British fintech Wise said this week it would shift its primary listing from London to New York, joining a growing list of firms snubbing the London Stock Exchange. UK chip designer Arm opted for a New York IPO in 2023, while food delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway quit the LSE for Amsterdam in November.  Sweden’s Klarna has confirmed plans to go public in New York, following in the footsteps of fellow Stockholm-based tech darling Spotify, which listed on the NYSE in 2018.  The draw? Bigger valuations, deeper capital, and more appetite for risk. Register Now “The US economy continues to perform far better than the EU, and valuations are simply higher for companies that can list there,” Victor Basta, managing partner at Artis Partners, told TNW.    The numbers back him up. The NYSE boasts a market cap of around $27 trillion — compared to just $3.5 trillion for the LSE.  That scale — and the deep-pocketed investors it attracts — pushed Arm to list across the pond. Wise followed for the same reason, according to CEO Kristo Käärmann.  Käärmann said the move would tap “the biggest market opportunity in the world for our products today, and enable better access to the world’s deepest and most liquid capital market.”  Beyond sheer growth potential, US investors are also known for taking bigger bets on growth-stage tech companies.   “US investors understand the whole ‘revenue-before-profit’ strategy,”  Andrey Korchak, a British serial entrepreneur, told TNW. “Meanwhile, in Europe, they often want to see revenue from day one.”  That risk aversion, Korchak believes, restricts the growth of startups. “Europe just doesn’t have the same density of tech unicorns,” he said. “And when startups here do hit that billion-dollar mark, most still prefer to list in the US.” Sean Reddington, co-founder of UK tech firm Thrive, fears that Wise’s New York listing will deepen the problems.  “Wise’s move to the US signals a worrying trend,” he said. “It threatens a ‘brain drain’ of capital and talent, making it harder for growth-stage VCs to invest in UK scaleups without a clear US exit plan.” He called for urgent government action, including providing “meaningful incentives” for tech firms to list in the UK.  “If the ultimate reward of a domestic IPO is diminished, it pushes more companies to consider relocating or listing overseas,” he said. Europe’s startup struggles will be a hot topic at TNW Conference, which takes place on June 19-20 in Amsterdam. Tickets for the event are now on sale — use the code TNWXMEDIA2025 at checkout to get 30%. Story by Siôn Geschwindt Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehic (show all) Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehicles, he's happiest sourcing a scoop, investigating the impact of emerging technologies, and even putting them to the test. He has five years of journalism experience and holds a dual degree in media and environmental science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. When he's not writing, you can probably find Siôn out hiking, surfing, playing the drums or catering to his moderate caffeine addiction. You can contact him at: sion.geschwindt [at] protonmail [dot] com Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week. Also tagged with

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. “Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time.” For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China’s AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

As the Nintendo Switch 2 launches, these are our hopes and dreams for the console Image credit: Nintendo Feature by GamesIndustry.biz Staff Contributor Published on June 5, 2025 With the Nintendo Switch 2 launching today, it closes out a rocky pre-launch period of tariffs, fiery price discussions around software and hardware, and some retailers cancelling pre-orders. Much of that will feel like a distant memory once the hotly-anticipated console is in players' hands, and they're trying out the first new Mario Kart game in more than 11 years. There's always something special about Nintendo hardware. Even with the Wii U, the console manufacturer's biggest dud in recent memory, that was still the case. While the Switch 2 is firmly an evolution of 2017's Switch and not anything bolder in terms of input or form factor, Nintendo's unbelievable run of great software over the past eight years looks set to continue. The downside for consumers, of course, is that they will be paying much more for some of those titles than they did on the last console. Below, to celebrate its launch day, the GamesIndustry.biz team shares its realistic hopes and dreams for the years to come on Switch 2. A fresh take on exclusive IP Nintendo has already demonstrated that it's willing to switch it up in terms of new takes on its iconic franchises, with the destructible levels of Donkey Kong Bananza and the open roads of Mario Kart World. But I have an appetite to see the same approach taken with continuations of beloved franchises like The Legend of Zelda, 3D Mario, and Pokémon. While Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are getting enhanced versions and the newest Pokémon Legends title launches this fall, Nintendo has the opportunity to revitalise some of its beloved IP with boosted hardware and fan interest. Not only that, but it could flip the script entirely and debut a brand new franchise unrelated to anything that’s come before it – something that would become intertwined with the Switch 2 and inspire a new generation of players and developers. – Sophie McEvoy The end of bad Switch ports While games like Doom and The Witcher 3 demonstrated that miracles were possible with the Nintendo Switch's limited hardware capabilities, numerous ports from more powerful platforms fell short. From the notoriously rough visual downgrade of Batman: Arkham Knight to the choppy port of WWE 2K 2018, sometimes visually intensive games have made their way to the console with a whiff of 'buyer beware' about them. In some cases, like the Kingdom Hearts games, 'cloud' versions bypassed trying to run natively on the hardware altogether, which was a compromise too far for many players. That's a trend the Switch 2, with its out-of-the-gates impressive ports of Cyberpunk 2077 and Civ 7, could really do without. Inevitably, we will reach a point with the next Xbox and PlayStation consoles where the disparity with the Switch 2 becomes too great, and we could potentially see a similar downslide in ports. But hopefully the quality level reached with this first wave of releases sets a high standard for what's to come. Users' tolerance for lower quality multiplatform releases has been tested too much during the latter years of the Switch's lifecycle. – Samuel Roberts Switch 2 is at the heart of indie games Image credit: ConcernedApe The early years of the Switch were a honeymoon period for indie games, causing a gold rush of publishers and developers getting their back catalogues on the platform. As the eShop became swamped with shovelware, while Nintendo did little to improve discoverability (until very recently), Steam quickly became the de facto home for indie games again. There's still nothing like playing an indie game on Switch. The portability remains a cut above other devices with a similar form factor, like the Steam Deck. While Nintendo shows it values smaller games with its Indie World showcases, there's still a disconnect between the intent of those presentations and how easily indie games are actually discovered on Switch. Using the eShop to celebrate good taste in games should be a goal of Nintendo's during this generation. A golden age of indies comparable to the original Switch launch seems unlikely – the moment has probably passed on that. But more consistent curation would have a massive amount of value. – Samuel Roberts Nintendo shows that the mouse has the magic The unveiling of the Switch showed that Nintendo learned a lot of lessons from the Wii U, itself a failed follow-up to the Wii: the company didn't rock the boat. It's the same form factor you know from the original Switch, with a clear '2' in the name. All its more novel secondary features – like the Joy-Con's mouse controls – are not at the centre of the marketing messaging like the Wii Remote or DS touchscreen were for those consoles. This was wise in a few practical ways. It means there are no interface-based headaches in porting a game onto the console, paving the way for (theoretically) good third-party support. Consumers, developers, and publishers know what they're getting. Still, it means the console is going to feel largely familiar as an experience. The hope, then, is that deeper into the generation, Nintendo and other developers find new and interesting things to do with the mouse. Competitive wheelchair basketball game Drag x Drive is Nintendo's first attempt at this, but the drab art style doesn't inspire much confidence. Previous breakthrough exclusives like Arms and Splatoon felt like a much bigger deal. – Samuel Roberts More than just a console As a handheld device, the Switch ended up being more than just a games console. Subscription-based services like Crunchyroll and InkyPen provide access to anime, comics, and manga, while the YouTube app lets players watch a (albeit limited) selection of movies and shows. With the improvements in screen resolution, the Switch 2 would benefit from integrating more streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. Sure, you can use these apps on phones and laptops, but it would be convenient to have everything on one device – particularly a handheld console that's a popular traveling companion. And with social connectivity being a major selling point of the new console with GameChat, there's an opportunity to host streaming parties of shows and films on top of playing games. – Sophie McEvoy The GameCube library isn't left to fester on Nintendo Switch Online On day one, Nintendo Switch Online's Expansion Pack brings GameCube games to Switch 2 players: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, and Soulcalibur 2. More will be coming, but if Nintendo's previous form with its classic console libraries are anything to go by, it will be a glacial wait. I hope I'm proven wrong. Possibly complicating matters is that some key GameCube titles have already been ported to Switch, like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Pikmin 1 and 2, and Metroid Prime. The console's best game, Resident Evil 4, has been widely available for years on other platforms. The best case scenario here, then, is that Nintendo brings some more unusual or unexpected games to the service – the coming inclusion of Chibi-Robo, a cult GameCube game that's been hard to get hold for many years, is a strong indicator that the company is thinking outside the more obvious Mario and Zelda games. Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes would be on my personal wishlist. And maybe Starfox Adventures, too, just to hear everyone complain about it again. – Samuel Roberts A new take on Zelda in time for the movie This one is pretty much guaranteed. After reinventing the Zelda series with the open world games Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, both of which celebrated player freedom and ingenuity, it will be fascinating to see what tack the team behind these games take next. "I think [TOTK] is – to use a bit of a term – an apotheosis, or the final form of that version of The Legend of Zelda," said producer Eiji Aonuma in a 2023 interview with Game Informer. "In that regard, I don't think that we'll be making a direct sequel to a world such as that that we've created." My prediction: in the same way Super Mario Wonder gave players a fresh spin on a classic Mario 2D platformer experience following 2023's (terrible, if you ask me) Super Mario Bros. movie, I could see a similar tack taken with 2027's live-action Zelda movie. A game that seems superficially familiar, but is bursting with new ideas, would bridge the gap between veteran Nintendo players and newbies. – Samuel Roberts

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What’s next for AI and math The modern world is built on mathematics. Math lets us model complex systems such as the way air flows around an aircraft, the way financial markets fluctuate, and the way blood flows through the heart. Mathematicians have used computers for decades, but the new vision is that AI might help them crack problems that were previously uncrackable.   However, there’s a huge difference between AI that can solve the kinds of problems set in high school—math that the latest generation of models has already mastered—and AI that could (in theory) solve the kinds of problems that professional mathematicians spend careers chipping away at. Here are three ways to understand that gulf.  —Will Douglas HeavenThis story is from our What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Inside the effort to tally AI’s energy appetite —James O’Donnell After working on it for months, my colleague Casey Crownhart and I finally saw our story on AI’s energy and emissions burden go live last week.  The initial goal sounded simple: Calculate how much energy is used when we interact with a chatbot, then tally that up to understand why leaders in tech and politics are so keen to harness unprecedented levels of electricity to power AI and reshape our energy grids in the process.It was, of course, not so simple. After speaking with dozens of researchers, we realized that the common understanding of AI’s energy appetite is full of holes. I encourage you to read the full story, which has some incredible graphics to help you understand this topic. But here are three takeaways I have after the project. This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here, and check out the rest of our Power Hungry package about AI here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk has turned on Trump He called Trump’s domestic policy agenda a “disgusting abomination.” (NYT $)+ House Speaker Mike Johnson has, naturally, hit back. (Insider $) 2 NASA is in crisisIts budget has been cut by a quarter, and now its new leader has had his nomination revoked. (New Scientist $)+ What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket? (MIT Technology Review)3 Here’s how Big Tech plans to wield AITo build ‘everything apps’ that keep you inside their ecosystem, forever. (The Atlantic $)+ The trouble is, the experience isn’t always slick enough, as Google has discovered with its ‘Ask Photos’ feature. (The Verge $)+ How to fight your instinct to blindly trust AI. (WP $)4 Meta has signed a 20-year deal to buy nuclear power It’s the latest in a race to try to keep up with AI’s surging energy demands. (ABC)+ Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? (MIT Technology Review) 5 Extreme heat takes a huge toll on people’s mental healthIt’s yet another issue we’re failing to prepare for, as summers get hotter and hotter. (Scientific American $)+ The quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat. (MIT Technology Review) 6 China’s robotaxi companies are planning to expand in the Middle East And they’re getting a warmer welcome than in the US or Europe. (WSJ $)+ China’s EV giants are also betting big on humanoid robots. (MIT Technology Review)7 AI will supercharge hackersThe full impact of new AI techniques is yet to be felt, but experts say it’s only a matter of time. (Wired $)+ Five ways criminals are using AI. (MIT Technology Review)8 It’s an exciting time to be working on Alzheimer’s treatments 12 of them are moving to the final phase of clinical trials this year. (The Economist $)+ The innovation that gets an Alzheimer’s drug through the blood-brain barrier. (MIT Technology Review)9 Workers are being subjected to more and more surveillanceNot just in the gig economy either—’bossware’ is increasingly appearing in offices too. (Rest of World) 10 Noughties nostalgia is rife on TikTokIt was a pretty fun decade, to be fair. (The Guardian) Quote of the day  “This is scientific heaven. Or it used to be.” —Tom Rapoport, a 77-year-old Harvard Medical School professor from Germany, expresses his sadness about Trump’s cuts to US science funding to the New York Times.  One more thing OLCF What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers When the Frontier supercomputer came online in 2022, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (1018) floating point operations a second.Since then, scientists have geared up to make more of these blazingly fast computers: several exascale machines are due to come online in the US and Europe.But speed itself isn’t the endgame. Researchers hope to pursue previously unanswerable questions about nature—and to design new technologies in areas from transportation to medicine. Read the full story. —Sophia Chen We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + If tracking tube trains in London is your thing, you’ll love this live map.+ Take a truly bonkers trip down memory lane, courtesy of these FBI artifacts.+ Netflix’s Frankenstein looks pretty intense.+ Why landlines are so darn spooky

The relationship between strategists and designers is key to creating effective work that meets clients’ needs. But strategists can feel misunderstood, and even undervalued, in their attempts to set a project’s direction through clear and meaningful thinking. We spoke with a range of in-house and independent strategists about what they wish designers knew about their work. Is the role of strategists changing, like so many design industry roles right now? If so, how? “The lightning speed turnaround” of creative work is creating new pressures, says Gardiner Richardson’s associate director and strategic lead, Matt Forster. Partly this is down to the rise of AI, which is front-of-mind according to independent strategist Manfred Abraham, who has held senior roles at Interbrand and Wolff Olins. The two big shifts, he says, are AI’s potential to bring efficiency to the process – using information gathering and analytics to inform insights – and the dramatic changes that AI will bring to the consumer landscape. “Imagine a world where your personal AI agent makes your life much easier,” he says. “What are consumers going to do with their extra time? Strategists will have to work in close collaboration with creatives to be able to imagine the future for our clients.” Beyond AI, consumers’ withering attention spans, coupled with the proliferating demands on their time, creates a big challenge. “Brands are looking for strategists to show them high interest areas of culture where they have a credible role to play, making it easier for them to reach their audience,” says Matt Boffey, chief strategy officer, UK & Europe, at Design Bridge and Partners. As the world becomes more complex, there is a renewed appetite for clarity, says Polly Clark, a strategy consultant for agencies like Buddy Creative in Cornwall. “I’m seeing that simplicity is even more important than ever,” she says. “Overly complex or convoluted thinking isn’t helpful for anyone, and just slows everything down.” And some strategists have noticed a bit of mission creep. “Increasingly, clients are expecting strategists to contribute at a broader business level not purely brand strategy, design or comms,” says Louise Kennedy, who recently joined Into The Light as head of strategy. What don’t designers understand about your role? “Strategy is not a threat or a limit to designers’ creativity,” says Gardiner Richardson’s Matt Forster. “It’s a springboard to a controlled creative leap.” Into the Light’s Louise Kennedy points out that “designers, on the whole, are visual and often want to get to the ‘creative ask’ very quickly so they can start doing what they do best. “But many of us strategists enjoy taking people on the journey of how we got there by unpacking context and patterns. What designers might see as wordy, we see as fascinating storytelling, but perhaps we tell them more than they need to know, to protect our own egos.” There seems to be a recurring tension between the idea of strategists as left brain thinkers – rigorous, analytical, and logical – against designers as right-brain thinkers – more creative and emotional. But Manfred Abraham points out this is a false – if persistent – way of looking at strategy. “Some designers have missed that there might be a strong right brain there as well!” he says. What don’t clients understand about your role? “Unless clients have experienced it before, they aren’t immediately going to understand the value of strategy,” Gardiner Richardson’s Matt Forster says. “They may have worked with agencies who underpin their creative approaches on little substance. “Once we’ve explained our strategic process, why we follow it and the value it will create for all their creative communications and wider business, it’s a no brainer.” Nor does every client understand the commercial power of great design. “In the brand consulting and growth space specifically, clients often think that strategy is communication strategy,” says Manfred Abraham. “The strategies we develop go much further than that – communications is a part of it.” And adding all this value takes time – more than some clients realise. “I think for clients, it is understanding the need to protect the time and space to do a proper job at this stage and the benefit that will bring,” says Into The Light’s Louise Kennedy. “We might even need to commission new insight work if we feel there are big gaps in knowledge,” she adds. How do you balance multiple client meetings with getting the deep thinking done? This, most strategists agree, is a precarious juggling act. “It sometimes feels like ‘manager time’ has won out over ‘maker time,’” says Design Bridge and Partners’ Matt Boffey. “Days are apportioned into slots, from 30 minutes to an hour, which is perfect for meetings but inadequate for building momentum on substantial projects. The goal, he insists, isn’t to eliminate meetings. “Collaboration remains essential. Rather, it’s to create conditions where both discussion and deep work can thrive. We must be careful that ‘talking’ doesn’t completely squeeze out ‘doing’.” He encourages his team to block time between meetings to mentally stretch, as you might after a gym session. “And I’m a strong advocate for reserving longer periods, either half days or full days, for the ‘deep work’ required when writing a discovery debrief or developing brand strategy.” Although Louise Kennedy blocks out time in this way, she finds it doesn’t always work for her. “Often in those moments I can get brainfreeze as I feel under pressure to produce something smart,” she says. “So I like to read everything on a project then leave it for at least a day so my brain can digest it fully and start working behind the scenes.” External consultants can work the schedule that suits them. On most days, Manfred Abraham gets up at 5.30am because that’s when his brain is at its best. It’s also a time of day free of client meetings, “so it’s great thinking time,” he says. Polly Clark, on the other hand, embraces this juggling act. “It’s always something I’ve needed to do, and actually helps sharpen my thinking. Switching focus means I can come back to things fresher, and stops me getting caught up in the weeds.” What’s the worst thing a designer can say to a strategist? Matt Forster – “That they still don’t get it – which means I haven’t involved them enough, explained it well enough or done a good enough job.” Louise Kennedy – “’I’m confused’ or worse, ‘I’m confused and bored’.” Matt Boffey – ‘“Great, the client’s bought the strategy, now we can really start the work.” “This sounds like strategy has become a hurdle to clear before creativity begins, where it should be the foundation that makes creativity powerful and purposeful. The best work happens when strategists and designers see their contributions as interconnected parts of a unified process, rather than unrelated elements.” Polly Clark – “In the past I’ve heard designers question what strategy brings. That’s been when the strategy hasn’t made sense of the challenge, or is overly convoluted – which is sure to make everyone switch off.” Manfred Abraham – “That great design doesn’t need strategic thinking. It’s simply not true. We are great individually but we are brilliant together.”

AI could soon surpass Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to a new analysis that concludes artificial intelligence could use close to half of all the electricity consumed by data centers globally by the end of 2025.The estimates come from Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has tracked cryptocurrencies’ electricity consumption and environmental impact in previous research and on his website Digiconomist. He published his latest commentary on AI’s growing electricity demand last week in the journal Joule. AI already accounts for up to a fifth of the electricity that data centers use, according to de Vries-Gao. It’s a tricky number to pin down without big tech companies sharing data specifically on how much energy their AI models consume. De Vries-Gao had to make projections based on the supply chain for specialized computer chips used for AI. He and other researchers trying to understand AI’s energy consumption have found, however, that its appetite is growing despite efficiency gains — and at a fast enough clip to warrant more scrutiny.“Oh boy, here we go.”With alternative cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin — namely Ethereum — moving to less energy-intensive technologies, de Vries-Gao says he figured he was about to hang up his hat. And then “ChatGPT happened,” he tells The Verge. “I was like, Oh boy, here we go. This is another usually energy-intensive technology, especially in extremely competitive markets.” There are a couple key parallels he sees. First is a mindset of “bigger is better.” “We see these big tech [companies] constantly boosting the size of their models, trying to have the very best model out there, but in the meanwhile, of course, also boosting the resource demands of those models,” he says. That chase has led to a boom in new data centers for AI, particularly in the US, where there are more data centers than in any other country. Energy companies plan to build out new gas-fired power plants and nuclear reactors to meet growing electricity demand from AI. Sudden spikes in electricity demand can stress power grids and derail efforts to switch to cleaner sources of energy, problems similarly posed by new crypto mines that are essentially like data centers used to validate blockchain transactions. The other parallel de Vries-Gao sees with his previous work on crypto mining is how hard it can be to suss out how much energy these technologies are actually using and their environmental impact. To be sure, many major tech companies developing AI tools have set climate goals and include their greenhouse gas emissions in annual sustainability reports. That’s how we know that both Google’s and Microsoft’s carbon footprints have grown in recent years as they focus on AI. But companies usually don’t break down the data to show what’s attributable to AI specifically.To figure this out, de Vries-Gao used what he calls a “triangulation” technique. He turned to publicly available device details, analyst estimates, and companies’ earnings calls to estimate hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware will likely use. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which fabricates AI chips for other companies including Nvidia and AMD, saw its production capacity for packaged chips used for AI more than double between 2023 and 2024. After calculating how much specialized AI equipment can be produced, de Vries-Gao compared that to information about how much electricity these devices consume. Last year, they likely burned through as much electricity as de Vries-Gao’s home country of the Netherlands, he found. He expects that number to grow closer to a country as large as the UK by the end of 2025, with power demand for AI reaching 23GW. Last week, a separate report from consulting firm ICF forecast a 25 percent rise in electricity demand in the US by the end of the decade thanks in large part to AI, traditional data centers, and Bitcoin mining. It’s still really hard to make blanket predictions about AI’s energy consumption and the resulting environmental impact — a point laid out clearly in a deeply reported article published in MIT Technology Review last week with support from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. A person using AI tools to promote a fundraiser might create nearly twice as much carbon pollution if their queries were answered by data centers in West Virginia than in California, as an example. Energy intensity and emissions depend on a range of factors including the types of queries made, the size of the models answering those queries, and the share of renewables and fossil fuels on the local power grid feeding the data center. It’s a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparentIt’s a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparent about AI in their sustainability reporting. “The crazy amount of steps that you have to go through to be able to put any number at all on this, I think this is really absurd,” de Vries-Gao says. “It shouldn’t be this ridiculously hard. But sadly, it is.”Looking further into the future, there’s even more uncertainty when it comes to whether energy efficiency gains will eventually flatten out electricity demand. DeepSeek made a splash earlier this year when it said that its AI model could use a fraction of the electricity that Meta’s Llama 3.1 model does — raising questions about whether tech companies really need to be such energy hogs in order to make advances in AI. The question is whether they’ll prioritize building more efficient models and abandon the “bigger is better” approach of simply throwing more data and computing power at their AI ambitions. When Ethereum transitioned to a far more energy efficient strategy for validating transactions than Bitcoin mining, its electricity consumption suddenly dropped by 99.988 percent. Environmental advocates have pressured other blockchain networks to follow suit. But others — namely Bitcoin miners — are reluctant to abandon investments they’ve already made in existing hardware (nor give up other ideological arguments for sticking with old habits). There’s also the risk of Jevons paradox with AI, that more efficient models will still gobble up increasing amounts of electricity because people just start to use the technology more. Either way, it’ll be hard to manage the issue without measuring it first. See More: