The Download: AI agents hype, and Google’s electricity plans

—Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs.

At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn’t just answer questions; it helped work on a bicycle repair by finding a matching user manual, locating a YouTube tutorial, and even calling a local store to ask about a part, all with minimal human nudging. Such capabilities could soon extend far outside the Google ecosystem.

The vision is exciting: Intelligent software agents that act like digital coworkers, booking your flights, rescheduling meetings, filing expenses, and talking to each other behind the scenes to get things done.

But if we’re not careful, we’re going to derail the whole idea before it has a chance to deliver real benefits. As with many tech trends, there’s a risk of hype racing ahead of reality. And when expectations get out of hand, a backlash isn’t far behind. Read the full story.

Google’s electricity demand is skyrocketing

We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020.

Taken together, these two bits of news offer a fascinating look at just how desperately big tech companies are hunting for clean electricity to power their data centers as energy demand and emissions balloon in the age of AI. Of course, we don’t know exactly how much of this pollution is attributable to AI because Google doesn’t break that out. (Also a problem!) So, what’s next and what does this all mean?

—Casey Crownhart

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