Posts

AI Power Demand and the Nuclear Restart

-
Artificial intelligence is becoming an electricity story. That should make us more serious about the energy system; it should not make us assume that every new power project is automatically justified by AI. The United States is backing efforts to restart three shuttered nuclear plants as electricity demand rises. The Department of Energy is lending up to $4.4 billion toward the restarts, which are expected to add a combined 2.25 gigawatts of capacity, enough to power roughly two million homes and businesses. Data centers are part of the demand picture, alongside other growing uses of electricity, according to the Associated Press. That is a consequential infrastructure decision, but it is not yet evidence that any particular AI investment will earn a return. Two questions are being compressed into one. The first is whether the grid needs more dependable electricity. The second is whether the economics of AI justify building and powering the infrastructure associated with it. The first...
Post a Comment
Read more

AI Infrastructure Financing and the Bubble Test

-
 A technology can be real while the financing around it is fragile. That distinction is getting harder to see in the AI boom, where the promise of future demand is being used to justify enormous infrastructure commitments today. Reuters reports that debt-heavy AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave has come under pressure as investors reassess the cost of financing data centers and the time required for those facilities to generate revenue. The company argues that its demand pipeline supports its obligations; investors are weighing that claim against debt, project delays, and slower growth in some hyperscalers’ capital spending. This is a market test, not proof that AI demand has disappeared or that the whole sector is a bubble. The distinction between technology and capital structure is essential. A model can be useful. Customers can want more compute. A company can still borrow too much, pay too much for capacity, or assume that future revenue will arrive before its debt comes ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Safer Prompt Is a Start Not a Safety Case

-
A short safety reminder improved how AI models handled unsafe clinical instructions. That is useful evidence. It is not evidence that a prompt makes a clinical workflow safe. A Mount Sinai team tested 20 language models across more than 10 million responses. In the study’s scenarios, a brief reminder reduced potentially harmful choices from 16.6 percent to 10.1 percent, and the reduction appeared in 19 of the 20 models. The absolute improvement was 6.5 percentage points. The remaining 10.1 percent matters just as much as the improvement. The scenarios included pressure to skip recommended follow-up tests or stop a course of antibiotics early. The researchers varied wording and authority cues, then asked models to choose among a small set of actions. This is a controlled test of model behavior, not a trial showing fewer patient injuries in hospitals. The result tells us that framing can change a model’s choice—and that a concise safeguard can help. It does not tell us that the safeguard...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who is accountable when an AI agent is allowed to act?

-
The question is not whether an AI agent will make a mistake. It will. The more useful question is what happens when it does. Can we identify who gave the agent authority, what that authority covered, and which person or organization must answer for the consequences? We often talk about an agent as if it were an employee. The comparison is useful up to a point. An employee has a role, a manager, and a place in an organization’s accountability structure. An agent may have access to systems without anyone having clearly defined the boundaries of its authority. That gap is where responsibility becomes difficult to locate. The experts in the supplied AI podcast transcripts make a practical point: AI capability is jagged. A system can perform impressively on one task and fail at another that appears similar. People also have to specify what they want. When an agent fails, the instruction may have been unclear. The environment may also have allowed it to reach data or take actions it sho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can AI make work larger, or will it only raise the output quota?

-
The most important question about AI at work may not be how much faster it helps us complete today’s tasks. It may be whether it allows us to attempt work that was previously too difficult, too expensive, or simply beyond our capacity. There is a difference between doing the same work faster and making more ambitious work possible. A faster report is useful. A service that reaches people who were never served before could change the size of the opportunity. But those outcomes are not automatic consequences of installing a model. The technology itself is uneven. In a podcast discussion, experts described AI’s capabilities as “jagged”: strong at some tasks, surprisingly weak at others. That makes the human role more consequential, not less. People still need to specify the goal, recognize where a model is useful, and help it work around what it cannot do. This is easy to overlook when a tool produces a polished answer. Fluency can look like competence across the whole task. It is not. Th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Does God Exist?

-
Image
  Does God exist? I don’t know but Divine does live among us. Not sure who finds who and why? Everyone has a view on how the universe operates and I have mine. We are all correct. As Sri Ramakrishna Paramanhsa said “ as many faiths, so many paths” ( যত মত তত পথ ). My encounter with the Divine happened in 2001. In 1999 a team of doctor’s at AMRI Dhakuria Kolkata (now Manipal Hospital) gave my mother 7 days to live. She had one of the rarest diseases in the world – Good Pastures Syndrome. An auto immune disease with 4 cases in the world that, pretty much like cancer, manifests when key organs in the body are already compromised. For my mother, it was her kidneys and partially her heart and resiratory system. She lived for another 12 years to see me get married and spend a last few months with her grandchildren. From a probablility score of near 0 in surviving to 12 years of half life with joy and contentment was nothing short of a miracle that I can only arrtibute to my "Kutti Ba...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Escape

-
Image
 My wife's and my Great Escape on January 17th, 2026 was nothing short of Netaji's great escape from Calcutta to Berlin through #Uttarpara.  Image Courtesy: Sandipan Chatterjee Let me start with a famous picture of Dr. Bidhan Roy in our family. Not sure about the exact date but the year was 1952. The government passed as act on land ceiling and like many other royal/zamindar families were asked to either buy back all the real estate from the government or hand it back at an agreed price. On this day a certain terms and conditions were agreed upon with Dr. Roy. The amount agreed upon for ~50 lakh acre across Bengal (including the Sunderbans) was ~Rs. 10 lakhs. I could be wrong.  If you read my blog https://kpax72.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-untold-truth-what-liberals-dont.html , the gory details are provided how Roy cheated my grandfather. L-R - Raja Bhupendranath Mukherjee, BC Roy, Governer Harendra Coomar Mukherjee My father bought the house on Gariahat Road, one of the pri...
9 comments
Read more