Author: GT

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The forecasts are eye-popping: utilities saying they’ll need two or three times more electricity within a few years to power massive new data centers that are feeding a fast-growing AI economy.But the challenges — some say the impossibility — of building new power plants to meet that demand so quickly has set off alarm bells for lawmakers, policymakers and regulators who wonder if those utility forecasts can be trusted.One burning question is whether the forecasts are based on data center projects that may never get built — eliciting concern that regular ratepayers could be stuck with…

Payment technology company Pine Labs, backed by PayPal and Mastercard, won over public investors on Friday, finishing its first day of trading 14% higher even after lowering its valuation for its $440 million IPO. This makes it the second-largest Indian fintech listing this year after online brokerage Groww’s nearly $750 million debut earlier this week. The stock opened at ₹242 and rose as high as ₹284 before settling at ₹252, up from the issue price of ₹221, resulting in a market capitalization of ₹289 billion (approximately $3.3 billion) for the Gurugram-based company. It’s a step down from Pine Labs’ 2022…

Meta is getting ready to launch third-party chat integration on WhatsApp in Europe, the company announced on Friday. The tech giant notes that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) requires it to give users in Europe the option to chat with people using third-party messaging services that have chosen to make their apps interoperable. “Following successful small-scale tests over the past months, the option for WhatsApp users to chat with users of messaging apps BirdyChat and Haiket directly via third-party chats will soon be rolling out across Europe,” Meta wrote in a blog post. “This marks a significant milestone in…

A German court has found that Google has abused its dominant market position in the price comparison sector and ruled that the company must pay a total of €572 million ($665.6 million) in damages to two German price comparison companies, according to a report by Reuters. Google must pay the price comparison platform Idealo about €465 million (about $540 million) in damages, and €107 million (about $124 million) to Producto, another price comparison tool, the report said. Idealo had claimed damages of €3.3 billion from Google, arguing that its lawsuit was a direct response to the European Court of Justice’s…

Boeing has signed a deal with startup Charm Industrial to remove 100,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Charm collects agricultural and forestry waste and uses heat to turn it into a product it calls “bio-oil,” a messy jumble of hydrocarbons that it injects underground, including into former oil wells. Once sequestered, Charm can sell carbon removal credits to companies. Axios first reported on the startup’s deal with Boeing. Aviation has made little progress on cutting its carbon emissions. That has left companies in the sector searching for alternatives. Carbon removal has emerged as a contender given that it…

Five people have pleaded guilty to helping North Koreans defraud U.S. companies by posing as remote IT workers, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Friday. The five people are accused of working as “facilitators” who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release. These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un’s…

OpenAI says ChatGPT will now ditch the em dashes if you tell it to. The telltale sign that supposedly signals text written by AI has popped up everywhere in recent months, including in school papers, emails, comments, customer service chats, LinkedIn posts, online forums, ad copy, and more. The inclusion of the em dash has led people to criticize those writers for being lazy and turning to an AI chatbot to do their work. Of course, many have also argued for the em dash, saying it’s been a part of their writing well before LLMs adopted the punctuation. However, the…

Let’s be honest, most tech wearables are bulky and not exactly what you’d describe as pretty. But when you’re regularly wearing something on your hands, you probably want it to look nice and maybe even blend in with the rest of your jewelry. That’s the idea behind Oura’s newest smart ring, the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic. The Ring 4 Ceramic is Oura’s first collection of smart rings that doesn’t feature metallic finishes. Instead, they’re made from zirconia ceramic, a more wear-resistant ceramic, which Oura says allows for both style and comfort.   I’ve tested the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic for the past three weeks, and here’s my experience…

Electricity prices are surging, voters are growing angry, and the artificial intelligence industry’s data centers are increasingly a target for blame with U.S. mid-term elections on the horizon.Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.The reasons for price increases are often complex and vary by region. But in at least three states with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period. Prices, for example, surged by 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and…

Two teenage founders walked into Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s backyard with an idea no one in agriculture seemed to want — an AI model to help design better pesticides. By the time they left, they had a new business model, a new company, and eventually, Graham’s backing. Now, that reimagined company — Bindwell — has raised $6 million in a seed round, co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital, with a personal check from Graham himself. Rather than selling AI tools to legacy agrochemical giants, the startup is using its own models to design new pesticide molecules in-house and…