Gregory Barber

The biggest fight of the generative AI revolution is headed to the courtroom—and no, it’s not about the latest boardroom drama at OpenAI. Book authors, artists, and coders are challenging the practice of teaching AI models to replicate their skills using their own work as a training manual. The debate centers on the billions of works underpinning the impressive wordsmithery of tools like ChatGPT, the coding prowess of Github’s Copilot, and artistic flair of image generators like that of startup…

The robotic line cooks were deep in their recipe, toiling away in a room tightly packed with equipment. In one corner, an articulated arm selected and mixed ingredients, while another slid back and forth on a fixed track, working the ovens. A third was on plating duty, carefully shaking the contents of a crucible onto a dish. Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley, nodded approvingly as a robotic arm delicately pinched and capped an empty plastic…

Earlier this month, one corner of the internet got a little bit greener, thanks to a first-of-its-kind geothermal operation in the northern Nevada desert. Project Red, developed by a geothermal startup called Fervo, began pushing electrons onto a local grid that includes data centers operated by Google. The search company invested in the project two years ago as part of its efforts to make all of its data centers run on green energy 24/7. Project Red is small—producing between 2 and 3 megawatts…

In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. DeepMind’s own experimental software had made a very specific prognosis of landfall much farther north. “We were riveted to our seats,” says research scientist Rémi Lam. A w…

The plan for the first small-scale US nuclear reactor was exciting, ambitious, and unusual from the get-go. In 2015, a group of city- and county-run utilities across the Mountain West region announced that they were betting on a new frontier of nuclear technology: a mini version of a conventional plant called a “small modular reactor” (SMR). Advocates said the design, just 9 feet in diameter and 65 feet tall, was poised to resurrect the US nuclear industry, which has delivered only two completed…

The pranksters were first branded as “Luddites” by online critics. Ignorant vandals, they meant. Tantruming technophobes who were attacking the very notion of progress. Somehow the activists had missed the memo about how electric robotaxis would cut carbon emissions and vastly improve road safety. The rebels embraced the label. In a response posted on social media, they offered up a quick history lesson, explaining that the original Luddites, the cottage workers of the early 19th century who too…

For those in charge of converting solar radiation into electricity, that remaining fraction provides little comfort. From California to Texas, grid operator estimates indicate that more than a third of the country’s solar capacity—enough to power about 20 million homes—will be unavailable at some point during the three-hour celestial event tomorrow, presenting a test for electric grids. The challenge is twofold. Solar power is now far more dominant than it was in 2017, the last time a solar ecli…

Typically, weather forecasters would rely on models of atmospheric physics to make that call. This time, they had another tool: a new generation of AI-based weather models developed by chipmaker Nvidia, Chinese tech giant Huawei, and Google’s AI unit DeepMind. For Lee, the three tech-company models predicted a path that would strike somewhere between Rhode Island and Nova Scotia—forecasts that generally agreed with the official, physics-based outlook. Land-ho, somewhere. The devil, of course, wa…

Apple claims its new Apple Watch is carbon neutral and has done impressive work to decarbonize its supply chain, but making new stuff always leaves a mark on the climate.

Earlier this year, National Grid, the local utility, presented the village with a new solution: a microgrid anchored by 12 trailer-sized containers filled with lithium-ion batteries. Raquette Lake experiences 12 times more outages than less remote customers, the utility says. The 20-megawatt battery bank would put an end to that. It would also contribute to New York’s goal of installing 6 gigawatts of energy storage by 2030, a crucial part of keeping the grid stable as the state rapidly retires…