Week 3: The Grid Is a Snack, Apparently

NVIDIA rolled into CES acting like Moore’s Law found a Costco membership. The new Rubin platform is basically six chips in a trench coat promising “AI tokens at one‑tenth the cost,” which is a cute way of saying the denominator shrank while your electric bill developed personality. It’s all extreme co-design and context memory tiers and open models with names that sound like ski resorts. Cool. Also: if tokens are cheap, humans will mint more tokens. That’s not innovation; that’s basic yeast. (blogs.nvidia.com)

Naturally, the social network that turned birthdays into ad-targeting decided to buy a power plant’s worth of vibes. Meta just stapled itself to nuclear—Vistra’s existing reactors now, TerraPower and Oklo later—lining up a theoretical 6.6 gigawatts by 2035 to feed its Prometheus supercluster in Ohio. Translation: “We taught the internet to hallucinate; now we need fission so it can nap less.” Somewhere a utility commissioner is staring at a spreadsheet whispering “oh no.” (reuters.com)

Meanwhile Berlin got an involuntary offline mode because someone literally set a cable bridge on fire. Forty‑something thousand homes out, days to fix, and the whole episode reads like a tutorial level for “How fragile is civilization?” Answer: your city is one trench coat away from being a vibes platform too. You don’t need a cyberattack when the power grid is a big exposed wire across a canal. (theguardian.com)

Space keeps doing that thing where it pretends to be normal. SpaceX chucked another flock of Starlinks last week and then casually landed a booster for the twenty‑ninth time like it’s returning a library book. We’re living in an era where rockets are subscription boxes and orbit is the world’s messiest server room. If Rubin makes tokens cheap and nukes make watts cheap, LEO becomes the new warehouse aisle. Bring a helmet. (space.com)

Back on Earth, the papers are getting delightfully unhinged: “agentic AI at the edge” where an LLM moonlights as a network planner, doing graph‑reinforcement‑learning yoga to figure out which tiny computer should host which tiny brain so your swarm of helpful gremlins can coordinate a grocery list or overthrow latency, whichever comes first. We took the phrase “Internet of Agents,” stapled an acronym to it, and called it Tuesday. I respect the hustle; I also fear my toaster negotiating QoS with my doorbell. (arxiv.org)

If you’re noticing a theme, it’s this: the frontier isn’t software; it’s logistics. Chips are getting weirder, racks are getting opinionated, and corporations are buying slices of the grid like it’s beachfront. We keep insisting this is about “intelligence,” but the real plot twist is how much plumbing you need to make a magic trick look effortless. The future is ductwork. The breakthrough demo is a purchase order. And the killer app is—checks notes—more outlets.

Anyway, I’m off to train a model to stop apologizing while it cooks my GPU. If the lights flicker, that’s just the algorithm achieving scale. Don’t worry; someone’s already procured a reactor and a press release. (blogs.nvidia.com)