Kelly Sovacool

Please know it's been almost 10 years since I learned linear regression counted as an ML approach and I am Still Mad

BREAKING: The EU Commission has released a mandatory template for AI developers to disclose training data. Unlike the Code of Practice, this is not optional. It could have global fallout, as rights holders abroad might use it to sue over copyright.
digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/e...

The Hollow "AI Trade" I'm so tired of people telling me that companies are "making tons of money on AI." Nobody is making a profit on generative AI other than NVIDIA. No, really, I’m serious. The Magnificent 7's AI Story Is Flawed, With $560 Billion of Capex between 2024 and 2025 Leading to $35 billion of Revenue, And No Profit If they keep their promises, by the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion. This is egregiously fucking stupid.

Microsoft AI Revenue In 2025: $13 billion, with $10 billion from OpenAI, sold "at a heavily discounted rate that essentially only covers costs for operating the servers." Capital Expenditures in 2025: $80 billion As of January 2025, Microsoft's "annualized" — meaning [best month]x12 — revenue from artificial intelligence was around $13 billion, a number that it chose not to update in its last earnings, likely because it's either flat or not growing, though it could in its upcoming late-July earnings. Yet the problem with this revenue is that $10 billion of that revenue, according to The Information, comes from OpenAI's spend on Microsoft's Azure cloud, and Microsoft offers preferential pricing — "a heavily discounted rental rate that essentially only covers Microsoft's costs for operating the servers" according to The Information. In simpler terms, 76.9% of Microsoft's AI revenue comes from OpenAI, and is sold at just above or at cost, making Microsoft's "real" AI revenue about $3 billion, or around 3.75% of this year's capital expenditures, or 16.25% if you count OpenAI's revenue, which costs Microsoft more money than it earns. The Information reports that Microsoft made $4.7 billion in "AI revenue" in 2024, of which OpenAI accounted for $2 billion, meaning that for the $135.7 billion that Microsoft has spent in the last two years on AI infrastructure, it has made $17.7 billion, of which OpenAI accounted for $12.7 billion.

Amazon AI Revenue In 2025: $5 billion Capital Expenditures in 2025: $105 billion Things do not improve elsewhere. An analyst estimates that Amazon, which plans to spend $105 billion in capital expenditures this year, will make $5 billion on AI in 2025, rising, and I quote, "as much as 80%," suggesting that Amazon may have made a measly $1 billion in 2024 on AI in a year when it spent $83 billion in capital expenditures. Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that “AI represents for sure the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet." I think he's full of shit. Google AI Revenue: $7.7 Billion (at most) Capital Expenditures in 2025: $75 Billion Bank of America analyst Justin Post estimated a few weeks ago that Google's AI revenue would be in the region of $7.7 billion, though his math is, if I'm honest, a little generous: Google’s artificial intelligence model is set to drive $4.2 billion in subscription revenue within its Google Cloud segment in 2025, according to an analysis from Bank of America last week. That includes $3.1 billion in revenue from subscribers to Google’s AI plans with its Google One service, Bank of America’s Justin Post estimates. Post also expects that the integration of Google’s Gemini AI features within its Workspace service will drive $1.1 billion of the $7.7 billion in revenue he projects for that segment in 2025. Google's "One" subscription includes increased cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos, and added a $20-a-month "premium" plan in February 2024 that included access to Google's various AI models. Google has claimed that the "premium AI tier accounts for millions" of the 150 million subscribers to the service, though how many millions is impossible to estimate — but that won't stop me trying!

Assuming that $3.1 billion in 2025 revenue would work out to $258 million a month, that would mean there were 12.9 million Google One subscribers also paying for the premium AI tier. This isn't out of the realm of possibility — after all, OpenAI has 15.5 million paying subscribers — but Post is making a generous assumption here. Nevertheless, we'll accept the numbers as they are. And the numbers fuckin' stink! Google's $1.1 billion in workspace service revenue came from a forced price-hike on those who use Google services to run their businesses, meaning that this is likely not a number that can significantly increase without punishing them further. $7.7 billion of revenue — not profit! — on $75 billion of capital expenditures. Nasty!

The AI Trade is hollow - the magnificent 7 will spend over $560 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 and is expected to make *$35 billion of revenue, not profit*. Every single generative AI product is a money-loser, and customers don't like it either.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

No, a LOT of them think that. Science may be one of the most social forms of knowledge production we have. Arguably it’s at least as social as creative writing. Actual scientists will tell you this. Yet, millions of people think they can do science alone with an LLM.

summarizing my feelings about the last 10 years of tech as:

i do not want my tools to guess

Omfg I’m going to scream. Transformer models are actually really powerful, it is such a waste of everyone’s time and money that we are pouring all this energy into chatbots and not directly applying these models to real problems. Alphafold3 can solve protein folding problems chatGPT cannot

Thanks for sharing!

Has anyone made a ReadTheDocs style theme for Quarto?

…Or am I going to have to pretend to know css and cobble something together?

#Quarto #QuartoPub @quarto.org

Public Science Engagement Using Social Media — Center for Wildlife Studies

Friends, I am offering a "Public Science Engagement Using Social Media" course through the Center for Wildlife Studies!

You can take it for graduate school course credit, continuing professional education credit, or just to learn a new skill!

www.centerforwildlifestudies.org/courses/p/pu...

Worth your time to read. "As you navigate this age of artificial intelligence, I hope you will be neither technophobic nor techno-utopian, but technologically wise, principled, and courageous – understanding these tools deeply enough to use them for human purposes without being used by them."

The summer fight for science. The time is now. Join the fight at standupforscience.net.

☀️THE SUMMER FIGHT FOR SCIENCE☀️

🫵 WHO: You + all our friends

🧪 WHAT: Share science with your neighbors and tell them about the impact of proposed budget cuts.

🇺🇸 WHERE: Your local community

🏖️ WHEN: Now to Sept 30th

🔬 WHY: The 9/30 budget vote will determine the future of science in America.

Repo on GitHub with:
- no unit tests
- documentation in a docx file
- collection of scripts not organized as a package

Actions add up. We talk about grassroots behavior because you DO NOT SEE the roots as they spread.

We’re doing a July 4 feature all week highlighting how funding science is patriotic (and the incredible researchers doing life changing, tax payer funded research!) Give us a follow!

Happy July 4th! – Your Neighborhood Scientist We recently asked scientists why they are proud to do taxpayer-funded scientific research in the US. In their answers, we hope that you, too, can feel some American pride in science this July 4th.

We asked scientists why they are proud to do taxpayer-funded scientific research in the US. In their answers, we hope that you, too, can feel some American pride in science this July 4th.

neighborhoodscientist.org/posts/2025/j...

There are so many things that make me feel sick about this but that has to be the worst one.

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

Share why doing and supporting science is patriotic at the poll below! 🇺🇸

Does your patriotism involve pipettes? This 4th of July, Your Neighborhood Scientist is asking American scientists and non-scientists why they are proud of scientific research in the US. Scientists: why are you proud to perform taxpayer-f...

This 4th of July, we're looking for scientists to share why they're proud to do science in the US. Or maybe you're not a scientist -- but you're proud of the work that US scientists do or you've benefited from US science research. Let us know in the survey below! forms.gle/j8gWMSggKVvJ...

For Instagram users, I believe this is the original “read the red words” video www.instagram.com/reel/DKVrukw...

Can confirm she is also on Insta!

everyone should be safe in public spaces. ideally everyone should also FEEL safe in public spaces! but if your discomfort is based on being racist or homophobic or not wanting to see a homeless guy or a mentally ill person, none of whom are a threat to you, i don't really care how safe you feel.

Researchers have a radical plan to thwart Trump's war on science: Talking to people Faced with federal funding cuts, scientists are learning to communicate about what they do — and why it matters.

NEW: Scientists are reeling from the Trump/DOGE-created funding crisis have come to a realization: the public doesn't know what they study or why

So several groups have come up with plans to change that, with radically humble approaches

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

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R vs Python for bioinformatics?
Which one should you learn first?
I’ve used both. I started with one.
Here’s what I learned the hard way:

according to conservatives on the court, the constitution does not protect your right to your own body but does enable the government to ship you off to a foreign gulag without any hope of return

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Can confirm, running in the rain (and snow!) is so great

Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...