Today's Articles (21/4/2026)
Overspending? Here’s how underconsumption can help you avoid wasting money
People might be surprised by how little difference they feel in their standard of living, even if they stop spending hundreds of dollars each month.
“It's usually pretty easy to save a chunk of cash every month without hurting your quality of life much at all,” Latham said. “I've seen people cut $600 to $800 a month and feel zero difference day to day … The quality of life doesn't suffer because the purchases were never improving it in the first place.”
Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.
All that speed comes at a cost. AI data centers around the world can now draw 29.6 gigawatts of power, enough to run the entire state of New York at peak demand. Annual water use from running OpenAI’s GPT-4o alone may exceed the drinking water needs of 1.2 million people. At the same time, the supply chain for chips is alarmingly fragile. The US hosts most of the world’s AI data centers, and one company in Taiwan, TSMC, fabricates almost every leading AI chip.
Within three years of going mainstream, AI is now used by more than half of people around the world, a rate of adoption faster than the personal computer or the internet. An estimated 88% of organizations now use AI, and four in five university students use it.
But for all the legislative activity, Gil says, regulation is running behind the technology because we don’t really understand how it works. “Governments are cautious to regulate AI because … we don’t understand many things very well,” she says. “We don’t have a good handle on those systems.”