Power ranges: AI faces supply crunch
4/29/202623 min
Artificial Intelligence is becoming ubiquitous, but the industry that powers it is struggling to keep up with demand. The host of our award-winning podcast series “Scam Inc” says fraudsters in Asia are becoming more sophisticated. And after Allbirds stops selling shoes, what comes next?
Guests and host:
- Shailesh Chitnis, global business writer
- Sue-Lin Wong, host of Scam Inc
- Shera Avi-Yonah, business writer
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-hosts of “The intelligence”
Topics covered:
- AI, Anthropic, GPUs, Nvidia, TSMC
- Scam Inc, malware, cybercrime, fraud
- Allbirds, Casper, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJason Palmer· Host0:00
[instrumental music] The Economist.
Rosie Blau· Host0:04
[instrumental music] Hello, and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.
Jason Palmer· Host0:13
And I'm Jason Palmer.
Rosie Blau· Host0:14
Today on the show, a new leap in sophisticated scams, and why Allbirds is stepping away from shoes. [instrumental music] But first... [instrumental music] It may not have escaped your notice that AI is everywhere. In Silicon Valley, techies apparently like to do something called token maxing, a race to burn through tokens, which are the fundamental units of data, usually a word or symbol, that power AI models. They are, of course, trying to show off just how much artificial intelligence they use, and it is a lot. OpenRouter, which is a marketplace for AI models, reports that from January to March, the number of tokens processed each week quadrupled. But there's a problem. The industry that supports AI isn't expanding at the same rate. Could we be facing a looming