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The AI infrastructure boom has a surprising weak link, and it is not silicon. A new report from Next Platform points out that electricians — the skilled tradespeople who wire high-voltage power systems — are becoming the genuine bottleneck for data center expansion. You can order all the GPUs you want, but if there is nobody certified to connect them to the grid, those racks sit dark.
That human infrastructure problem connects neatly to a warning from Signal president Meredith Whittaker, who is pushing back hard on the emotional framing around AI assistants. Her message is blunt: these systems are not your friends, not conscious, not sentient. At a moment when tech companies are designing chatbots to feel like companions, Whittaker is asking us to remember what we are actually talking to.
And on a genuinely fascinating research note, Chinese scientists have demonstrated a digital twin framework for optical computing, running AI workloads inside a virtual simulation of a light-based computer before touching the real hardware. It is a way to test and optimize systems that are still too fragile or expensive to experiment on directly — simulation serving as a rehearsal for the physical world.
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