Cutting-Edge AI Chatbot Makes Its Debut

ChatGPT, a new cutting-edge AI chatbot that was opened to the public for testing last week, attracting a million people in the first five days, is the latest example of generative artificial intelligence, AI which can generate new content rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data. It is being hailed as the next era-defining technological innovation, changing how we create new content online or even experience the Internet.

While chatbots to date have had major limitations, ChatGPT, which was created by AI research lab OpenAI, is based on natural language generation technology. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” writes OpenAI on its announcement blog page. Among other things ChatGPT can write poetry, correct coding mistakes with detailed examples, generate AI art prompts and write new code.

ChatGPT has not only created a much better chatbot it could also transform how the Internet itself functions, with some going as far as predicting that it could spell the end for Google.

“Why scroll through mountains of ads and useless results when you can just ask a question and then a system trained on the entire corpus of the English-language Internet provides just that answer?” asked the UK’s Sunday Times.

Assessing ChatGPT’s blind spots and figuring out how it might be misused for harmful purposes are a big part of why OpenAI released the bot to the public for testing. With good reason: “While this outlook might make it sound as if generative AI is the ‘silver bullet’ for pushing our global society forward,” said VentureBeat, “it comes with an important footnote: the ethical implications are not yet well defined. This is a severe problem that can inhibit continued growth and expansion.”

For starters, ChatGPT “quickly spits out eloquent, confident responses that often sound plausible and true even if they are not,” notes VentureBeat. Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for coders and programmers, has temporarily banned users from sharing ChatGPT responses because so many of them are wrong. Industry observers have been wondering out loud if a site for coders and programmers can’t keep up with plausible but incorrect information how will search engines and social media sites cope?

Text-to-image AI models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E program, which generate detailed original images based on simple written inputs and are already starting to transform advertising, gaming, and film making, also pose issues. “People can easily find themselves the target of AI-generated fake videos, explicit content and propaganda,” said VentureBeat. “This raises concerns about privacy and consent. There is also a looming possibility that people will be out of work once AI can create content in their style with or without their permission.”

Already Shutterstock, one of the Internet’s leading stock image companies, announced it was partnering with OpenAI to launch a new tool that would integrate the generative AI DALL-E 2 into its online marketplace, raising concerns that bots will take away jobs from humans.

“I think there are two choices in this world. Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy told Fast Company. “Be the blacksmiths that are saying, ‘Cars are going to put us out of the horseshoe-making business’, or be the technical leaders that bring people, maybe kicking and screaming, into the new world.”

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FINANCIAL SERVICES

Walmart Plans To Offer Buy Now Pay Later Loans Through Its Fintech Venture

The fintech venture backed by Walmart Inc is planning to launch buy now, pay later loans as soon as next year, the Information reported on December 8.The retail giant last year entered a strategic partnership with investment firm Ribbit Capital to create the fintech startup, known as “One”

ENERGY

Thales And Marvel Fusion Team To Work With The World’s Most Powerful Laser System



Thales and German fusion energy startup Marvel Fusion announced that they will team to upgrade the laser system of the Extreme Light Infrastructure for Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) in Măgurele, Romania. With the upgraded laser, Marvel Fusion aims to validate key aspects of its technology for fusion energy. This will make Marvel Fusion the first private company to establish a scientific collaboration with the world’s most powerful laser facility ELI-NP. Thales, this will strengthen its leadership position in the design, development, and manufacturing of solid-state lasers for science, industry, and space.

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Quantum Is Coming. Is The World Ready?

There is a lot of talk about Responsible AI but quantum computing, which promises to allow computers to run thousands of times faster, enabling new applications that deliver things like more sophisticated molecular simulations for drug development, models of traffic patterns for optimizing transportation or richer artificial intelligence, will introduce issues of its own. To address these, leaders from the global quantum industry will gather in Barcelona Nov. 7-9 to formulate recommendations and discuss harmonized global action, according to an announcement made this week.

While it is hard to predict when quantum computers will be perfected, progress is moving fast. Its introduction is so close that there is now a push to have the United Nations proclaim 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technologies.

The Barcelona meeting, which will take place during PUZZLE X 2023, a conference that focuses on advances in exponential technologies such as quantum and their impact, aims to provide a platform to present the voice and recommendations of the quantum industry, says Zina Cinker, a frontier material expert, strategist, and condensed matter physicist, who currently serves as the Director General of MATTER, an international think tank and association of over 30 country chapters, orchestrating the global use of frontier materials to solve humanity’s most immediate challenges. In 2021 MATTER launched PUZZLE X, with the support of the Government of Spain, Generalitat de Catalunya, and Barcelona City Hall. (The Innovator is a media partner of PUZZLE X.)

PUZZLE X is organizing the special assembly of quantum leaders in collaboration with the International Year of Quantum Science and Technologies initiative (IYQ2025).

Quantum mechanics has led to some of the most profound technological developments of our age: the transistors at the heart of our electronics, the lasers underlying global telecommunication, and the LEDs that have created a revolution in lighting efficiency, notes the IYQ2025. Looking forward, it says quantum science and technology will be the key cross-cutting scientific field of the 21st century, having a tremendous potential impact on critical societal challenges highlighted by the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, including climate, energy, food safety and security, and clean water.

Quantum could also have negative impacts on society. Once access becomes available all existing public-key algorithms and associated protocols will be vulnerable to criminals, competitors, and other bad actors so companies and organizations need to put a transition roadmap in place now and determine which areas are the most vulnerable, so they know where to start. What’s more, the competitive advantages will be so large that businesses that are not ready could be crushed by competitors. The technology could also dramatically increase gender inequality in the workplace and between the global North and South.

To help in addressing these issues and more leaders gathering at the special assembly in Barcelona will discuss quantum-related topics of relevance to UN bodies such as UNICEF and the International Telecommunications Union. These include taking steps to ensure:

*A quantum-safe world : Quantum secure communication and global readiness

*Equitable advances in quantum: Country Equity | Public private partnerships | Best-practice-sharing among regions and current and future stakeholders

* The Quantum divide is narrowed: Gender equity | Educational gap | Future talent & workforce development

* Progress on the 2030 agenda: Using quantum technologies to assist in reaching UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The Barcelona assembly will conclude with a ceremonial signing of an Open Letter by key international quantum stakeholders to encourage the UN to pass the resolution proclaim 2025 as the year of quantum. To date, the letter has been signed by many leading figures in science such as Nobel laureates Bill Phillips, Sir Kostya Novoselov, and 300 other major quantum stakeholders and companies. The letter remains open for signatures until November 1. To request an invitation to the assembly to present your company’s recommendations click here.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

OpenAI and Jony Ive In Talks To Raise $1 Billion From Softbank For AI Device

OpenAI is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to launch a venture to build the “iPhone of artificial intelligence”, fuelled by more than $1bn in funding from the Japanese conglomerate. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, has tapped Ive’s company LoveFrom, which the designer founded when he left Apple in 2019, to develop the ChatGPT creator’s first consumer device, according to three people familiar with the plan. Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions at the designer’s San Francisco studio about what a new consumer product centred on OpenAI’s technology would look like, the people said. They hope to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone’s innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-marketpotential of the mobile internet.

ChatGPT Can Now Speak, Hear And Process Images According to Open AI

OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now “see, hear and speak,” or, at least, understand spoken words, respond with a synthetic voice and process images, the company announced September 25. The update to the chatbot — OpenAI’s biggest since the introduction of GPT-4 — allows users to opt into voice conversations on ChatGPT’s mobile app and choose from five different synthetic voices for the bot to respond with. Users will also be able to share images with ChatGPT and highlight areas of focus or analysis (think: “What kinds of clouds are these?”).The changes will be rolling out to paying users in the next two weeks, OpenAI said.

Meta Launching AI Chabots For Instagram, Facebook And WhatsApp

Meta is launching artificial intelligence-driven persona chatbots across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and giving developers the power to create their own versions of AI assistants, as the US tech giant seeks to drive engagement on its platforms, reports the Financial Times. At its Connect developer conference on Wednesday, Meta unveiled an AI assistant that will be able to search for answers to users’ questions through a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing, as well as AI image generation. Users of Meta’s platforms will also be able to interact with 28 chatbots that take on characters played by celebrities, who have agreed to have their voice and likeness used in the feature. Cook Roy Choi voices a sous chef called Max who will be able to generate recipes from a list of ingredients entered into the system, and a Dungeon Master played by US rapper Snoop Dogg will talk you through a text-based adventure. Meta said the AI assistant and personas would launch in the US in beta mode from Wednesday, but that there were plans for “several more coming over the next few weeks” across a range of interests, including gaming, philosophy and fashion. The Financial Times first reported on Meta’s plans for persona-based chatbots this summer. “This isn’t just going to be about answering queries,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said during the conference. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you, helping you accomplish the things that you want.”

Amazon Invests $4 Billion In AI Startup

Amazon plans to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, as the big tech group steps up its rivalry with Microsoft, Google and Nvidia to persuade AI companies to use its technology, reports the Financial Times. The deal, announced on Monday, will see Amazon invest an initial $1.25bn for a minority stake in Anthropic. Their agreement allows for the investment to be increased to $4bn later. It is a bid to forge a close relationship with a prominent AI start-up akin to Microsoft’s alliance with OpenAI, the group behind ChatGPT. As part of the agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud computing platform and its dedicated AI chips to create its models. AI start-ups have become locked in an arms race to secure the costly chips and data centre resources necessary to build the latest AI systems, called large language models.

SUSTAINABILITY

Lego Drops Plans To Make Bricks From Recycled Plastic Bottles


Lego has abandoned plans to make its famous bricks from recycled plastic bottles, saying that the manufacturing process would be more polluting than the current production of oil-based bricks.Lego made the decision — first reported by the Financial Times Sunday — after it spent years testing recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as a more climate-friendly alternative to the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) it uses in the majority of its toys.The toymaker has pledged to use only sustainable materials in its products by 2032 and, two years ago, unveiled a prototype brick made from recycled PET. The plastic was sourced from bottles that are typically used for water or soda.Since then, however, Lego has found that making bricks from the recycled material would require investing in new equipment and involve more steps, which would ultimately lead to more planet-heating pollution than the status quo, a company spokesperson told CNN Monday.Lego’s move underscores the challenge companies face in trying to adapt their products and processes in response to the climate crisis.

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An Alternative To Fossil Fuels Made From Co2, Water and Sunlight

Global demand for both oil and gas is set to peak by 2030, according to the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) projections. If governments act to reach Net Zero emissions by mid-century, which is necessary to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C within reach, oil and gas use would decline by more than 75% by 2050.

Yet the oil and gas sector which provides more than half of global energy supply currently account for just 1% of clean energy investment globally. “The oil and gas industry is facing a moment of truth,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, said duringt COP28 in Dubai in December. “With the world suffering the impacts of a worsening climate crisis, continuing with business as usual is neither socially nor environmentally responsible,” he said. “Oil and gas producers around the world need to make profound decisions about their future place in the global energy sector. The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

Synhelion, a Swiss scale-up which has developed a breakthrough method to produce renewable synthetic fuel from CO2, water, and sunlight, is proposing a way forward. It wants to license its technology to gas and oil companies and have them become the future owners and operators of green fuel production plants. “There is a huge technology overlap and spending several billion per plant is nothing new for oil and gas and the energy sector,” says Philipp Furler, CEO and Founder of Synhelion, which was recently named a Global Innovator by The World Economic Forum. “Oil and gas companies could be the future owners and operators of our plants but so could other players. We are open and willing to provide our technology to industry partners.”

Synhelion is a member of the EU SUN-to-Liquid II research project which was launched in November and aims to demonstrate the scalability and high efficiency of producing sustainable synthetic fuel from Co2, water and sunlight. The consortium, which also includes the German Aerospace Center, Spain’s IMEDEA Energy Institute, German aviation think tank Bauhaus Luftfahrt, industrial gas supplier HyGear and science and business consultancy L-up, aims to bridge the gap between research and industrial applications in high temperature sunlight-driven chemistry.

“We want to develop solutions that will create global impact,” says Furler.

As a leader in high temperature solar chemistry Synhelion, a spin-off of ETH, holds exclusive licenses to commercialize the Sun-to-Liquid process. Within the SUN-to-LIQUID II project Synhelion and its partners develop a technology that uses concentrate solar radiation to drive a two-step redox process to convert Co2 and water into syngas. This process has the potential to produce renewable synthetic fuels at high efficiency. The process uses less energy than more mature power-to-liquid technologies that convert hydrogen into syngas and is more economical because it is 10x to 20x cheaper to store heat than electricity.

Synhelion evolved from ETH Zurich in 2016 to decarbonize transportation. The process it developed for green fuels works like this: when the sun is shining solar radiation is reflected by a mirror field, concentrated onto a receive and converted into high-temperature process heat. The generated head is fed to a thermochemical reactor that produces synthesis gas. This is them processed into fuels by standard gas-to-liquids technology such as the Fischer-Tropsch process. The set-up also includes thermal energy stage, which enables fuel production around the clock. The end-product is solar kerosene, diesel or gasoline that can be burned in standard engines.

The Swiss scale-up is currently building DAWN, the world’s first industrial-scale solar fuel plant in Julich, Germany, which is scheduled to open in June of this year. DAWN combines proprietary concentrated solar technology with industrial reforming technology to convert biogenic methane, C02 and water into syngas, which is then turned into jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline. This solar reforming process combines both established and new technologies, allowing for a faster market entry of carbon-neutral solar fuels. Synhelion’s future plants will be able to produce solar fuels directly from solar energy, CO2, and water.

A plant in Spain is due to open in 2026. The aim is to have that plant produce 1.25 million liters of fuel per year. To put that in perspective, commercial airlines produce about 300 million tons of fuel per year.

Construction of the industrial plant DAWN and the technical deisng and construction planning of Synhelion’s first commercial plant in Spain is being financed by CHF 22 million raised in a 2022 financing round and CHF 16 million raised in 2021. The 2022 funding round was led by existing and new investors, such as SMS Group, CEMEX, Eni, AMAG Group and SWISS. The company has also raised funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The Swiss scale-up plans to raise a new round of funding in 2024.

Once the technology scales the goal is to get the production cost down to around one euro per liter of fuel within the next 10 years, Furler says.

Helping Solar-To-Liquid Fly

The first customer for the solar-to-liquid fuel from the German and Spain plants is Lufthansa Group and its subsidiary Swiss International Airlines. The aviation industry has committed to achieving net-zero flying by 2050, but notes McKinsey, the path to reaching that goal is complex. For starters there is not enough sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) available to meet demand.

“We partnered with Lufthansa to help us understand how to establish this value chain,” says Furler. “Do we produce synthetic crude oil, refine it into kerosene and then blend it with fossil fuels and make certified jet fuel or do we stop at the crude level and have it co-processed at a refinery? We need to understand what best fits the needs of the aviation industry and what is most effective and economical.”

As a new member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community, an invitation-only group of the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups that are at the forefront of ethical technological and business model innovation, Synhelion is actively contributing to the Forum’s Airports of Tomorrow (AoT) initiative. As part of the WEF’s Center for Nature and Climate, AoT’s aim is to address the energy, infrastructure, and financing needs of the aviation industry’s transition to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. AoT is investigating how SAF producers can be supported to serve rising demand and bring them together with the right partners. The overall goal of the initiative is to make sure that SAF will be available on the market in time to meet emission reduction targets. Based on the results of planned roundtables and meetings held within the AoT initiative, the Forum will publish short case studies on policy implementation that address topics like the ideal countries and regions to produce SAF and what that means for regulation and incentive creation.

Cementing A Greener Future

Synhelion’s technology also holds promise for the greening of other industries, such as cement. In August Synhelion and Cemex announced a significant milestone in their joint effort to develop fully solar-driven cement production: the scaling of their technology to industrial-viable levels. This includes the continuous production of clinker, the most energy-intensive part of cement manufacturing, using only solar heat.

At the beginning of 2022, the companies announced the first-ever successful production of solar clinker in a small-scale batch process pilot. “Advancing from that stage to production under plant-like and continuous conditions reaffirms the tremendous potential of this technology to reach industrial-scale implementation,” the two companies said in a press release. Synhelion and Cemex say they are now takin steps toward building a solar-driven industrial-scale pilot cement plant.

Clinker is produced in a rotary kiln at temperatures nearing 1’500°C. Fossil fuels are typically used to heat the kiln and are responsible for approximately 40% of direct CO2 emissions. Synhelion’s technology provides sufficient heat to produce clinker without using fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels entirely with solar energy would be a game-changer in Cemex’s efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, says the company. Additionally, the technology creates the conditions to separate, and therefore capture, the remaining CO2 from calcination in concentrated form without additional efforts.

The partnership between Synhelion and Cemex has recently receive recognition. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $ 3.2 million to Solar MEAD, a joint project between Cemex, Sandia National Laboratories, and Synhelion to study the conditions to maximize heat transfer to the raw cement mix. The collaboration also received an honorable mention in the Eco-Innovator category of the Corporate Citizenship Innovation Awards sponsored by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship – an organization dedicated to advancing the work of corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

Reducing Risk

Synhelion’ technology can also be applied to other industries that require high temperature process heat, such as the steel sector, but scaling up to serve the needs of multiple industries is challenging and will require investment and regulatory clarity. “We need industrial partners and investors who are willing to take risks,” says Furler.

As pressure mounts on established companies to become greener investing in clean technologies like Synhelion’s could help them reduce their own risks.

The oil and gas sector is a case in point. In transitions to net zero, oil and gas is set to become “a less profitable and riskier business over time,” says the IEA report. The report’s analysis finds that the current valuation of private oil and gas companies could fall by 25% from $6 trillion today if all national energy and climate goals are reached, and by up to 60% if the world gets on track to limit global warming to 1.5 °C.

The report finds that the oil and gas sector is well placed to scale up some crucial technologies for clean energy transitions. In fact, some 30% of the energy consumed in 2050 in a decarbonized energy system comes from technologies that could benefit from the industry’s skills and resources, including liquid biofuels.

However, this would require a step-change in how the sector allocates its financial resources. The oil and gas industry invested around $20 billion in clean energy in 2022, or roughly 2.5% of its total capital spending. The report finds that producers looking to align with the aims of the Paris Agreement would need to put 50% of their capital expenditures towards clean energy projects by 2030, on top of the investment required to reduce emissions from their own operations.

The report also notes that carbon capture, currently the linchpin of many firms’ transition strategies, cannot be used to maintain the status quo. If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 °C would require an entirely inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilisation or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture. The amount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today, says the IEA report.



Working with Synhelion would make sense for oil and gas companies because a large fraction of the investment cost in the scale-up’s plants is made up of standard oil and gas technology such as Fischer-Tropsch, compressors and gas cleaning developed over the last 100 years. “We are producing the same products (with the difference being ours is sustainable) that will serve the global oil and gas infrastructure for refining and product distribution,” says Furler. “Therefore, oil and gas should be interested to maintain the value of their infrastructure, which could be lost if the energy system changes to other energy carriers. Oil and gas can handle large projects with high CAPEX and long plan lifetime, thus would be perfectly suited to be the future owner and operators of our plants.

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A Pivotal Moment For Search

If the hyperbole from Microsoft and Google is to be believed search will never be the same. Both companies held events this week to highlight how generative AI will change the way people look for things on the Internet.

Microsoft released a new version of its search engine Bing powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. It was billed as a landmark event — the company’s “iPhone moment.”

The new Bing, which is available only to a small group of testers now and will become more widely available soon, looks like a hybrid of a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot. Type in a prompt like “Write me a menu for a vegetarian dinner party” — and the left side of your screen fills up with the standard ads and links to recipe websites,” explained a reporter from The New York Times who tested the technology.”

On the right side, Bing’s A.I. engine starts typing out a response in full sentences, often annotated with links to the websites it’s retrieving information from.To ask a follow-up question or make a more detailed request — for example, “Write a grocery list for that menu, sorted by aisle, with amounts needed to make enough food for eight people” — you can open up a chat window and type it, explained The New York Times.

The search results were so impressive that the reporter ended his column by saying “I’m going to do something I thought I’d never do: I’m switching my desktop computer’s default search engine to Bing. And Google, my default source of information for my entire adult life, is going to have to fight to get me back.

Google may dominate search now but “a new race is starting with a completely new platform technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice finally,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

Google is not standing still. It held its own event in Paris this week to give a preview of its GPT-style chatbot Bard. Google’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan , showed slides with new examples of Bard’s capabilities during a brief presentation. One slide showed how Bard can be used to display the pros and cons of buying an electric car, for example, and to plan a trip in Northern California.

Meanwhile China’s Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPT-style project called “Ernie Bot” in March.

Interest in generative artificial intelligence is gathering steam but in their hurry to market companies are unleashing technology that gives plausible but wrong answers.

Just ask Google. It lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after Reuters revealed that Bard shared inaccurate information in a promotional video. In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Microsoft’s new product fared no better. The New York Times reporter acknowledged that during Microsoft’s product demo, the new Bing gave an answer to a math problem that was way off mark. The reporter shrugged it off saying that “fixating on the areas where these tools fall short risks missing what’s so amazing about what they get right.”.

In a blog posting, scientist Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI, questions that logic. “One might well have said the same in response to people (like me) who expressed concerns about the development of driverless cars in 2016. Seven years and roughly $100 billion later, those pesky errors haven’t gone away,” writes Marcus. “And it’s not just that AI has a fairly spotty track record for taking demos into reliable products; and it’s not just that hallucinatory web search could be dangerous if left to run amok in domains like medicine, it’s that the promises themselves are problematic, when examined from a scientific perspective.”

Scaling neural network model “has made their faux writing more and more authoritative-sounding, but not more and more truthful,” he says.“Hallucinations are in their silicon blood, a byproduct of the way they compress their inputs, losing track of factual relations in the process.”.

Experts disagree on how serious the confabulation problem is, notes the Financial Times in an article entitled “Why Chatbots Are Bound To Spout Bullshit.” Some believe ChatGPT has made remarkable progress in a very short space of time and that is possible or even likely the next generation, in a year or two, will not suffer from the problem, notes the FT article.

In his blog posting Marcus says he believes the problems will eventually be ironed out but there is no telling how long it will take for that to happen. “If they don’t get ironed out soon —and they might not– people might quickly tire of chat-based search, in which BS and truth are so hard to discriminate, and eventually find themselves returning to do their searches the old-fashioned, early 21st century way, awe or not.,” he says.

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DIGITAL IDENTITY

European Parliament Passes Plans For A Digital Identity Network

Members of the European Parliament’s (MEPs) Industry, Research and Energy Committee have given their support to a new digital identity framework, eID, by 55 votes to 8, reports Finextra. The Framework was proposed in June 2021, and would create an interoperable, EU-wide scheme, allowing European citizens to use the all-in-one gateway to access public services. Users will be able to identify and authenticate themselves online via a European digital identity wallet without having to go through commercial providers. Amendments were also proposed by the MEPs including making the wallet a tool that can also read and verify electronic documents, and allowing for peer-to-peer interactions. They also proposed measures to strengthen privacy and cybersecurity.

ENERGY TRANSITION

Sunrun Teams With Startup To Operate Virtual Power Plants in The U.S.



U.S. residential solar company Sunrun has teamed up with startup Lunar Energy to operate virtual power plants (VPPs) of home solar and storage systems, a step toward transforming its vast customer network into a resource for power grids. Lunar, which is backed by Sunrun and Korean battery maker SK Group is already operating 12 such systems for the California-based solar company from New England to Hawaii. Sunrun has been pursuing VPPs as a means of leveraging the value of its customers’ 48,000 home battery systems. VPPs can be called on to supply power when grid supplies are stretched or store it when there is more solar and wind power than needed, reducing the need for fossil-fueled centralized power plants.Lunar’s software, called Gridshare, is capable of operating a fleet of batteries and other smart devices from various manufacturers. It determines at the device level if batteries should feed electricity to the grid, charge from solar energy or discharge power into a household.

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Cybersecurity Futures 2030

A small western Pennsylvania municipal water utility was just one of multiple organizations breached in the United States by an Iranian-backed hacktivist collective. The group, known as Cyber Av3ngers, targeted a specific industrial device – a programmable logic controller -because it is Israeli-made. Other industries that use the same equipment — Vision Series programmable logic controllers made by Israel’s Unitronics — including energy, food and beverage manufacturing and healthcare, have been warned that they are also potentially vulnerable.

In Israel, cyberattacks that use distributed denial of service (DDoS) operations; wiper malware; and the exploitation of other vulnerabilities that facilitate the spread of disinformation were used by Hamas and its supporters as weapons of war. So were deep fake videos that risk unleashing even more violence and confusion in the future.

Meanwhile, European cyber police arrested the ringleader of a ransomware gang operating in Ukraine accused of successfully extorting “several hundred million euros” in ransom from victims in 71 countries; the boss of Australia’s largest ports operator confirmed data from current and former DP World employees was stolen during a November cyber attack that shut down its operations around the country in November, temporarily disrupting global trade; and the UK foreign minister Leo Docherty told the House of Commons that Russia’s Federal Security Service had used a “range of cyber espionage activities” to target MPs, peers, civil servants, journalists and NGOs, through a sustained campaign to “meddle in British politics.”

These incidents are a snapshot of how the cybersecurity agenda has changed over the past five years: cyber is now an inextricable part of warfare, critical infrastructure – and democracy- are increasingly coming under attack, ransomware is on the rise, and the commercialization of new cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, are introducing new threats such as deep fakes.

The next five years will bring another set of unprecedented cybersecurity challenges, says a new report from The World Economic Forum entitled Cybersecurity Futures 2030.

To help corporates and governments better prepare for the future, the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CTLC), with the support of the Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity and the Center for Naval Analyses’ Institute for Public Research, launched Cybersecurity Futures 2030, a global initiative that explores how digital security could evolve over the next five to seven years. Between January and April 2023, the CTLC independently developed a set of four scenarios that portray possible cybersecurity futures. The scenarios were explored at workshops in five international locations: Dubai, Washington, DC, Kigali, New Delhi and Singapore and in virtual events involving the UK and multiple European countries.

The New Digital Security Landscape

So, what does the new digital security landscape look like? The report says it will require society to fundamentally reorient its responses to constant digital security challenges, three of which are changing in important ways: data privacy, talent development and sustainability.

*Data privacy: It is no longer plausible or desirable to fully restrict flows of personal data, says the report. The objective in the run-up to 2030 will be for countries, communities, and individuals to ensure a controlled and responsible use of their data and to negotiate a fair return.

*Cybersecurity Talent: The world needs 3.4 million cybersecurity experts to support today’s global economy, but the industry is struggling to fill that gap. Going forward the competition for global talent is expected to intensify. As automation and AI fulfill entry-level jobs there will be increasing need for people trained in supervisory and policy roles of cybersecurity and AI security, says the report. At the same time demand for people who can design, build, and deploy secure machine learning and AI products will continue to skyrocket. The risk is there will be zero-sum game dynamic, with countries and companies competing for the same limited pool of talent, says the report. Against that backdrop the ability to attract global talent, retain homegrown talent and provide a productive environment to capitalize on that talent, will be increasingly important. At the same time, education and awareness of digital security will be critical to combat misinformation and cyber crime, says the report. And, if countries want to re-shore supply chains and enable economic development, a mobilization will be required to upskill workers to create a workforce that is equipped to design, build, and deploy advanced technology across many sectors.

*Sustainability, climate change and digital security will increasingly be intertwined. Although technologies like AI promise to help with climate change the technologies themselves are causing major increases in energy demand. At the same time, construction of new, distributed green energy infrastructure, such as electric vehicle changing and smart grid networks, will expand the Internet of Things, introducing new vulnerabilities. Digital inclusion, or the equitable and safe access to and use of digital technologies, is another facet of sustainability, says the report. Without it the divide between haves and have nots will not only enlarge it may undermine security by destabilizing society. The report stresses the need to protect the most vulnerable parts of the population, reduce inequality between skilled and unskilled labor, reduce employment-driven migration and unrest, encourage stability and potentially reduce transnational cyber crime by redirecting potential criminals towards productive pursuits.

Matching The Speed Of Trust With The Speed Of Innovation

Three overarching observations also emerged from the workshops, according to the report.

The first is that “digital security is being reframed as the ability of societies to match the speed of trust with the speed of innovation.” The report says that governments that follow through on long-term technology and cybersecurity strategies can become trusted brands, gaining advantages in attracting talent, seizing leadership opportunities in multilateral standard setting processes and countering disinformation campaigns. Participants stressed that the online spread of misinformation, disinformation and mal information – which is referred to by the acronym MDM in the report– are now core cybersecurity concerns.. “Cybersecurity will become less about protecting the confidentiality and availability of information and more about protecting its integrity and provenance,” says the report.

Secondly, the report says cybersecurity challenges and opportunities of the next decade will be proportionate to the pace and scale at which countries digitalize. The report’s advice? Decision-makers should monitor the pace of digitization- and the ability of populations to integrate new technologies safely and securely-as closely as they do the security specifications of the technology itself.

Thirdly, there is an urgent need for the call for trusted standards that incentivize interoperability in cybersecurity and AI security. Some workshop participants expressed concern that there is no global leadership, a lack of trusted and expert regulatory bodies and insufficient capacity for the enforcement of security and privacy laws and standards. Practical conversations are needed about the trade-offs between digital sovereignty and interoperability, the report says. “The focus in the next three to five years will be on the practicalities of navigating a world in flux,” it says. Workshop participants anticipate that global alliances are set to reshuffle in the coming years, with opportunities for countries to create new poles in a more multipolar world.

Weaknesses Have Consequences

The report outlines how allowing unchecked weaknesses will impact the cybersecurity landscape and the competitiveness of companies and countries. For example:

*Collective failure to mitigate climate change will limit innovation and technology adoption and will deprioritize cybersecurity. “A continual cycle of preparing for, responding to and recovering from natural disasters and other climate-related challenges, is a key weakness for the digital security landscape, as it will mean fewer resources to commit to promising security ideas and endeavors,” says the report.

*Dependency on the largest tech firms or on tech products and services exported by other countries can lead to vulnerabilities. The report urges organizations and countries to carefully consider the advantages of investing in innovation before automatically using market-ready solutions.

*An inability to overcome social engineering could increase polarization, erode trust in digital products and platforms and leave organizations in a weakened position to solve other problems and seize new opportunities, says the report.

Key Takeaways for Decision-Makers

The report has a list of takeaways for decision makers. Among other things it advises organizations to ensure they have a stable and secure supply chain of resources, including technology components, new materials, and skilled, affordable workers. It also advises working to form a digitally literate public and customer base that is media savvy and inoculated against “mis-dis-and mal-information” and that countries and companies strategically and tactically use regulation to guard against the downsides of AI products as they rise in prominence.

The next phase of the Cybersecurity Futures 2030 project will focus on working with decision-makers to further set cybersecurity priorities and think more broadly how these findings might impact their organizations. “Grappling with these kind of questions should be a defining focus in 2024 for C-Suites, boards and government agencies internationally,” says the report.

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Why Companies Need To Transition To Post-Quantum Cryptography

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has chosen the first group of encryption tools that are designed to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer, which could potentially crack the security used to protect intellectual property and privacy in the digital systems companies rely on every day such as online banking and email software.

The July 5 announcement should serve as a wake-up call to corporates, says Ali El Kaafarani, CEO of UK-based PQShield, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and one of The Innovator’s 2021 Startups of The Week. The company contributed a public key encryption algorithm and three digital signature algorithms announced as standards by NIST.

When large-scale quantum computers – machines that exploit quantum mechanical phenomena to solve mathematical problems that are difficult or intractable for conventional computers – are built, they will be able to break many of the public-key cryptosystems currently in use, according to NIST, a physical sciences laboratory operated by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

While it is hard to predict when quantum computers will be perfected, once access becomes available all existing public-key algorithms and associated protocols will be vulnerable to criminals, competitors, and other bad actors. “It is critical to begin planning for the replacement of hardware, software, and services that use public-key algorithms now so that the information is protected from future attacks,” says El Kaafarani. “Companies and organizations need to put a transition roadmap in place and determine which areas are the most vulnerable so they know where to start. Visibility is power.”

Bad actors are already adopting a “harvest now, decrypt later” approach, stealing encrypted information and storing it on their own servers until they can get more computing power to decrypt it. “When quantum computers become available all the data that have been harvested somewhere will be actually readable, so every minute, every hour, and month and year that companies take no action to protect themselves they are handing their IP, medical records and everything else they store to someone who can decrypt it later,” he says.

The quantum threat has been high on the global security agenda for months, with governments and their partners planning their transition to quantum-resistance even before NIST’s standards were announced. In a recent White House fact sheet following the G7 summit, the deployment of Post-Quantum Cryptography was listed as one of the key challenges of the 21st century.

In January, a White House Memorandum called for US government agencies to identify any encryption not compliant with quantum-proof standards and provide a timeline towards transition. Separately, the French national security agency ANSSI has recommended the immediate introduction of post-quantum defences throughout the private sector.

There are three unknowns that make it urgent for business and organizations to act, El Kaafarani says.

The first is “we don’t know when a quantum computer will be able to decrypt information sent over the Internet,” he says. “People are speculating that it could be five, ten or fifteen years but there is no proof it is not going to happen sooner”. The second reason is that the first person or organization to build a fully functioning quantum computer may not announce it publicly, meaning a bad actor might use it to surreptitiously start decrypting everything from medical records to company IP without anyone realizing it. “The third unknown – and this is very critical – is that the majority of organization don’t even know how long it is going to take to make the transition to post-quantum cryptography,” he says. “If you look at these three unknowns you will understand the need to start identifying why you are using cryptography and how you are using it and define a clear transition roadmap. This should have happened yesterday. If you haven’t started, you are already late.”

Most security algorithms that companies depend on are used in components of many different communications, processing, and storage systems, he says. “It is going to take up to ten years to change everything they have to this new standard.”

Indeed, it took almost two decades to deploy the modern public key cryptography infrastructure known as RSA that is widely used for secure data transmission.

What’s At Risk

In 1994 a mathematician named Peter Shor device a quantum algorithm that in theory allows a sufficiently large and fault tolerance quantum computer to crack the majority of the currently used public key cryptosystems.

The bad news is that RSA, a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission and related cousins such as elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC),will be broken by quantum technologies. Blockchain technology is based on RSA and ECC, so over the next three to five years blockchain will have to migrate quantum safe protocols. That’s just the start. Today there are more than 20 billion physical devices in the world such as mobile phones, IOT devices, laptops and servers. Every one of them will need a software upgrade to make them quantum safe, says Jack Hidary, who leads SandboxAQ, an enterprise SaaS company he spun out from Google parent Alphabet that delivers solutions that leverage quantum technologies and AI and run on today’s classical computing platforms. “The sustainability of our financial system and e-commerce, for example, depends on it,” he said in an interview with The Innovator.

The goal of post-quantum cryptography is to develop cryptographic systems that are secure against both quantum and classical computers, and can interoperate with existing communications protocols and networks.

“The message is post quantum crypto relies on math, which means it runs on classical computers and doesn’t need anything quantum for it, says El Kaafarani. “It is a drop-in one-to-one replacement of the cryptography we have been using.”

In June 2015, El Kaafarani moved from Hewlett-Packard Labs to Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute to start a Post-Quantum Cryptography project. A short time later NIST announced that was starting work on standardizing Post-Quantum Cryptography, making it clear that having a fully-functioning, fault tolerant, quantum computer is no longer out of reach.

The idea for PQShield came to him over the next three years while observing how businesses were not doing enough to be ready for this monumental change, he says. PQShield officially launched in May 2018 with the help Oxford’s Mathematical Institute, Oxford University Innovation and Oxford Sciences Innovation. It has been working with NIST on standards since its inception.

PQShield offers “an end-to-end solution in terms of hardware and software” and can additionally evaluate “what else a company can improve in its security architecture,” El Kaafarani says. A key differentiator is that some of its researchers and engineers are taking an active role in the development of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process.

PQShield’s contributions have been adopted as the first standard for a full suite of public key encryption and digital signatures.

“We co-developed and co-designed the algorithms in collaboration with great researchers and engineers and the wider cryptography/security community analyzed them,” says El Kaafarani.“That is why there is confidence in these algorithms, they were scrutinized by the global cryptography community for six years.”

The next step is to draft a document that defines everything about the algorithms but NIST’s work is not finished. The goal is to adopt more than one suite of algorithms as standards so that if one set is eventually cracked there will be others from different math fields to fall back on, he says.



“Work on the transition does not have to wait for full NIST standards, as hybrid cryptography allows practitioners to safely deploy quantum resistant schemes without comprising security levels,” concludes a May 12 article in Nature authored by Sandbox AI’s Hidary and nine other industry experts. The article recommends that work on the transition to post quantum computing begin as soon as possible and that companies experiment with different families of post quantum computing algorithms.

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Climate Laggards Under Scrutiny In Run Up To Climate Week 2024

Dutch bank ING said this week that it will drop large clients it believes are not making sufficient progress on reducing their climate impact.The announcement comes just days before leaders convene for Climate Week NYC 2024 September 22-29 to showcase leading climate action and discuss how to do more.

The annual event is hosted by the Climate Group and New York City and takes place in conjunction with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and The World Economic Forum’s annual Sustainable Development Impact Meetings which bring together more than 1,000 business leaders, policymakers, international and civil society organizations, innovators and social entrepreneurs to advance the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

The 2030 deadline for the UN SDGs is approaching, but less than a fifth of the SDG targets are on track. While there has been minimal or moderate progress on nearly half of the targets, more than a third have stalled or even regressed, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 found in June.

ING Chief executive Steven van Rijswijk said September 17 that the Dutch bank had put its clients on notice that it would either restrict or stop providing finance to companies that fail to address their carbon footprint on a case-by-case basis. Although some banks have introduced restrictions on lending to specific sectors such as coal, policies that apply across large chunks of their portfolio are rare.

ING’s stance is in sharp contrast to many other financial institutions, especially in the U.S., notes the Financial Times. Banks such as Bank of America have loosened some climate targets or become reluctant to speak out about the financial risks of global warming amid a backlash against so-called “woke capitalism.”

ING’s Van Rijswijk told the Financial Times that ING had assessed 2,000 of its largest clients based on their publicly available climate transition plans and other data. Companies had until 2026 to make sufficient progress, he said. “Our goal is to make sure we fight climate change. It is not to say goodbye to clients,” he said. “But if it is about them not being willing [to address their carbon footprint] then that will mean we will say goodbye.” He added that bank wanted to move “in tandem with Paris”, the global agreement to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C and ideally to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. “.\

Now, more than ever, businesses need to recognize that “the imperative for action on environmental issues is one not of morality or consumer sentiment but the laws of nature,” says an essay by Linsay Hooper, interim CEO of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CSIL) and CISL fellow Paul Gilding, which was published this week in The Financial Times. “Climate change and biodiversity loss are not abstract threats but real and measurable factors that will undermine business as usual,” says the essay. “Rather than asking ‘How much sustainability can we afford?’ companies must ask ‘How do we accelerate, navigate and benefit from the transition’?”

Some companies are getting it right: Swedish steel, mining and utility businesses have formed the Hybrit initiative to reinvent their industry with solutions such as fossil-free steel, notes the guest essay. But others, such as the plastics industry, are acting defensively and cling to inadequate measures, says the essay, when they should be building the critical mass needed to advocate for policies and action to drive waste collection, cut material use and increase reuse and recycling.

The essay lays out a case for why companies ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) polices are not working.

“The environmental, social and governance agenda has not delivered and in its current form and it never will,” says the essay. A change of mindset and a fundamental redesign of the markets that frame business decisions is needed to eliminate the tension between profitability and sustainability, it says. It calls for the creation of thriving markets for climate-neutral, nature-positive and circular products and for governments to create conditions that make it economically compelling to phase out damaging activities. Otherwise, the essay says, “businesses that voluntarily transition will be undermined by those that don’t.”

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK:

HEALTH

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Obtains “Breakthrough Device” FDA Approval

Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink said on September 17 its experimental implant aimed at restoring vision received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s “breakthrough device” designation. Founded in 2016 by Musk and a group of engineers, Neuralink is building a brain chip interface that can be implanted within the skull, which it says could eventually help disabled patients to move and communicate again and also restore vision. The FDA’s breakthrough tag is given to certain medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. It is aimed at speeding up development and review of devices currently under development. The experimental device, known as Blindsight, “will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see,” Musk said in a post on X.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

U.S. To Convene Global AI Safety Summit In November

The Biden administration plans to convene a global safety summit on artificial intelligence, it said on September 18, as Congress continues to struggle with regulating the technology. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will host on Nov. 20-21 the first meeting of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes in San Francisco to “advance global cooperation toward the safe, secure, and trustworthy development of artificial intelligence.” Raimondo in May announced the launch of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes during the AI Seoul Summit in May, where nations agreed to prioritize AI safety, innovation and inclusivity. The goal of the San Francisco meeting is to jumpstart technical collaboration before the AI Action Summit in Paris in February.

AI Experts Ready Humanity’s “Last Exam”


A team of technology experts issued a global call on September 16 seeking the toughest questions to pose to artificial intelligence systems, which increasingly have aced popular benchmark tests. Dubbed “Humanity’s Last Exam” the project seeks to determine when expert-level AI has arrived. It aims to stay relevant even as capabilities advance in future years, according to the organizers, a non-profit called the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and the startup Scale AI. The call comes days after the maker of ChatGPT previewed a new model, known as OpenAI o1, which “destroyed the most popular reasoning benchmarks,” Dan Hendrycks, executive director of CAIS and an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI startup, told Reuters.

Lionsgate Studio Signs Deal With AI Startup Runway

The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood, reports the Wall Street Journal. Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process.

UN Advisory Board Makes Seven Recommendations For Governing AI

An artificial-intelligence advisory body at the United Nations on September 19 released its final report proposing seven recommendations to address AI-related risks and gaps in governance. The U.N. last year created a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of AI. The recommendations will be discussed during a U.N. summit held in September. With the development of AI in the hands of a few multinational companies, there is a danger that the technology could be imposed on people without them having a say in how it is used, the U.N. said in a statement. It recommended a new policy dialogue on AI governance, creating an AI standards exchange and a global AI capacity development network to boost governance capacities. Among other proposals, the U.N. wants a global AI fund to be established, which would address gaps in capacity and collaboration. It also advocates the formation of a global AI data framework to ensure transparency and accountability.Finally, the U.N. report proposed setting up a small AI office to support and coordinate the implementation of these proposals.

T-Mobile Strikes Deal With Open AI

T-Mobile said it would partner with OpenAI to build an artificial-intelligence platform designed to help the telecom company gain and keep customers, reports The Wall Street Journal. The companies said the new platform, called IntentCX, will harvest data on customer interactions from the millions of T-Mobile subscribers who use its T-Life app. The app, launched this year, combines several existing services like bill management, smartwatch integration and T-Mobile Tuesdays retail deals through a single portal.T-Mobile said the partnership will help the company automate tasks that might ordinarily demand a store visit or a call to a customer-service agent. The new platform would blend data on past service calls with network status information to troubleshoot their problems, for instance.

AGRICULTURE

Startup Partners With Corteva On Gene Editing Of Crops

Pairwise, a startup pioneering gene editing in plants, has closed a $40m series C funding round and formed a five-year joint venture collaboration with agtech giant Corteva to advance the tech to increase climate resilience in corn and soy..

CYBERSECURITY

Hacker Uses Chatbot on Telegram To Leak Details Of Indian Insurance Company’s Clients

Stolen customer data including medical reports from India’s biggest health insurer, Star Health, is publicly accessible via chatbots on Telegram, just weeks after Telegram’s founder was accused of allowing the messenger app to facilitate crime. The purported creator of the chatbots told a security researcher, who alerted Reuters to the issue, that private details of millions of people were for sale and that samples could be viewed by asking the chatbots to divulge them. Using the chatbots, Reuters was able to download policy and claims documents featuring names, phone numbers, addresses, tax details, copies of ID cards, test results and medical diagnoses.

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Quantum Computing Is Coming: Is Your Business Cyber Ready?

News broke this week that a new type of quantum computer could be built on the physics of sound waves. Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. are exploring the fundamental quantum properties of sound by splitting phonons in half and entangling them together. Their work may one day allow researchers to build a new type of quantum computer called a mechanical quantum computer. A quantum computer using phonons could be very compact and self-contained, built entirely on a chip similar to that of a laptop computer’s processor. Its small size could make it easier to implement and use, if researchers can further expand and improve phonon-based technologies.The Ptritzker School group’s experiments with phonons use qubits – the same technology that powers electronic quantum computers – which means that as the technology for phonons catches up, there’s the potential to integrate phonon-based computers with electronic quantum computers. Doing so could yield new, potentially unique computational abilities.

The news follows a June 14 announcement by IBM of a new breakthrough, published on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, demonstrating for the first time that quantum computers can produce accurate results at a scale of 100+ qubits reaching beyond leading classical approaches.

One of the ultimate goals of quantum computing is to simulate components of materials that classical computers have never efficiently simulated. Being able to model these is a crucial step towards the ability to tackle challenges such as designing more efficient fertilizers, building better batteries, and creating new medicines.

But today’s quantum systems are inherently noisy and they produce a significant number of errors that hamper performance. This is due to the fragile nature of quantum bits or qubits and disturbances from their environment. In their experiment, the IBM team demonstrates that it is possible for a quantum computer to outperform leading classical simulations by learning and mitigating errors in the system. The team used the IBM Quantum ‘Eagle’ quantum processor composed of 127 superconducting qubits on a chip to generate large, entangled states that simulate the dynamics of spins in a model of material and accurately predict properties such as its magnetization.

“This is the first time we have seen quantum computers accurately model a physical system in nature beyond leading classical approaches,” Darío Gil, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, said in a statement. “To us, this milestone is a significant step in proving that today’s quantum computers are capable, scientific tools that can be used to model problems that are extremely difficult – and perhaps impossible – for classical systems, signaling that we are now entering a new era of utility for quantum computing.”

While nobody knows for sure when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will arrive, these and other recent announcements indicate that the timeline is shrinking. Once the technology goes mainstream organizations will need to adapt to the risk posed by quantum computers, which have the potential to break many of the cryptographic systems that we rely on today for secure communications and data protection.

To help organizations prepare the World Economic Forum has just published a quantum tool kit that outlines a set of principles that organizations can use to help ensure they are ready to enter the quantum computing era. The toolkit provides organizations with a framework to assess their quantum readiness and identifies steps to prioritize and enhance their quantum security measures. It covers a range of areas, from strategizing about future-proof technology, embedding quantum risk in governance structures and existing risk management processes, to finding the right talent. The toolkit advises organizations to start now to give themselves sufficient time to experiment and get acquainted with the challenges and success factors that will allow a quantum-secure transition.

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK

HEALTH

U.S. Regulators Approve First Drug To Regulate Alzheimer’s

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first Alzheimer’s drug to slow the progression of the neurodegenerative disease, paving the way for millions of American patients to access the treatment. The regulator said on Thursday it would grant full approval to lecanemab, now known by the brand name Leqembi, which was developed by Japanese drugmaker Eisai and US biotech Biogen.

Top Israeli, U.S. Healthcare Providers Developing Pan-COVID Vaccine

Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, is teaming up with leading American health organizations to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that will protect against multiple variants. The Israeli tech site No Camels reports that Sheba will use its database, which is based on studies involving more than 9,000 of its healthcare staff, to help the development of the pan-vaccine. In the future, its research will also be applied to other viruses with the goal of preventing future pandemics. The Sheba Pandemic Research Institute (SPRI), a partnership between the medical center and the US government’s National Institute of Health, will join forces with the latter’s vaccine research center to develop the jab.They will also be collaborating with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, a US government biomedical research facility, and leading pharmaceutical company Sanofi, which has previously developed a COVID vaccine, to create it. “This partnership has the potential to change the future of virus care and can transform the way we prevent and manage future pandemics,” said Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, Director of SPRI and Infection Prevention & Control Unit at Sheba Medical Center.

MOBILITY

Toyota Claims Battery Breakthrough In A Potential Boost For Electric Cars

Toyota says it has made a technological breakthrough that will allow it to halve the weight, size and cost of batteries, in what could herald a major advance for electric vehicles.The world’s second largest carmaker was already pursuing a plan to roll out cars with advanced solid-state batteries, which offer benefits compared with liquid-based batteries, by 2025. On July 4, the Japanese company said it had simplified production of the material used to make them, hailing the discovery as a significant leap forward that could dramatically cut charging times and increase driving range.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

New York City Starts To Regulate AI Used In Hiring Tools

The Wall Street Journal reports that employers are preparing for a new law going into effect July 5 in New York City that will be the first in the nation to regulate the use of automation and artificial intelligence in hiring decisions. The law, known as NYC 144, requires employers that use certain kinds of software to assist with hiring and promotion decisions—including chatbot interviewing tools and resume scanners that look for keyword matches—to audit those tools annually for potential race and gender bias, and then publish the results on their websites. There is growing public concern about the role that algorithms play in essential facets of people’s lives, from employment and education to life insurance and mortgage lending. Because algorithms are difficult, if not impossible, for most people to untangle and understand, legislators have focused on mandating transparency rather than on regulating the software itself.

Harvard Professor Taps AI To Teach Online Computing Class

The world’s most popular online learning course, Harvard University’s CS50, is getting a ChatGPT-era makeover, reports Fortune Magazine. CS50, an introductory course in computer science attended by hundreds of students on-campus and over 40,000 online, plans to use artificial intelligence to grade assignments, teach coding and personalize learning tips, according to its Professor David J. Malan. “Providing support tailored to students’ specific questions has been a challenge at scale, with so many more students online than teachers,” said Malan, in a phone interview with Fortune. His team is now fine-tuning an AI system to mark students’ work, and testing a virtual teacher’s assistant (TA) to evaluate and provide feedback on students’ programming. The virtual TA asks rhetorical questions and offers suggestions to help students learn, rather than simply catching errors and fixing coding bugs, he said. Longer term, he expects this to give human TAs more time for in-person or Zoom-based office hours. Malan said CS50’s use of AI could highlight its benefits for education, particularly in improving the quality and access of online learning — an industry that Grand View Research forecasts to grow to $348 billion by 2030, nearly tripling from 2022. “Potentially, AI is just hugely enabling in education,” he said.

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Imagine fulfilling current global energy needs from humidity in the air.

Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla envisioned the concept of universal energy – power that would be drawn from the air itself and supplied to homes, machinery and vehicles, without wires or cables – as far back as 1899. While it may still sound like science fiction materials scientist Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin son Andriy and Sergiy are out to prove it can be done. They are scheduled to demo technology which allows direct conversion of humidity in the air into electricity at PUZZLE X, a conference about future technologies taking place in Barcelona November 7-9.

The trio, who co-founded Lisbon-based CascataChuva, are not alone in their attempts to change atmospheric humidity into renewable energy but the company says it is poised to become the first to commercialize the technology. By the end of next year, the company hopes to begin producing a one-cubit meter sized device that can produce 10 kilowatts of electrical energy a day – enough to power the needs of one household up to 200 square meters – for 20 years or more. The devices will be designed to power individual apartments and places that can’t use solar energy. “We can directly install our system on the balconies or inside apartments and supply them with electric energy,” says Sergiy Lyubchyk. The company believes the electricity it generates can initially be sold for about 17 cents per kilowatt, far cheaper than the average price tag of 40 cents to 50 cents in France or Germany or the 24 cents charged in Portugal. Once manufacturing scales up CascataChuva believes that it will be able to match the 14 cent per kilowatt hour price tag of solar energy. The company is in talks with Swedish energy company Vattenfall about testing direct connections to the electrical grid when it begins piloting its technology at the end of 2024.

Creating energy from humidity in the air is attracting growing interest due to its potential to power a variety of applications, including Internet of Things objects such as wearable health devices, electronic skin sensors, and information storage devices. A team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, for example, published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air – enough to light a single pixel on an LED screen. A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) has developed a new moisture-driven electricity generation (MEG) device made of a thin layer of fabric – about 0.3 millimetres (mm) in thickness – made from sea salt, carbon ink, and a special water-absorbing gel – to generate electricity from the interaction with moisture in the air. Australian company Strategic Elements is working with the University of New South Wales and the The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, (CSIRO) an Australian government agency responsible for scientific research to develop a flexible, self-charging battery technology that harvests electrical energy from moisture in the air to directly power devices. Meanwhile, Chinese scientists published a paper in Nature in June 2022 that explains how they were able to create sustainable power generation for at least one month from ambient humidity.

“What makes us all different is the materials we are using; there is no similarity in materials being used in all of these groups,” says Andriy Lyubchyk, CascataChuva’s CEO. Although the Portuguese startup is not ruling out Internet of Things applications it is first focusing on powering households . It is also targeting data centers and developing customized solutions for cooling systems such as refrigeration in tropical climates or as a source of power in areas of Africa or Asia where solar energy is not an option, such as jungles, says Svitlana Lyubchyk.

The company plans to generate revenue by selling humidity-to-electricity power systems to homeowners, commercial entities, independent power producers and resellers.

CascataChuva believes the technology could eventually generate as much as 500 X the global needs for electricity. “Our only limitation is geographies where there is a lack of humidity,” says Sergei Lyubchyk. For its technology to work humidity needs to be over 30%. “The higher the humidity, the better it is,” he says. Europe is an ideal environment, he says, as there is an average of 70% humidity.

A New Source Of Green, Renewable Energy

CascataChuva has a head start on other researchers.

When Svitlana Lyubchyk, a materials scientist, moved from Ukraine to Portugal about 20 years ago, she was hired as the coordinator of a European project to develop materials that will help kill airborne microorganisms. While she was doing these experiments her twin sons, who were students at the time, noticed that humidity was generating output signals from the samples they were investigating.“We immediately understood that this is a new source of energy,” she says.

The company has been working on the technology since 2015 and initially was ridiculed. “We were considered freaks,” says Andriy Lyubchyk.

Over time the Lyubchyks refined their approach by engineering a nanomaterial that captures airborne water molecules and directs their movement through nanoscale channels, yielding an electric charge. The challenge was to create a device that allow continuous operation under ambient conditions. This nanoscience breakthrough has helped the company achieve what the company calls “remarkable efficiency” in generating electricity.

The team built a 4 cm-diameter version of the device, which it patented in 2018, which can power a light bulb or a cell phone charger. It will demo this at PUZZLE X. The washing machine-sized device for powering homes it plans to produce in 2024 will be made up of about 20,000 of these devices stacked into a single cube. A converter, like those used with solar panels, will be needed to convert the energy into AC electricity.

The company has received € 5.5 million in non-equity grants from the European Innovation Council (EIC) as part of its CATCHER program.

The company’s work has not been published in scientific journals because of EU patent rules but it is being continuously peer-reviewed by independent top research/business experts that evaluate it for the EIC, says Svitlana Lyubchyk, who like her sons, has both Portuguese and Ukrainian citizenship.

CascataChuva is currently raising funding to ramp up manufacturing of the larger devices, using existing industrial machines.

“Our goal was to try and make the creation of energy using this process very efficient,” says Andriy Lyubchyk. “Now we have good results and are confident that we will be able to create a new renewable energy source to benefit humanity.”

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The 2025 Security Innovator Award

 

The Security Innovator Award is the industry’s only 100% peer-nominated program to recognize the innovative contributions made by individuals in the security industry – from integrators to consultants, to end-user practitioners, to manufacturers and service providers.

This award is open to anyone in the security industry to be able to recognize a fellow employee or a partner with whom they work closely for being innovative. We think it fills a unique void in this industry for peer-nominated recognition.

“The Security Innovator Awards emphasize industry innovation and reward those individuals who actively demonstrated an outstanding level of excellence,” explains SecurityInfoWatch Editorial Director Steve Lasky.

Your nominee can be an employee, colleague, friend, or business partner. There is no fee to nominate an individual. Nominations will close on May 16. 

Remember, this is an award for individuals, not organizations, and it is not a memorial award or a lifetime achievement award for a retired person. The nominations will be vetted to ensure that the person is an active member of the security industry. 

Honored individuals will be featured in the July issue of Security Business, the July/August issue of Security Technology Executive, and on SecurityInfoWatch.com.

There will be an opportunity to upgrade an honoree’s recognition with special packages designed to highlight and enhance the acknowledgment.

Visit: https://innovatorawards.org/

AI’s Energy Conundrum

Google said this week that its greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of the data centers it uses to underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to Net Zero by 2030 in doubt. It is the latest big tech company to publicly reveal a struggle to reconcile the energy use needed to fuel its AI ambitions with climate goals.

Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and is building its own AI tools, in May said its emissions have risen by almost a third since 2020, as the push to build out the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence threatens its climate goals. The nearly 30% increase in emissions was in large part due to the construction of the data centers that AI and cloud computing systems run on, Microsoft said in its annual sustainability report.

The computational power required for sustaining AI’s rise is doubling roughly every 100 days. To achieve a tenfold improvement in AI model efficiency, the computational power demand could surge by up to 10,000 times. The energy required to run AI tasks is already accelerating with an annual growth rate between 26% and 36%. This means by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021.

The AI lifecycle impacts the environment in two key stages: the training phase and the inference phase. In the training phase, models learn and develop by digesting vast amounts of data. Once trained, they step into the inference phase, where they’re applied to solve real-world problems. At present, the environmental footprint is split, with training responsible for about 20% and inference taking up the lion’s share at 80%. As AI models gain traction across diverse sectors, the need for inference and its environmental footprint will escalate.

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates recently claimed that artificial intelligence will be more of a help than a hindrance in achieving climate goals, despite growing concern that an increase in new data centers could drain green energy supplies.

Speaking at a June 27 conference in London hosted by his fund Breakthrough Energy ,Gates told journalists that AI would enable countries to use less energy, even as they require more data centers, by making technology and electricity grids more efficient.

That may turn out to be prescient but to align the rapid progress of AI with the imperative of environmental sustainability, a meticulously planned strategy is essential, Beena Ammanath, a board member at the Centre for Trustworthy Technology, wrote in an essay published by The World Economic Forum in April.

She cites research about the actionable steps that can be taken today to align AI progress with sustainability. For example, capping power usage during the training and inference phases of AI models presents a promising avenue for reducing AI energy consumption by 12% to 15%, with a small tradeoff on time to finish tasks with GPUs expected to take around 3% longer.

Another impactful tactic is optimized scheduling for energy savings. Shifting AI workloads to align with times of lower energy demand — like running shorter tasks overnight or planning larger projects for the cooler months, in place where air conditioner usage is widespread — can also lead to substantial energy savings, she notes.

Finally, moving towards the use of shared data centers and cloud computing resources instead of individually commissioning private infrastructure can centralize computational tasks in collective infrastructures and reduce the energy consumption associated with AI operations. This can also lead to financial savings on equipment and potentially lower energy bills, especially when resources are strategically located in areas with lower energy costs, says Ammanath.

Beyond immediate measures, the near-term focus should be on harnessing AI’s own capabilities to foster sustainability, she says. AI, used right, can be a powerful tool for meeting the ambitious target of tripling renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by the decade’s end, established in last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28).

AI can bolster climate and energy transition efforts in different ways, including the development of new materials for clean energy technologies; the optimization of solar and wind farms, improving energy storage capabilities and carbon capture processes, enhancing climate and weather predictions for better energy planning, and catalyzing novel breakthroughs in green energy sources like nuclear fusion., she says.

“By strategically harnessing AI to enhance our renewable energy landscape, the future of AI holds the promise of not only becoming green in its own operations but also aid in building a more sustainable world,” she says.

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK

DATA CENTERS

Europe Wants To Send Energy Guzzling Data Centers Into Space

The rise of artificial intelligence is skyrocketing demand for data centers to keep pace with the growing tech sector — and pushing Europe to explore space options for digital storage, in a bid to reduce its need for energy-hungry facilities on the ground, reports CNBC.

Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty, a 16-month-long study that explored the feasibility of launching data centers into orbit, has come to a “very encouraging” conclusion, according to Damien Dumestier, manager of the project.The 2 million euro ($2.1 million) ASCEND study, coordinated by Thales Alenia Space on behalf of the European Commission, claims that space-based data centers are technically, economically and environmentally feasible.“The idea [is] to take off part of the energy demand for data centers and to send them in space in order to benefit from infinite energy, which is solar energy,” Dumestier told CNBC.

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Making stuff here – leading innovator releases blueprint to reinvigorate Australian economy

Darwin, Australia, Feb. 26, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Australia is the land of plenty. But building home-grown, green and gold prosperity depends on a growing domestic industry that adds real value to our resource wealth. This means backing Australian businesses to not just deliver the raw materials – like iron ore and cotton – but to growing the value chain from sophisticated metals processing to weaving, data centres, and beyond. Doing so requires leadership, a willingness to put money, time, and support behind innovators.

As the co-founder of the Darwin-based high-speed metal 3D printing a start-up, SPEE3D, Camilleri has been at the forefront of commercialising Australian inventions for decades. But with their 3D metal printing technology in daily use on the battlefields of Ukraine and supporting the logistical planning of militaries from the United States to Japan – Camilleri and his colleagues know that having real support at home is essential for any local business with the next big idea.

As Australia’s next Federal Election races towards us, Camilleri’s blueprint is a call to arms for all those hoping to lead Australia in the coming years. Australian industry is in crisis and plans to rebuild a future-proofed Australia must be founded in our domestic industry. Australia spends just 1.8% of GDP on R&D – well below the OECD average of 2.7% and far behind leaders like Israel and South Korea, who are investing over 4%. As a consequence, Australia exported just $7.77 billion worth of high-tech goods in 2023, that’s equivalent to $294 per capita. Compare this to Singapore at $33,339 per capita, South Korea at $4,055, or Germany at $3,018.

Australia’s decision-makers know that this is a crisis. It was heartening to see that the first publication from the Government’s R&D review, released by the Minister for Industry last week, did not shy away from the consequences or proportions of our collapse in innovation. But we need real action. If innovators are to prosper in Australia, Government needs to find innovative solutions to the problem. This cannot wait for the conclusions of a year-long review; in an environment where technology makes quantum-leaps by the week, change cannot be postponed.

Camilleri said today that “meeting this challenge needs the commitment of every policymaker, every investor, every entrepreneur, and every Australian. We’re a country of disruptors, and we need to support that culture in industry.”

“Decisive actions taken today will allow small Australian manufacturers to climb the value chain and unite Australia’s world-leading foundations in energy, materials, and expertise to generate enormous economic returns.”

“The global 21st Century economy can be built here in Australia. But that means making stuff here, and its Australia’s innovators who will deliver it. For innovative industry to prosper, we must look beyond exporting raw materials and instead manufacture the high-tech goods of the future - from aerospace components to underwater vehicles.”

About Steven Camilleri and SPEE3D:

Steven Camilleri is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SPEE3D, an Australian company revolutionizing metal 3D printing with supersonic deposition technology—the world's first high-speed metal additive manufacturing system capable of producing industrial-grade parts at production scale. 

A seasoned innovator and holder of multiple patents, Steve has a Master’s degree in Engineering and has spent his career at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and commercial success. 

Before SPEE3D, Steve co-founded In Motion Technologies, a Charles Darwin University spin-off focused on axial flux electric motors. The company was later acquired by Fasco Motors, a division of NYSE-listed Regal Beloit, further solidifying his track record of bringing breakthrough technologies to market. 

His product innovations span industries, from world-record-holding solar cars to high-efficiency electric motors, electric bicycles, and advanced pool pumps. His ability to bridge research and real-world applications has made him a leading figure in advanced manufacturing and engineering. 



Beyond his technical expertise, Steve is a lifelong learner with diverse interests across science, engineering, and manufacturing—and he speaks several languages. He is committed to disruptive innovation, proving that bold ideas, backed by smart execution, can redefine industries. 

Visit: https://innovatorawards.org/