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- 🔥 Is AI Really Killing the Planet?
Read time: 5 minutes
Turns out your AI chats aren’t cooking the planet - Google just proved it. Meanwhile, Meta bought Midjourney’s “aesthetic tech,” and Netflix is rewriting the rules for GenAI in film…
What are on FIRE 🔥
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AI INSIGHTS
You know how people say AI is an energy hog? Turns out your AI prompts aren’t boiling the oceans. Google just dropped a massive study on AI’s real environmental footprint and it’s way smaller than the doom headlines suggested.
🔍 What Google Found
0.24 watt-hours per prompt → ~10x lower than older public estimates (which claimed 3–7 Wh)
0.03 grams CO₂ per prompt → Basically like sending one email
0.26 milliliters of water per prompt → Previous guesses said 45–50mL. Google says it’s 5 drops.
Most studies only measure active GPU use. Google measured everything, including:
CPUs that route tasks
Idle machines that wait for spikes
Cooling systems and infrastructure
→ It’s a more honest, all-in measurement of AI’s environmental cost. In the past year alone, Google says:
Gemini’s energy use dropped 33x
Gemini’s carbon footprint dropped 44x
While also increasing model performance. But there’s no standard way to measure AI’s footprint. Depending on what you count, numbers vary by 100x. We need shared measurement standards.
Why It Matters: Right now, a prompt’s impact could sound terrifying or totally chill, depending on who’s reporting it. Actually, Google is flexing the fact that their infra is cleaner, faster, and more complete than OpenAI or Meta.
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TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🍏 Apple is adding new ChatGPT for Enterprise controls this September, letting IT teams allow or block any external AI provider - not just OpenAI.
🖼 Meta signed with Midjourney to license its “aesthetic tech,” aiming to boost creative features and cut production costs across its products.
🤖 Elon Musk said Grok 5 starts training in September with “a shot at AGI,” and promised Grok Imagine will beat Google’s Veo 3 “in every respect.”
📈 Google shares rose 3% after reports Apple may use Gemini to power Siri, a potential leap for Apple’s AI roadmap under antitrust pressure.
🎬 Netflix published new GenAI rules for film and TV partners, stressing transparency and legal checks to keep “audiences trusting what they see.”
🎮 Dynamics Lab launched Mirage 2, a browser-based engine that builds real-time playable AI worlds - including a Red Dead 2 demo you can try now.
💰 AI Daily Fundraising: Functionize has raised $41M Series B, led by Mumford Investments and LHH Investments. The funding will accelerate its agentic automation platform, which powers enterprise software test cases with AI agents.
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🌐 Omnara puts Claude Code in your pocket, coding across devices with push notifications & one-tap approvals
🧠 DeepSeek-V3.1 is a hybrid open-source LLM for reasoning + code, supporting both thinking and non-thinking modes
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🕸️ ProfileSpider scrapes professional profiles in one click, exporting lists directly to your CRM or ATS
AI QUICK HITS
⚡ Coinbase CEO fired engineers who refused to onboard with AI tools
🎬 Google Drive now lets you edit videos directly in Videos, no downloads needed
🌱 ByteDance released Seed-OSS, an open-source reasoning model with 500k+ context
🏛️ Google signed a $0.50-per-agency Gemini deal with the U.S. government
🏢 Cohere launched Command A Reasoning, beating rivals on agentic benchmarks
AI CHART
A new 21-country survey just dropped, and people in certain countries are way more convinced AI is coming for their jobs than folks in the others.
Over 1,000 people from each of 21 countries were asked: “Do you think your job will be replaced by a machine or computer in the next decade?”
→ But when you zoom in on individual countries, the split gets real interesting.
Across the world, over half of workers (54%) say a machine could replace them in the next 10 years.
These 3 emerging economies top the “yes” column are Indonesia: 76% + India: 75% + Pakistan: 72%. The reason? These economies have:
Tons of routine, low-skill labor. Less job security and labor protections.
Fast AI and tech adoption. A rising middle class that’s very aware of disruption risk
India, in particular, is what researchers call “doubly vulnerable” → Lots of low-skill work + high automation potential.
Meanwhile, people in richer economies are… not that worried. Basically, they think AI will help, not replace. Maybe, this is AI inequality gap!
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The AI Fire Team
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