New York Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish. But it sure sounds like he does. He’s been using artificial intelligence software to send prerecorded calls about city events to residents in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Yiddish. The voice in the messages mimics the mayor but was generated with AI software from a company called ElevenLabs.

“People stop me on the street all the time and say, ‘I didn’t know you speak Mandarin,’” Adams said at a news conference this month.

Experts have warned for years that AI will change our democracy by distorting reality. That future is already here. AI is being used to fabricate voices, fundraising emails and “deepfake” images of events that never… More.

The first AI election is here. Our tech columnist proposes some ground rules for candidates’ use of artificial intelligence.

Modern chips: many steps, low energy consumption.

These key requirements for a chip are summed up mathematically by the parameter TOPS/W: “tera-operations per second per watt”. This can be seen as the currency for the chips of the future. The question is how many trillion operations (TOP) a processor can perform per second (S) when provided with one watt wordpress of power. The new AI chip, developed in a collaboration between Bosch and Fraunhofer IMPS and supported in the production process by the US company GlobalFoundries, can deliver 885 TOPS/W. This makes it twice as powerful as comparable AI chips, including a MRAM chip by Samsung. CMOS chips, which are now commonly used, operate in the range of 10–20 TOPS/W. This is demonstrated in results recently published in Nature.

In-memory computing works like the human brain.