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Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker
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| While for-profit tech companies race ahead with Generative AI a group of prominent artificial intelligence experts called on European officials to pursue even broader regulations of the technology in the European Union’s AI Act, China unveiled a number of draft measures for managing Generative AI services, including making providers responsible for the validity of data used to train Generative AI tools, and the U.S. said it would weigh accountability measures.
These moves come as concern grows about the impact of Generative AI on society. Late last month, more than 1,800 signatories — including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak — called for a six-month pause on the development of systems more powerfu” than GPT-4. Among the signatories was UK-based veteran tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ian Hogarth, who has backed more than 50 AI start-ups in Europe and the US, including Anthropic, one of the world’s highest-funded generative AI start-ups. This week Hogarth wrote an article in the Financial Times after attending a London dinner party with people in the AI community who acknowledged developments would bring significant risks but are racing ahead anyway. “It felt deeply wrong that consequential decisions potentially affecting every life on Earth could be made by a small group of private companies without democratic oversight,” wrote Hogarth.
In his essay Hogarth called for government action. “We are not powerless to slow down this race,” he said. "If you work in government, hold hearings and ask AI leaders, under oath, about their timelines for developing God-like AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]. Ask for a complete record of the security issues they have discovered when testing current models. Ask for evidence that they understand how these systems work and their confidence in achieving alignment. Invite independent experts to the hearings to cross-examine these labs.”
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology stories impacting business. |
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| While hiking in the Colorado Rockies in 2018 two high school friends in their 30s – one a heir to an oil and gas company who had his consciousness raised about climate change while at university, the other a graduate of MIT and Stanford with expertise in finance, computer science and AI - came up with a business plan. Their novel idea? Recuperate the wasted gas that oil and gas producers burn each year, contributing to global warming, and use that energy to mine cryptocurrency, power AI’s huge energy needs, and offer cheaper, cleaner Cloud services to customers.
Fast forward five years and customers of Crusoe Energy, the company Cully Cavness and Chase Lochmiller co-founded, include oil producers ExxonMobil and Devon Energy as well as AI startups.
Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation technology is deployed directly to oil wells sites to convert stranded gas, which would otherwise be wasted and flared, into electricity to power modular data centers housed in 40-foot shipping containers. These data centers support high-performance computing including cryptocurrency transaction processing (mining) as well as CrusoeCloud, a cloud computing platform for computational biology, artificial intelligence and 3D rendering.
The scaleup's deployed fleet of flare-eliminating data centers have a capacity to reduce CO2-equivalent emissions estimated at 650,000 metric tons per year, comparable to removing approximately 140,000 cars from the road, according to the company. It's is an example of how young companies can work with legacy players to abate climate change and help solve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. |
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Who: Bruno Gutierres is Open Innovation Director at Alstom, a French multinational mobility company that manufactures high-speed trains, metros, monorails and trams and deliver integrated turnkey systems. He leads the company’s Collaborative Innovation Program, which gives any Alstom employee the opportunity to submit and develop innovative ideas in startup mode, the Alstom Startup & Supplier Program, which facilitates collaborations with external ecosystems worldwide, as well as new Innovation Stations in Tel Aviv, Singapore and Stockholm that take advantage of Alstom’s strong presence in those ecosystems to set up collaborative projects on mobility with local partners. Before joining Alstom in September 2019 Gutierres founded and ran the Airbus Bizlab, the first aerospace accelerator for startups and intrapreneurs
Topic: Open innovation
Quote: "We decided KPIs will not be based on the number of projects as it doesn’t make any sense to measure quantity rather than quality. The last thing we want is for Alstom to become the world champion of POCs [proof of concept trials]
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Some 87% of companies either already have a skills gap or will have one within a few years and some 85 million jobs are predicted to be displaced by 2025 while 97 million new jobs will emerge, making it more urgent than ever for corporates to move towards skill-based approaches at scale. That is where TechWolf, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, comes in. The Ghent, Belgium-based startup automatically monitors workers’ skills based on HR information and the digital footprint employees create on the job to pinpoint what capabilities are already present, see which future skills are lacking and identify efficient paths to upskilling, reskilling and hiring. Clients include pharmaceutical company GFK, Booking.com and KBC Bank, an integrated Belgium bank-insurance group. |
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| Amount U.S. oil and gas producer Occidental Petroleum is spending to build the first in a planned fleet of plants using direct-air capture technology to pull CO2 out of the air, reports the Wall Street Journal. Occidental said the plan will help it reach net-zero emissions on all its operations, its own energy use and its customers’ use of its products, by 2050, and allow it to keep investing in oil extraction. Occidental plans to make money with the CO2 removal plants by selling carbon-dioxide removal credits to companies such as airlines, trucking and marine companies that can’t easily switch to clean energy. It also plans to turn some of the carbon dioxide into products to sell, including synthetic jet fuel, or use it in the process of pumping "Net Zero oil" from its own wells that it hopes to sell at a premium. Using technology developed by scaleup Carbon Engineering, fans at the plants will pull up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air a year, about as much as 111,000 American cars spew out in a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. CEO Vicki Hollub told investors last year she also expects the clean-energy efforts to eventually become more lucrative than the company’s chemical segment, which manufactures basic chemicals and petroleum-derived products such as vinyls. |
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VivaTech, June 14-17, Paris, France
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Of The New Champions, June 27-29 Tianjin, China
CogX Festival, September 12-14, London, England
Puzzle X November 7-9, Barcelona, Spain |
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