Source: we benchmark this sort of stuff at my company and for the past year or so frontier models with a modest reasoning budget typically succeed at arithmetic problems (except for multiplication/division problems with many decimal places, which this isn't).
Those of us who don’t base our technical understandings on memes are well aware of the tooling at the disposal of all modern reasoning models gives them the capability to do such things.
Please don’t bring the culture war here.
ChatGPT 5.2 has recently been churning through unsolved Erdös problems.
I think right now one is partially validated by a pro and the other one I know of is "ai-solved" but not verified. As in: we're the ones who can't quite keep up.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07421
And the only reason they can't count Rs is that we don't show them Rs due to a performance optimization.
Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful function of an AI assistant.
Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" capacity on your fingertips
Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.
Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x?fromPaywa...
I agree with your point about induced demand. The “win” wouldn’t be looking at a single press release with already-suspect numbers, but rather looking at essentially all press releases of note, a task not generally valuable enough to devote people towards.
That being said, we normally consider it progress when we can use mechanical or electrical energy to replace or augment human work.
Whether talking weight or bulk a decimal place is approximately the difference between needing a wheelbarrow, a truck, a semi truck, a freight train and a ship.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...
In reality copper is just convenient. We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else!
For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, which at current prices is $0.17 / meter. A 2.4mm2 aluminum conductor has the same resistance, weighs 0.0065kg/m, which at current prices is $0.0195 / meter!
Sure, aluminum is a pain to work with, but with a price premium like that there's a massive incentive to find a way to make it work.
Copper can't get too expensive simply due to power demands because people will just switch to aluminum. The power grid itself had been using it for decades, after all - some internal datacenter busbars should be doable as well.
Aluminum has a higher resistance, which means the same diameter will get hotter than copper. Make the cable thicker and its resistance drops, which means it gets less hot.
Want more amps at the same temperature? Ohm's law still applies: just use a thicker cable.
Aluminum bus bars(solid, often exposed) would be designed for the required power levels and installation criteria.
The biggest reason is that aluminum oxidizes, and unlike copper, the oxide layer has high resistivity. In theory that shouldn’t be an issue in datacenters hiring expert technicians.
That said, there is no reason we can't design better connectors that can withstand the expansion and shrinkage cycles, like spring loaded or spring cage connectors.
Look at the electrical fires of the 1950’s and 1960’s as an example, and that was at household levels of current.
Aluminum is used, but everything accounts for the insane coefficient of linear expansion and other annoying properties.
daeken•1h ago
eterm•1h ago
blitzar•1h ago
RobotToaster•54m ago
lostlogin•20m ago
brookst•46m ago
literalAardvark•42m ago
The history is quite interesting and well worth checking out.
I can't recommend a book on the subject, but I do heartily recommend "Longitude", which is about the challenges of inventing the first maritime chronometers for the purpose of accurately measuring longitude.
EA•11m ago
coldcode•12m ago
testplzignore•1h ago
Pinus•1h ago
crote•33m ago