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• 📰 AI News and Trends

• The AI Energy Crisis - The Problem and Possible Solutions

• 🧰 AI Tools - Avoid Brain Rot

• AI Is Rotting Everyone’s Brain, and We’re Just Getting Started

• 📚 Learning Corner - Google’s 9 Hour AI Prompt Engineering Course In 20 Minutes

📰 AI News and Trends

• Cerebras Prices IPO at $185 – Cerebras Systems Inc. priced its shares at $185 ahead of its initial public offering, raising $5.5 billion, making it one of the largest technology IPOs in years and indicating strong investor demand for AI chips competitive with Nvidia.

• AI Cybersecurity Investments Outpace Acquisitions – Q1 2026 saw investment volumes in AI security startups ($3.8 billion) exceed the value of AI security acquisitions ($2.6 billion), an unusual trend where bigger investment bets are being placed on hot startups rather than smaller acquisitions.

• LinkedIn Plans Workforce Reduction – Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn is reportedly planning to lay off 5% of its staff.

• Andreessen Horowitz Is Spending over $110 Million in Super PACs aligned with AI and Crypto efforts, as well as donating to MAGA and the Republican National Committee

• Sam Altman holds more than $2 billion in companies that have done business with OpenAI, creating a conflict of interest, a court document showed.

• TikTok is launching a new hub called TikTok GO that connects travel content with booking services that let users recreate the experiences they discover in the app.

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The AI Energy Crisis - The Problem and Possible Solutions

Data centers consume 6% of UK/US electricity, 3x the global average, and AI is the culprit. In just two years, AI has driven global data center energy consumption up 15%. The International Data Centre Authority warns that community backlash becomes “significant” once a country’s data centre footprint hits 5% of national grid consumption. The UK and US have already crossed that threshold. But the hidden scandal is that 13% of US datacenters’ power is “zombie services”, unused apps still running in the background, wasting 3+ GW annually. That’s electricity equivalent to powering millions of homes, consumed by code nobody remembered to shut down. This means higher energy bills for regular people, strain on water supplies, and a new justification for keeping fossil fuel plants online.

Solutions exist and are scaling fast. Liquid cooling technology can allegedly reduce data centre energy use by 40% and water consumption by up to 96% compared to traditional air cooling. The technology works by circulating dielectric coolant directly over the hottest components, removing nearly all the heat instead of letting it dissipate wastefully. On the software side, companies are helping organizations eliminate “zombie” cloud resources, idle instances, orphaned storage, and forgotten load balancers that continue consuming costs without delivering any value. Studies suggest that up to 30% of enterprise cloud spending is wasted this way, and cleanup efforts generate significant returns. The scale of the problem means the infrastructure gets built anyway, but now the choice is either old air-cooled systems that waste energy or new liquid-cooled systems that don’t. Either way, the AI boom is coming. The question is whether we build it sustainably.

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📚Learning Corner

AI Is Rotting Everyone’s Brain, and We’re Just Getting Started

Developers report that using AI to write code is making them dumber. They produce working output but can’t understand how it works or fix what breaks. Research shows developers who fully delegate to AI perform 17% worse on conceptual tasks afterward.

Scale that across billions of knowledge workers, add teenagers using TikTok and AI simultaneously, and you’re looking at a structural collapse in human cognition nobody planned for. Human attention span has collapsed from 12 seconds in 2000 to 7.6 seconds in 2026, a 36% erosion in 26 years. Children with 4+ hours of daily screen time show 34% steeper attention declines. The deeper problem is that when children encounter coding, writing, or problem-solving for the first time while delegating to AI, they never develop the neural pathways to understand it. There’s no muscle to atrophy because the muscle was never built. Meanwhile, AI models themselves degrade from exposure to low-quality viral social media, creating a feedback loop where both humans and AI are fed the same junk.

Tech executives brag about AI writing 75% of Google’s code and 95% of Microsoft’s by 2030, but these gains translate into mass layoffs, not better products or shorter work weeks. Some guardrails are emerging, human-in-the-loop approaches, screen time limits, and refusing core thinking tasks to AI. But they’re not solutions; they’re just guardrails. By most metrics, AI will rot everyone’s brains. Are we going to notice in time to build systems or institutions that protect human cognitive development, or will we optimize for productivity until we wake up having outsourced the thinking itself?

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🧰 AI Tools of The Day

4 Tools to avoid Brain Rot

• Freedom (Focus Blocker) — Behavioral Guardrails - Blocks distracting websites and apps across all devices, with customizable rules that create barriers to mindless AI use.

• Lumosity or Peak — Targeted Cognitive Training - Neuroscientist-designed games targeting memory, attention, flexibility, speed, and problem-solving. Not entertainment, measurable cognitive exercises.

• iA Writer — Minimalist Writing to Block Distraction - A distraction-free writing environment that strips away every formatting option, sidebar menu, and AI suggestion.

• Endel or Noisli — Adaptive Soundscapes for Deep Focus - AI-generated soundscapes that adapt to time of day, heart rate, and activity—creating a sonic environment optimized for concentration.