Datacentres are deeply unpopular – so the geniuses at OpenAI are rebranding them — Arwa Mahdawi - The Guardian
By Google News AI ·
These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them
Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.
Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When heâs not golfing or commenting on senatorsâ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to peopleâs lives.
Trump isnât alone in thinking a rebrand can distract from bigger issues. The tech industry seems to be on a mission to pepper every inch of the earth with datacentres that will facilitate our glorious AI-powered future. One slight problem: the hoi polloi are not quite so enthusiastic. People around the world are increasingly nervous about AI. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum hate datacentres with a passion; so much so that they have become one of the biggest talking points of the midterms. There are various reasons for this anger, but the big one is that a lot of people blame the resource-guzzling centres for driving up the cost of utility bills. And so, with Trumpian logic, the great minds at OpenAI have come up with a brilliant solution to their very bad image problem. They will rename datacentres ⦠wait for it ⦠compute campuses.
Did a consultant (or ChatGPT) land on this new alliterative formulation because it sounded a smidgen warmer, a bit more human, than…
Originally published by Google News AI