Uncomplicate IT relays the steps to take to ensure your smartphone experience is safe and secure. Click to learn more.
Earlier this month, OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4o. This AI model promises to be faster and more “human” than its predecessors, adding more value than ever before. AI has become the leading force of innovation. Yet, beneath the surface lies a significant challenge - the heavy consumption of water when cooling the data centers. Research has indicated it takes approximately one 16.9oz bottle of water for ChatGPT to answer 50 questions. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT now has 100 million active users weekly. That is a staggering amount of water! A single data center can consume millions of gallons of water per year. For instance, Google's data centers used approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water in 2021. To put this in perspective, that's enough to fill over 6,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The water is typically sourced from local municipalities, groundwater, or even man- made lakes and ponds, which can put a strain on local water supplies, especially in areas vulnerable to drought.
It’s 2021, with the world still grappling with the pandemic, and you are headed out to a restaurant. Instead of receiving a physical menu, the waitress guides you to a square filled with small squares positioned randomly. She instructs you to open your camera app and focus on the square. Following her directions, a link appears as you scan the square. By clicking on the link, your browser opens, and the menu materializes. How did scanning a mere square bring you here? QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, were first developed in 1994 by a Japanese company called Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota. For many years, factories were using linear based barcodes to track automobile parts during the manufacturing process. Barcodes were limited to just 20 characters and often there would be multiple barcodes on one product. Denso Wave wanted something more efficient. An engineer at Denso Wave named Masahiro Hara began brainstorming a better way to track parts and information. Surprisingly he got his idea from an ancient Chinese board game called Go. Played on a 19x19 grid, black and white game pieces are added until no more moves can be made and the player with the most territory covered wins.
