IEA Hits $580B AI Spend; BNPL Risks Grow

Summary

These infrastructure, financial, and software development trends dictate future technology stability, energy policy, and coding standards worldwide.

AI Infrastructure Spending reaches $580B globally, outpacing new oil supply spending by $40B, raising renewable energy concerns 1.
BNPL Expansion poses risks, noted by Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris, as consumer lending debt grows 2.
Open Source Utility remains high; Nolan Lawson’s decade-old blob-util package sees 5M+ weekly downloads on npm 5.
LLM Alignment Reversed using Heretic, a tool to automatically remove safety censorship from transformer models 6.
Professional Software Principles from The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition emphasize ongoing learning 4.
$580 Billion - Total global spending projected for AI data centers this year 1.
$40 Billion - Amount by which data center spending exceeds new oil supply spending 1.
5+ Million - Weekly downloads for the decade-old blob-util npm package 5.
20 Lines - Length of Python code needed to solve N-Queens using Z3 API 3.

The world will spend $580 billion on data centers this year, exceeding new oil supply spending by $40 billion.
— Article [1]
‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ is expanding fast, and that should worry everyone.
— Article [2]
Z3 is a high-performance theorem prover developed at Microsoft Research.
— Article [3]
`blob-util`, which is approximately 10 years old, currently receives over 5+ million weekly downloads.
— Article [5]
Heretic is a tool that automatically removes censorship... from transformer-based language models.
— Article [6]

Nigel Morris expressed concern over the rapid expansion of BNPL services in consumer finance.

Sources: [2]