Every time you pop an idle thought into ChatGPT or another AI interface, it triggers a far-flung journey. Your query—“What is this rash?” perhaps—races to a hulking data center in a place like Abilene, Texas, where it’s routed to the right stack of servers.

The traffic directors of all this activity are a series of high-bandwidth network switches—devices that coordinate data between servers—made by companies like Broadcom. The AI wave has reshaped Broadcom’s semiconductor business; its switches are now designed to support the high-capacity needs of massive AI data centers, and its custom AI accelerator line is a fast-growing source of revenue.

“Over the last three years, things have changed pretty dramatically with AI,” Peter Del Vecchio, product line manager for Broadcom’s Tomahawk family of data center switches, told us. “For example, we announced [Tomahawk 5] in August of 2022, and the main market at that time was just general data center networking. ChatGPT was announced three months later, and pretty much everything changed.”

Fast-forward three years: Broadcom has inked a deal with OpenAI to jointly build 10 gigawatts’ worth of AI accelerators over the coming years, tapping both Broadcom’s custom AI accelerators and its networking infrastructure. It’s one of a flurry of infrastructure partnerships that OpenAI has forged over the past several months.

On the heels of this new deal, Tech Brew took a behind-the-scenes tour of Broadcom’s network switch R&D labs, where engineers undertake the multiyear process of assembling these devices.

Keep reading here.—PK

It’s not a New York City heat wave if the utility doesn’t send customers alerts asking them to limit usage of large appliances and air conditioners. And New Yorkers aren’t alone: In response to mounting energy demand, utility companies across the country are asking customers to curtail their energy use.

These alerts—and the ensuing energy management—are part of demand-response programs, or coordinated ways energy customers can help reduce stress on the grid by using less energy during specific intervals. Customers might be financially incentivized to participate, like by paying cheaper non-peak rates. Two recent reports on demand-response programs, run by energy management companies Renew Home and Parity, showed how homes and hotels can be assets to a swamped grid.

Collective action at home: Both demand-response scenarios used software to curtail small amounts of individual energy use. In the Renew Home study, conducted this summer, 5 million homeowners with Google Nest thermostats opted in to an Energy Shift program in which home temperatures were raised between .5 degrees and 2 degrees Fahrenheit within a two-hour period over numerous randomized trials.

Keep reading here.—TC

Deloitte Australia recently took an embarrassing blow to its reputation when a report it compiled for the Australian government turned out to contain numerous AI-generated hallucinations. The firm will have to refund part of the $290,000 the Aussie government paid for the report.

Though the Deloitte Australia incident’s unusual in that it involves a Big Four firm, it may point to a broader issue with poorly edited or cut-and-pasted AI-generated content in the workplace. The phenomenon’s even got a catchy name: workslop.

Workslop’s toll: A Stanford University and BetterUp Labs survey published in the Harvard Business Review found that 40% of 1,150 US employees across a range of industries said they’d received workslop from colleagues in the past month. Staff estimated that around 15% of the work product they get is workslop, and that they spent an average of nearly two hours dealing with each incident. Workslop “shifts the burden of the work downstream” to the people who receive it and who then must fact-check, correct, rewrite, or interpret it, the authors wrote. Staff lose trust in coworkers who send them work products with obvious errors or that lack context, the Stanford study found.

Workslop can have “pretty detrimental” effects on culture, Asha Palmer, SVP of compliance solutions at Skillsoft, told CFO Brew. Workslop can ultimately lead to “reputational damage” for both the organizations and individuals involved, Palmer said.

Keep reading here.—CV