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Google has announced that it's helping to financially support the electrical training ALLIANCe (etA), an organization formed by the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electricians. The goal is to train "100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the United States" to meet the growing power demands of AI. Using AI will unlock unspecified, but positive economic opportunities, Google's new white paper, "Powering a New Era of American Innovation," claims. In order to take advantage of them, though, the US power grid needs to become more capable and efficient. That's largely because the data centers used to run and train AI models require vast amounts of energy. The white paper claims that new data centers could demand an additional "15-90 GW" of energy by 2030, something that more efficient chips and model training can't account for. For a sense of the scale, the US Department of Energy says 1 Gigawatt is the equivalent to 103 offshore wind turbines. Google's paper calls for investments in alternative energy sources like nuclear power, but also notes that expanding the electrical workforce is necessary. "McKinsey estimates that 130,000 additional electricians will be needed by 2030 to build out data centers and manufacturing facilities," the company writes. Currently, though, retiring electricians outnumber newly trained ones. "Nearly 10,000 American electricians either retire or change careers each year, while only about 7,000 new entrants join the field." Investing in electrical training is Google's attempt to help change that. It would be nice if it was paired with a clearer explanation around what that AI will be doing with all that extra power Google notes that there's a "causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth" but skilled job training isn't a bad thing.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-funding-electrician-training-to-help-meet-the-power-demands-of-ai-221320678.html?src=rss
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Mark Zuckerberg says he believes most of the Meta's code will be written by AI agents sometime within the next year-and-a-half. Zuckerberg made the prediction during an hour-long interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. "I would guess sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we'll reach the point where most of the code that's going towards these efforts is written by AI," said Zuckerberg, referring to the company's efforts to build internal AI agents. "And I don't mean like autocomplete... I'm talking more like you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can improve things, it can find issues, it writes higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already." Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:"within 12-18 months, most of the code is written by AI"It wont just be autocomplete.AI agents will set goals, run tests, find problems, and write better code than top engineers. pic.twitter.com/2del08UA45 Haider. (@slow_developer) April 29, 2025 This is not the first time Zuckerberg has made this type of prediction. During his awkward appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year, he said, "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code." Notice how the goal posts have moved. Less than five months ago, Zuckerberg said coding agents that could effectively replace most human programmers were within reach. Now, those same systems will not arrive by mid-2026 at the earliest. The changing timelines underscore exactly why we should be critical of the AI industry and its many promises. AI agents may very well one day replace mid-level programmers, but right now predictions like the one made by Zuckerberg and many others are, at best, advertisements for technologies that don't yet exist and may never perform at the level their advocates say they will. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/mark-zuckerberg-predicts-ai-will-write-most-of-metas-code-within-12-to-18-months-213851646.html?src=rss
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YouTube is testing a new feature that will blur the thumbnails of videos that appear in search results that "frequently include sexual themes," the platform announced in the Community section of the YouTube Help Center. The experimental feature is currently being tested on a small percentage of users, Youtube says. The hope is that by blurring thumbnails, YouTube can provide search results that include videos that technically abide by its Community Guidelines, but protect users from seeing content that's possibly "sensitive in nature." YouTube's post doesn't get into specifics of what will trigger a blurred thumbnail, but does note that "the video title, channel name, and description will remain visible" even if a thumbnail is obscured. Users who have the feature will also be able to disable thumbnail blurring if they want. YouTube offers a Restricted Mode for screening out mature content, but a more apt comparison for this experimental feature might be the SafeSearch settings in Google Search. SafeSearch lets you completely filter out "explicit images, text, and links," show all relevant results or blur explicit images, while allowing explicit text and links through. Considering YouTube's position 20 years in as both a backbone of the internet and a de facto television replacement, this seems like a common sense feature to have.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-will-blur-the-thumbnails-of-mature-videos-as-part-of-a-new-test-202546425.html?src=rss
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