Big Tech goes nuclear - Marketplace

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In this week’s newsletter, we’re looking at the promising, annoying and lucrative ripple effects of AI hype: Nuclear power is back, AI slop is all over Spotify, and a tiny island is making bank off “.ai” websites.

The news fix

Big Tech goes nuclear. Amazon’s cloud computing arm announced Wednesday plans to invest millions in nuclear power projects. And it’s not alone. Google announced a nuclear deal earlier this week, and Microsoft said last month it would help bring the decommissioned Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online. As one portfolio manager told CBS, Big Tech and nuclear energy could be a “marriage made in heaven.”

Why? These companies need more electricity for their power-guzzling artificial intelligence data centers. The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that by 2030, data centers could consume up to 9% of the electricity America generates on an annual basis, up from 4% in 2023.

Interest in nuclear power is up, but don’t look at the receipts. At the 2023 World Climate Action Summit, 25 countries, including the United States, pledged to triple nuclear energy production by 2050 in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But few states or utility companies risk investing in new nuclear projects, because the costs are too damn high.

Take Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia, which came online last April and has been dubbed the most expensive power plant ever built in the world. It cost an estimated $37 billion, more than double its initial budget, and bankrupted the company overseeing construction. Two South Carolina reactors were abandoned mid-construction in 2017 despite billions in sunk costs. Dominion Energy, one of the utility companies behind the project, is still charging customers $8 a month on average to pay down debt tied to the failed nuclear reactors.

Can next-generation reactors drive down costs? Small modular reactors, SMRs, take up less space, are quicker to construct and can be placed closer to electric grids compared to previous generations of reactors. That, in theory, should make them cheaper to build, but we don’t yet have any precedence. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the first commercial modular reactor design last year for a project that would have generated 462 megawatts of power in Utah. Then, the project fizzled due to cost overruns.

Smart in a shot

The Ancient Lake Records label uploaded hundreds of albums to Spotify in September and October. (Screenshot Spotify)

Spotify has been flooded with AI-generated music. Dubious record labels have been uploading hundreds of fabricated albums en masse to the streaming platform this fall, Ars Technica reported, including some that ended up on real artists’ pages. In many cases, those albums are still up, and there’s no easy way for users or musicians to report the fakes. Who is listening to those fakes? It’s not just unsuspecting listeners who get served the albums via the algorithm. Bots are now listening to bot-created music, which distorts what gets recommended to human listeners and diverts royalty payments from the artists they mimic. All this AI slop further erodes the user experience of Spotify.

Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify data analyst, told Ars Technica that it’s hard to get rich off streaming fraud because of paltry per-stream royalties. So the only way to make a decent buck is to flood the platform. Breaking free of the algorithm altogether may be the only alternative to actually discovering new music sans bots (and to stop getting repeatedly served the same Sabrina Carpenter song).

The numbers

When an AI company is getting off the ground, they reach out to Anguilla. The tiny island has been inundated with requests from websites seeking to use its top-level domain, .ai. To keep up with demand, the British territory signed a deal this week for a U.S. company to manage URLs. Let’s do the numbers.

308

There are about 308 country code top-level domains reserved for a specific, sovereign state or a territory. The nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers describes these domains as “ZIP codes” that support a stable and secure web.

$32 million

That’s how much money the government of Anguilla made off registration fees last year, from buyers who wanted websites ending in .ai. That number quadrupled from 2022 and accounted for nearly 21% of government revenue.

533,000

There are more than 533,000 .ai web domains, the Associated Press reported, most of which are for companies that aren’t based in Anguilla. Other countries have monetized their country’s reserved domains to suit the branding needs of foreign industries. Popular domains come from Tuvalu (.tv), Libya (.ly), Columbia (.co) and Montenegro (.me).

Not every nation is as permissive with its country code. France, for example, only allows people living in Europe to use its .fr domain.

None of us is as smart as all of us

Tell us what’s making you smarter at smarter@marketplace.org. We’d love to include your recommendation in a future newsletter.

Can you hear the fake?

Politicians are easy targets for deepfakes, and voice-cloning tools have become so good even experts have a hard time spotting fakes. Host Kimberly Adams recommends a Washington Post interactive showing how to separate fact from misinformation by paying attention to common imperfections in the way humans speak.

The results are in

Tulsa, Oklahoma, began offering $10,000 to remote workers who relocated to the city in 2019. Five years later, researchers found these transplants saved an average of $25,000 on their annual housing costs, while the city reaped millions in tax revenue. Writer Ellen Rolfes is reading a New York Times story on how the Tulsa Remote program reversed brain drain at little or no cost.

Resistance and revolt

More than 1,000 ships involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1501 and 1867 sank at sea, yet less than a dozen have been found. Editor Stephanie Siek is reading a Guardian article about the Black archeologists who are investigating underwater shipwrecks to discover untold stories of Africans who “did not go quietly.”

There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.

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