Daily Tech News 3 June 2025

• A pro-AI subreddit (one of the individual forums on the Reddit site) has started banning crazies who think the AI trees are talking to them. (404 Media)

  The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters" who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god," highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.

  Yep, that sounds like Reddit alright.

  "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities," one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment."

  Oh. Those guys.
  
  They are also crazy.
  
  
  

• AMD's new 9060 XT could be 5% slower than Nvidia's 5060 Ti rather than 5% faster, according to leaked third-party benchmarks. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the other hand, the 16GB 9060 XT at $349 is cheaper than even the 8GB model of the 5060 Ti at $379, making it the easy and obvious choice given that 8GB cards are terrible for recent games.
  
  On the third hand, these MSRP numbers are all imaginary and we'll have to wait and see what is actually available.
  
  
  
• AMD meanwhile is trying to defend the existence of the 8GB model of the 9060 XT. (WCCFTech)
  
  Both the current Xbox and PlayStation have 16GB of RAM, so games ported from consoles to PC very often want more than 8GB of video RAM to run smoothly, or sometimes to run at all, sometimes turning into slideshows at even modest settings, or simply crashing entirely.
  
  Intel's B580 is not a fast card, but it does provide 12GB of VRAM at a nominal $249, something that neither Nvidia nor AMD can provide.
  
  
  
• After running 80,000 simulations across all available polling data, researchers have concluded that the Milky Way is less than 50% likely to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy over the next ten million years. (Science Alert)
  
  They announced that it is more likely to collide with Hillary Clinton.
  
  
  
• The Liberux Nexx is a Linux-based smartphone with more-or-less adequate specs. (IndieGogo)
  
  It has an Arm Cortex A76 chip, which ranks as "okay, I guess".
  
  And flagship pricing - around $1500 during the pre-order stage and a proposed $2000 if it ever reached retail.
  
  
  
• It's a small world after all: The planet is in the midst of a climate catastrophe and here's Google doing Google things. (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm not sure what exactly is going on at Notebook Check, but maybe someone should check on them.
  
  Anyway, the reason I bring this nonsense to your attention is this:

  On May 20th 2025, MIT released an article breaking down the energy costs associated with each query run through a range of AI models, including Large Language Models (LLM) and image and video generators (Diffusion).
  
  Even if you exclude the 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity it took to train GPT-4, the smallest text-based model with 8 billion parameters uses 57 joules of energy per response or 114 joules when accounting for cooling. On a large model with 50 times more parameters, that number climbs to 3,353 joules (6706 with cooling) for each response.
  
  It would be counterintuitive to get into the maths here, as MIT do a far better job, likening each response to travelling 400 feet (122 meters) on an e-bike. Google processes around 158,500 searches every second. So, by MIT's maths, if we could capture the power associated with running Gemini for 1 second, a person could travel 19,337 kilometres on an e-bike, or roughly one and a quarter times around the planet.

  The Earth is 40,000 kilometres in circumference.
  
  Almost exactly. It was exact, because that's how the metre was originally defined, but they got it slightly wrong and it was a little too late to change once they got GPS operational and found the real number.
  
  
  
• AirBnB wants to build the "everything app". (The Verge)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Salesforce has bought Moonhub, a startup building AI tools for hiring, for an undisclosed sum. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Also no.
  
  
  
• How Digg is building a website for humans. (Tech Crunch)
  
  A novel concept in this era.
  
  I don't think the new Digg is likely to succeed, but anyone willing to take on the festering groupthink hugbox of Reddit is welcome to try.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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