Topic
The electricity and computing power AI models and agents require, measured per query or workflow and benchmarked against datacenter and household use.
Qingyi Zhou and colleagues at UW-Madison optimized a nanostructure around a vacancy color center and report seven orders of magnitude less power for nonlinearity than conventional optical materials need. The work is simulation.
Reality
The Perspective calls them self-organizing memristive networks and applies mean-field theory, graph theory and disordered-systems physics to their conductance dynamics, with the energy saving still stated as a motivation.
Reality
A thin viscoelastic layer of PDMS keeps two metal electrodes from snapping together and holds the history of voltages applied to them. Integrating a sensor with that memory is the team's next project.
Reality
Zeke Hausfather logged eight weeks of Claude Code use and priced the electricity behind it, which hands operators a user-side number for agent energy and a reason to stop dividing by chat prompts.
Reality
Token use has outgrown the accounting around it, and the firms reporting returns are the ones putting the price of a prompt in front of the person about to run it, rather than in a dashboard read a quarter later.
Reality