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An anonymous reader shares a report: Costing tens of thousands of dollars each, Nvidia's pioneering AI chips make up a hefty chunk of the $400 billion that Big Tech plans to invest this year -- a bill expected to hit $3 trillion by 2029. But unlike 19th-century railroads, or the Dotcom boom's fiber-optic cables, the GPUs fueling today's AI mania are short-lived assets with a shelf life of perhaps five years. As with your iPhone, this stuff tends to lose value and may need upgrading soon because Nvidia and its rivals aim to keep launching better models. Customers like OpenAI will have to deploy them to stay competitive. So while it's comforting that the companies spending most wildly have mountains of cash to throw around (OpenAI aside), the brief useful life of the chips and the generous accounting assumptions underpinning all of this investment are less consoling. Michael Burry, who made his name betting against US housing and who's recently turned to the AI boom, waded in this week, warning on X that hyperscalers -- industry jargon for the giant companies building gargantuan data centers -- are underestimating depreciation. Far from being a one-off outlay, there's a danger of AI capex becoming a huge recurring expense. That's great for Nvidia and co., but not necessarily for hyperscalers such as Google and Microsoft. Some face a depreciation tsunami that's forcing them to be extra vigilant about controlling other costs. Amazon has plans to eliminate roughly 14,000 jobs. And while Wall Street is used to financing fast-depreciating assets such as aircraft and autos, it's worrying that private credit funds are increasingly using GPUs as collateral to finance loans. This includes lending to more speculative startups known as neoclouds, who offer GPUs for rent. Microsoft alone has signed more than $60 billion of neocloud deals.

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Quantum computing is finally heating up. There is a heady mix of high-profile and highly resourced big tech players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Nvidia either building QPUs, simulating  them, or integrating them with classical supercomputers in addition to well-funded younger companies and startups, such as QuEra, IonQ, Quantum Computing, Quantinuum, D-Wave, and Alice & Bob. …

IBM Lets Fly “Nighthawk” And “Loon” QPUs On The Way To Quantum Advantage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Ryanair has revealed plans to halt flights from several European airports next year, blaming tax changes for the move.

The supermodel, 55, met the head of the Catholic Church at the end of a general audience in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday.

It has been years since I had this sensation but suddenly I feel 38 again, mother of a five and seven year old. It's that restless feeling, of things on the move... Oh God, I think I've got nits again.

The 34-year-old Brazilian is currently in intensive care after falling unconscious during a training session with Sao Paulo due to a heart problem.

Holidays have been cancelled and hotel bookings scrapped after the collapse of short-term rental service Sonder following the end of a deal with hotel giant Marriott.

This is the moment a black Mercedes was hemmed in at a pedestrian crossing as a group of men surrounded the car.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 currently has a four per cent chance of hitting the moon on 22 December 2032. However, fresh observations could mean the odds of a collision rise to as high as 30 per cent.

Obama, 61, appeared on a new limited series, titled IMO: The Look, where she spoke about her hair journey as a Black woman and how her time in the White House impacted that.

End of support? Not quite

Microsoft released an emergency out-of-band update on November 11 to fix a malfunctioning enrollment wizard that prevented eligible Windows 10 users from accessing Extended Security Updates (ESU).…

Researchers from four universities have released a study revealing that AI models remain easily detectable in social media conversations despite optimization attempts. The team tested nine language models across Twitter/X, Bluesky and Reddit, developing classifiers that identified AI-generated replies at 70 to 80% accuracy rates. Overly polite emotional tone served as the most persistent indicator. The models consistently produced lower toxicity scores than authentic human posts across all three platforms. Instruction-tuned models performed worse than their base counterparts at mimicking humans, and the 70-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 showed no advantage over smaller 8-billion-parameter versions. The researchers found a fundamental tension: models optimized to avoid detection strayed further from actual human responses semantically.

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Benjamin Aninakwa, 54, was found not guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence

Tourists have been kicked out of their rooms and face cancelling their holidays after Marriott's partner Sonder suddenly collapsed into bankruptcy.

Keir Starmer has faced demands to sack his closest aide for a bungled bid to kill off Labour leadership threats - amid speculation of a leadership challenge.

Sunseekers in Mudeford, Dorset say The Beach House has changed from an upmarket enclosed restaurant to an open air 'festival' and a 'drinker's paradise'.

The Prime Minister told MPs he was 'a strong supporter' of the BBC and said the 'argument for an impartial British news service is stronger than ever'.

Liv Cooke, 26, has amassed a £10million fortune by converting run-down properties into HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) for up to five people.

Customers could get their money back from their card provider or insurer, but not all of them will be able to make a claim.

The incident occurred on November 5 when the victim returned home to discover the break-in had taken place.