Tim Levin reports via InsideEVs: Two things of note in the electric vehicle world happened today around the same time. First, the Geely Group-owned Chinese EV brand Zeekr debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today at a valuation of around $5.2 billion. Then, around 250 miles south in Washington, D.C., news emerged that the Biden Administration is set to quadruple tariffs on Chinese-made electric cars if they hit American roads. The timing may be purely coincidental. But after this week, one thing feels clearer than ever: the automotive Cold War between China and the West is fully underway, and EVs specifically are at the center of it all.

The Wall Street Journal got the scoop that the White House plans to announce higher tariffs on Chinese clean-energy imports in the coming days. Under the reported new policies, tariffs on Chinese EVs are set to quadruple, rising from the current 25% to a whopping 100%, anonymous sources told the outlet. In theory, that would substantially increase the cost of any Chinese-made EVs on our market, including, potentially, ones sold by known Western and other Asian brands. It's no secret why the U.S. is attempting to push back on Chinese EVs, to say nothing of other clean energy imports from that country like solar panels. China has spent years aggressively building up its capacity to manufacture electric cars. It's developed a stranglehold on the supply chains for lithium-ion batteries and the critical minerals they contain. It has lavished state incentives on both EV production and purchasing. In recent years, the country has emerged as a global EV powerhouse -- and, for the first time ever, an exporter on par with leaders like Japan and Germany.

Many still believe that China's cars are cheap and technologically subpar. But the truth is China has learned to build cars very, very well, as InsideEVs' own Kevin Williams discovered during a recent trip to the Beijing auto show. China's homegrown electrified vehicles range from the inexpensive -- some, like the BYD Seagull, cost less than $10,000 in their home market -- to higher-end, luxury-focused offerings like the Yangwang U8, a kind of plug-in hybrid competitor to the Mercedes G-Class that can "float" on water. From batteries to software, most are incredibly advanced. Car companies and policymakers in the U.S. (and Europe) say these cars pose a real threat to our nascent EV market, where many options still remain unaffordable and things like batteries and software are works in progress. In response, European Union officials have also launched investigations into Chinese imports that could lead to stronger tariffs. "In effect, the tariffs may end up buying the U.S. some time, rather than being a permanent solution here," concludes Levin. "After all, as Kevin Williams pointed out after going to Beijing: all of these crackdowns aren't guaranteed to yield better cars from Ford, General Motors and the rest."

According to the WSJ, the new tariffs on Chinese goods will also apply to solar panels, batteries and critical battery minerals. They're expected to be announced as soon as next week.

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian.

During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat.

Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Imagine exploring the intricate world within a single cubic millimeter of human brain tissue. It might seem insignificant, but within that tiny space lies a universe of complexity -- 57,000 individual cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and a staggering 150 million synapses, the junctions where neurons communicate. All this information translates to a mind-boggling 1,400 terabytes of data. That's the kind of groundbreaking achievement researchers from Harvard and Google have just accomplished.

Leading the charge at Harvard is Professor Jeff Lichtman, a renowned expert in brain structure. Partnering with Google AI, Lichtman's team has co-created the most detailed 3D reconstruction of a human brain fragment to date. This intricate map, published in Science, offers an unprecedented view of the human temporal cortex, the region responsible for memory and other higher functions. Envision a piece of brain tissue roughly half the size of a rice grain but magnified to reveal every cell and its web of neural connections in vivid detail. This remarkable feat is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaboration between Harvard and Google. Lichtman's expertise in electron microscopy imaging is combined with Google's cutting-edge AI algorithms. [...]

The newly published map in Science reveals previously unseen details of brain structure. One such discovery is a rare but powerful set of axons, each connected by up to 50 synapses, potentially influencing a significant number of neighboring neurons. The team also encountered unexpected structures, like a small number of axons forming intricate whorls. Since the sample came from a patient with epilepsy, it's unclear if these formations are specific to the condition or simply uncommon occurrences.

Apple has apologized for its tone-deaf "Crush!" ad that sparked a furious backlash with artists, musicians and other creators. AdAge reports that Apple said the video "missed the mark" and has scrapped plans to run the cutesy-turned-cringey commercial on TV. From a report: It's clear that Apple intended for the ad to serve as a metaphor for all the myriad creative tools one has when they throw down $1,000 or more for a new iPad Pro. Run during Tuesday's event, the video shows a series of musical instruments and other tools for human expression, including a guitar, drums, trumpet, amplifiers, record player, TV and much more. "All I Ever Need Is You" by Sonny & Cher soundtracks the clip.

Soon, it's revealed that the objects are all sitting on an industrial crusher, which descends upon the scattered creative instruments, exploding in plumes of satisfyingly colorful smoke. But when the crusher pulls back up, we see that everything was transformed into a shiny new iPad Pro.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Tens of millions of Americans each day breathe in carcinogenic chemicals that are woven into the interiors of their cars, a new study has found. While opening a window can help reduce the risk, only reforms can keep people safe, researchers wrote in a study in Environmental Science and Technology. Approximately 124 million Americans commute each day, spending an average of an hour in their cars. By federal law, the interior of these vehicles are required to contain flame retardants, or chemicals that make it harder for them to combust in a crash. These chemicals have been a legally mandated part of modern cars since the 1970s, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) passed a law requiring their use.

It's arguable how effective this protection is. Patrick Morrison, of the International Association of Firefighters, said in a statement on the study that these chemicals do little to prevent blazes -- but instead simply make them "smokier and more toxic." What the study conclusively demonstrates is that any such protection comes at a price. Virtually all cars investigated by Duke University researchers contained the chemical tris (1-chloro-isopropyl) phosphate, or TCIPP -- which the U.S. National Toxicology Program is investigating as a potential carcinogen. Most cars also had two other phosphate-based flame retardants that the state of California is investigating as potential carcinogens: Those chemicals are tris (1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCIPP) and tris (2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP). All three chemicals are linked to reproductive and neurological problems -- particularly because they don't stay in the fabrics they're woven into. Flame retardant chemicals off-gas or leach from the seat and interior fabrics into the air, -- especially in hot weather, when car interiors can reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit. A study from 2017 found that the average U.S. child has lost up to 5 IQ points from exposure to flame retardants in cars and furniture. Meanwhile, adults with the highest levels of flame retardants in their blood face a risk of death by cancer that is four times greater than those with the lowest levels, according to a study published last month.

T-Mobile and Verizon are in talks to buy parts of U.S. Ceullar in separate transactions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Reuters reports: T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of U.S. Cellular for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, the report said citing people familiar with the matter. Verizon's talks with the regional carrier is expected to take longer and might not result in an agreement, the report added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Maryland legislature passed two bills over the weekend limiting tech platforms' ability to collect and use consumers' data. Maryland Governor Wes Moore is expected to sign one of those bills, the Maryland Kids Code, on Thursday, MoCo360 reports. If signed into law, the other bill, the Maryland Online Privacy Act, will go into effect in October 2025. The legislation would limit platforms' ability to collect user data and let users opt out of having their data used for targeted advertising and other purposes. Together, the bills would significantly limit social media and other platforms' ability to track their users -- but tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, have opposed similar legislation. Lawmakers say the goal is to protect children, but tech companies say the bills are a threat to free speech.

Part of the Maryland Kids Code -- the Maryland Age-Appropriate Design Code Act -- will go into effect much sooner, on October 1st. It bans platforms from using "system design features to increase, sustain, or extend the use of the online product," including autoplaying media, rewarding users for spending more time on the platform, and spamming users with notifications. Another part of the legislation prohibits certain video game, social media, and other platforms from tracking users who are younger than 18. "It's meant to rein in some of the worst practices with sensible regulation that allows companies to do what's right and what is wonderful about the internet and tech innovation, while at the same time saying, 'You can't take advantage of our kids,'" Maryland state Delegate Jared Solomon, one of the bill's sponsors, said in a press conference Wednesday.

"We are technically the second state to pass a kids code," Solomon told The New York Times. "But we are hoping to be the first state to withstand the inevitable court challenge that we know is coming."

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create AI-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products. From a report:While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce "safe and beneficial" AI. OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users "responsibly" create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity."

It said: "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts ... We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behaviour in this area." The proposal was published as part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools. Joanne Jang, an employee at the San Francisco-based company who worked on the document, told the US news organisation NPR that OpenAI wanted to start a discussion about whether the generation of erotic text and nude images should always be banned from its products. However, she stressed that deepfakes would not be allowed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone.

"My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."

Google announced on Tuesday that it will be exiting One Market Plaza, a prominent office complex in San Francisco that it had been occupying since 2018. The company's lease for the 300,000-square-foot-office will expire next April. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Many of Google's employees are already working outside of the giant waterfront office, in light of the company's flexible approach to office attendance. As one of the city's largest office properties and a prominent feature on its skyline, the 1.6-million-square-foot One Market Plaza complex features two high-rise towers and a 11-story office annex building known as the Landmark." Ryan Lamont, a spokesperson for Google, said the company will be moving out of One Market's Spear Tower, but will continue to occupy the smaller Landmark building. He declined to comment on how long Google plans to remain in the latter." As we've said before, we're focused on investing in real estate efficiently to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce," Lamont said in an email to the Chronicle. "We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco."

Real estate market participants who spoke with the Chronicle indicated that Google plans to consolidate much of its operations from One Market to nearby 345 Spear St., where the company leases about 400,000 square feet. These individuals said that Google will likely renew its lease at that property once it expires next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes. While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn't release the final text of the order until yesterday. The final text (PDF) has some changes compared to the draft version released a few weeks before the vote.

Both the draft and final rules ban paid prioritization, or fast lanes that application providers have to pay Internet service providers for. But some net neutrality proponents raised concerns about the draft text because it would have let ISPs speed up certain types of applications as long as the application providers don't have to pay for special treatment. The advocates wanted the FCC to clarify its no-throttling rule to explicitly prohibit ISPs from speeding up applications instead of only forbidding the slowing of applications down. Without such a provision, they argued that ISPs could charge consumers more for plans that speed up specific types of content. [...]

"We clarify that a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider's decision to speed up 'on the basis of Internet content, applications, or services' would 'impair or degrade' other content, applications, or services which are not given the same treatment," the FCC's final order said. The "impair or degrade" clarification means that speeding up is banned because the no-throttling rule says that ISPs "shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service." The updated language in the final order "clearly prohibits ISPs from limiting fast lanes to apps or categories of apps they select," leaving no question as to whether the practice is prohibited, said Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick.

Under the original plan, "there was no way to predict which kinds of fast lanes the FCC might ultimately find to violate the no-throttling rule," she wrote. "This would have given ISPs cover to flood the market with various fast-lane offerings, arguing that their version does not violate the no-throttling rule and daring the FCC to enforce its rule. The final order prevents this from happening."

Smart home device maker Brilliant has laid off most of its staff and is seeking a buyer after failing to secure funding, CEO Aaron Emigh told The Verge. The company has shut down its support center and halted sales of its smart light switches and controllers, which integrate with various smart home platforms. Emigh said existing devices will continue to function, but their long-term functionality remains uncertain. Founded in 2016, Brilliant aimed to simplify smart home control but struggled with high prices, interoperability issues, and slower-than-expected market growth. The company raised $60 million in funding over eight years.

Researchers should not be using tools like ChatGPT to automatically peer review papers, warned organizers of top AI conferences and academic publishers worried about maintaining intellectual integrity. From a report: With recent advances in large language models, researchers have been increasingly using them to write peer reviews -- a time-honored academic tradition that examines new research and assesses its merits, showing a person's work has been vetted by other experts in the field. That's why asking ChatGPT to analyze manuscripts and critique the research, without having read the papers, would undermine the peer review process. To tackle the problem, AI and machine learning conferences are now thinking about updating their policies, as some guidelines don't explicitly ban the use of AI to process manuscripts, and the language can be fuzzy.

The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is considering setting up a committee to determine whether it should update its policies around using LLMs for peer review, a spokesperson told Semafor. At NeurIPS, researchers should not "share submissions with anyone without prior approval" for example, while the ethics code at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), whose annual confab kicked off Tuesday, states that "LLMs are not eligible for authorship." Representatives from NeurIPS and ICLR said "anyone" includes AI, and that authorship covers both papers and peer review comments. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, an academic publishing company best known for its top research journal Nature, said that experts are required to evaluate research and leaving it to AI is risky.

Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules."

Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%.

Full repairs to three submarine internet cables damaged in the Red Sea in February are being held up by disputes over who controls access to infrastructure in Yemeni waters. From a report: The Yemeni government has granted permits for the repair of two out of three cables, but refused the third because of a dispute with one of the cable's consortium members. Repairs to the Seacom and EIG cables have been approved, but the consortium that runs AAE-1, which includes telecommunications company TeleYemen, was not granted a permit by Yemen's internationally recognized government, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.

Three out of more than a dozen cables that run through the Red Sea, a critical route for connecting Europe's internet infrastructure to Asia's, were knocked offline by the Houthi-sunk Rubymar vessel in late February. Although the telecommunications data that passes along the damaged cables was re-routed, the incident highlighted the vulnerability of critical subsea infrastructure and the challenges of making repairs in a conflict zone. The dispute over the third cable derives from the split political control of TeleYemen, the country's sole telecommunications provider, a reflection of the country's broader geopolitical divisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A key supplier to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies is building a $20 million supercomputer with buzzy chipmaker Nvidia to speed deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities across the U.S. federal government, the MITRE think tank said Tuesday. MITRE, a federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that has supplied U.S. soldiers and spies with exotic technical products since the 1950s, says the project could improve everything from Medicare to taxes. "There's huge opportunities for AI to make government more efficient," said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of MITRE. "Government is inefficient, it's bureaucratic, it takes forever to get stuff done. ... That's the grand vision, is how do we do everything from making Medicare sustainable to filing your taxes easier?" [...] The MITRE supercomputer will be based in Ashburn, Va., and should be up and running late this year. [...]

Clancy said the planned supercomputer will run 256 Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at a cost of $20 million. This counts as a small supercomputer: The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier in Tennessee, boasts 37,888 GPUs, and Meta is seeking to build one with 350,000 GPUs. But MITRE's computer will still eclipse Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group's 68 GPUs, and will be large enough to train large language models to perform AI tasks tailored for government agencies. Clancy said all federal agencies funding MITRE will be able to use this AI "sandbox." "AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems," Clancy said. "The U.S. military needs to figure out how to do command and control. We need to understand how cryptocurrency markets impact the traditional banking sector. ... Those are the sorts of problems we want to solve."

"With all the improvements in car safety over the decades, the recent addition of a plethora of high tech sensors and warnings comes with increased costs," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "And not just to have to have them on your car. Any time you get into an accident, even a minor one, it will most likely require a detailed examination of any sensors which may have been affected and their subsequent realignment, replacement, and calibration." CNN reports: Some vehicles require "dynamic calibration," which means, once the sensors and cameras are back in place, a driver needs to take the vehicle out on real roads for testing. With proper equipment attached the car can, essentially, recalibrate itself as it watches lane lines and other markers. It requires the car to be driven for a set distance at a certain speed but weather and traffic can create problems. "If you're in Chicago or L.A., good luck getting to that speed," said [Hami Ebrahimi, chief commercial officer at Caliber] "or if you're in Seattle or Chicago or New York, with snow, good luck picking up all the road markings."

More commonly, vehicles need "static calibration," which can be done using machinery inside a closed workshop with a flat, level floor. Special targets are set up around the vehicle at set distances according to instructions from the vehicle manufacturer. "The car [views] those targets at those specific distances to recalibrate the world into the car's computer," Ebrahimi said. These kinds of repairs also demand buildings with open space that meet requirements including specific colors and lighting. And it requires special training for employees to perform these sorts of recalibrations, he said

"The change that we've seen in the last five years is greater than we've seen, probably, in the last five decades," said Todd Dillender, chief operating officer of Caliber Collision, one of the biggest auto body repair companies in the United States with more than 1,700 locations across 41 states. [...] With a rapidly changing industry, qualified auto body repair technicians are in short supply, just as they are in the engine repair business. That's also led to upward pressure on pay in the industry as technicians have to be highly qualified and educated, Dillender said. That's good for people who work in the industry, of course, but tougher for those who pay, and for the insurance companies who, in turn, pay for the repairs. A new study from consumer automotive group AAA says the cost to fix sensors and cameras in new vehicles "now accounts for more than a third of the post-crash repair costs," reports CNN. However, "no one, including AAA, recommends not getting these features because of repair costs," since many of them can cut crash rates in half and improve a car's overall safety.

"They're not going to prevent everything," said Greg Brannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA. "And when you are in a crash, there are additional costs so it's sort of the old 'there's no free ride' when it comes to these things."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Amazon plans to start flying delivery drones in Arizona this year -- but don't count on them to bring you a refreshing drink on a hot day. The hexacopter can't operate when temperatures top 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius, the company says, and average daily highs exceed that for three months of the year in Tolleson, the city outside Phoenix where Amazon is preparing to offer aerial deliveries from inside a 7.5-mile radius. The drones can't help with midnight snacks either, because they'll be grounded after sunset. Potentially being inoperable for a quarter of the year might make launching drone deliveries in Tolleson and neighboring desert communities seem like an odd choice. It's far from the first challenge faced by Amazon's much-delayed drone project. The unit is years behind its goals of flying items to customers in under an hour on a regular basis, and a one-time target of 500 million deliveries by 2030 seems distant. Amazon Prime Air has completed just thousands of deliveries, falling behind rivals; Alphabet subsidiary Wing has notched hundreds of thousands of delivery flights and Walmart more than 20,000.

In the California wine country town of Lockeford, where Amazon initially launched drone deliveries, some residents told WIRED last year that they ordered only because Amazon lured them with gift cards. In Arizona, it could be discouraging not being able to rely on drones during those hours when one might not want to venture too far from the comfort of air conditioning. [...] That temperature and other environmental conditions could ground or hamper the drone industry has been known for years. A team from University of Calgary's geography department estimated that on average across the world, drones with limitations similar to Amazon's, including from weather and daylight, would be limited to flying about 2 hours a day. In the world's 100 most populous cities, the average daily flight time would be 6 hours. "Weather is an important and poorly resolved factor that may affect ambitions to expand drone operations," they wrote in a study published in 2021. Heat, in particular, forces motors to work harder to keep drones aloft, and their batteries are only so powerful.

Wayve, a UK-based AI firm focused on developing self-driving car technology, has secured a record $1.05 billion in funding, with Microsoft and Nvidia participating in the round led by SoftBank. According to the BBC, this investment is the largest for an AI company in Europe. The BBC reports: Wayve says the funding will allow it to help build the autonomous cars of the future. [...] Wayve is developing technology intended to power future self-driving vehicles by using what it calls "embodied AI." Unlike AI models carrying out cognitive or generative tasks such as answering questions or creating pictures, this new technology interacts with and learns from real-world surroundings and environments. "[The investment] sends a crucial signal to the market of the strength of the UK's AI ecosystem, and we look forward to watching more AI companies here thrive and scale," said Wayve head Alex Kendall.