The European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels. The Trump administration’s embrace of cryptocurrency has ratcheted up European concerns about control of the euro.

If you follow the AI world on X, you’ve probably seen in recent weeks clips of video game-like worlds where users are playing as a dog on a sunny beach, a vial of poison in the play Hamlet or a pack of cigarettes on the floor of Penn Station. 

These videos, generated with Google’s Genie 3 model, highlight the promise of so-called world models, which simulate real-world environments and aim to approximate the physics of how objects move and humans interact with their surroundings. 

There’s only one issue: these kinds of world models are expensive to run. Odyssey, another developer of world models, has to use an entire H200 chip for each user that accesses its Odyssey 2 model through its application programming interface, CEO Oliver Cameron told me.

That can cost Odyssey several dollars per hour, Cameron said. In comparison, running a 70-billion parameter text model like Llama 3 costs just a few cents per hour. 

It’s even more expensive to power Odyssey’s more advanced Odyssey-2 Pro model, which takes several H200 chips to run per user, Cameron said.

On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace up to 18,000 feet above the El Paso International Airport in Texas, saying the restrictions would be in place for 10 days. Then, less than 10 hours later, the federal agency reopened the airspace, allowing planes to land and take off at the busy airport.

About an hour after lifting the restrictions, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, whose responsibilities include overseeing the FAA, explained the unexpected closure by saying, "The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion." (The Trump Administration refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, or DOW, although its legal name remains the former.)

Not everyone agrees with Duffy's account.

Based upon reporting from The New York Times and other publications, the military has been developing high-energy lasers to bring down drones. The FAA and US military officials had been discussing tests of the new weapon from the nearby Fort Bliss Army base. However, the FAA had not resolved all of its concerns about airplane safety from the tests.

Despite these apparently lingering concerns from the FAA, the military went ahead with a test earlier this week against what was thought to be a drone. The object was a party balloon.

Cartel drones a serious threat

That is not to make light of drone incursions. This is a real issue along the US border with Mexico, where cartels increasingly fly drones for surveillance. They are particularly useful for pinpointing the location of US Border Patrol agents to assist the cartel in smuggling non-citizens across the border into the United States.

One of the many lessons from the war in Ukraine, which has rapidly pushed forward drone technology in contested environments, is that it is not practical to shoot down drones with conventional missiles. So it is understandable that the US military is looking at alternatives. This all culminated in some sort of snafu between the FAA and military officials regarding coordination with this week's test.

Whether it was genuine concern about air travelers, a show of force, a fit of pique, or something else, the FAA decided on Tuesday evening to take the extraordinary step of abruptly closing an airport that serves more than 3 million passengers a month. The proposed 10-day closure of the airport was remarkably long.

Moreover, this action was taken without consulting local or state officials in Texas—who are understandably outraged—or reportedly even the White House.

"I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened," El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said during a news conference on Wednesday. "That failure to communicate is unacceptable."

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(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker)