared

• Why Starship matters