Long weekend this week! Hurrah! Let’s all get some rest and spend some more time with family before they’re forcibly implanted with Neuralink and made to serve as human batteries for our AI overlords.

Who needs office real estate when you can just build more data centers? 📈

Besides the obvious impacts to the construction industry in creating more project opportunities, the big push of LLMs and AI in recent times has driven the construction of new data centers around the world to feverish heights. Another consequence of this is actually the availability of energy and the growing pace of energy consumption across all industries. The “most important annual event on the energy industry’s calendar” just happened early March, and the most talked about topic? AI - who would’ve thought?

In addition to AI, recent booms in cryptocurrency and cloud computing has pushed our electricity grids to the limits. The article hints at an unsavoury truth: electricity providers might consider adding additional fossil-fuel based generation to meet this new demand. How do we balance the technological push forward with that of environmental stewardship? Here’s hoping that fusion energy takes off sooner rather than later to supply these power hungry chatbots.

Neuralink’s first human test subject live-streamed himself playing games with his mind

Since our last report of Neuralink, it seems like the first human recipient of the system is functioning well! Well enough to be playing video games with his mind at least! Combined with Figure AI, this marks another crazy development on the highway to a certain 1999 science fiction dystopia. Making fun of Musk-backed ventures aside, Neuralink actually hedges its bets particularly well and offers a killer value proposition in both the present and the future. Now, it can help restore some degree of independence and control over those with certain medical conditions, and in the future, it can easily position itself to be the next generation of human-computer interfaces. The opportunities (but also the risks) are endless.

Lightning Round

• Stability.ai, the pioneer of image generation with Stable Diffusion, just recently had its CEO resign, leaving the fate of the startup in turmoil.

• The International Mass Timber Conference starts today! Whoo! Seems like it’ll be a packed event with lots of interesting vendors and attendees.