Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, is battling inertia.

After more than two decades in the tech industry—including stints at Google and LinkedIn—he’s found that “even the slowest parts of the technology industry are changing fast relative to everywhere else.”

That pace, Scott told us, can make it difficult for some companies to slow down and develop tech carefully. Ahead of last week’s Microsoft Build, the company’s annual headline event for developers, Emerging Tech Brew spoke with Scott about Microsoft’s approach to responsible AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how important it is not only to mitigate the risks of AI systems, but also to know when to just stop developing certain projects. What exactly would warrant stopping development of an AI project?

A few years ago, we were really excited about a large language model that we were developing. The plan had been to open-source the model and all of its weights to the public. As we started running the large language model through our responsible AI process, a whole bunch of stuff got flagged—where, if we had released it to the public, we wouldn’t have known how to control for a whole bunch of these potential harms that the process was uncovering.

I was one of the initial people who was pushing pretty hard to get it open-source because I wanted to get it into the hands of researchers outside of the company, so they could play with it, do research, and investigate—and, honestly, so they could even help us uncover some of the harms that we weren’t anticipating or some of the beneficial uses that we hadn’t imagined.

But we decided not to release the model in that form, and instead, we built an academic program where we could, in a controlled way, partner with research institutions to give them access to the model so that they could study it and scrutinize it—but also, where we didn’t have to worry about malicious actors grabbing it and using it for something that was actively harmful to society. So that’s a concrete example of something that we just stopped in the tracks because it didn’t pass responsible AI muster.

Read the full interview with Scott here, including his thoughts on regulation and Microsoft’s new risk flagging tools.—HF

Weeds, the enemy of gardeners and farmers everywhere, could soon meet their robotic match.

What’s new: FarmWise, a California-based weed-removal startup that works with some of the largest farms in the US, has raised $45 million in Series B funding, its co-founder and CEO, Seb Boyer, told Emerging Tech Brew.

FarmWise’s main product is Titan, an AI-powered robot trained to identify and cut down weeds without harming the desired plant.

• The company is part of a broader crop of precision-agriculture startups looking to harness tech to simplify processes for farmers while limiting the amount of pesticides and herbicides used to grow.
• Around a decade ago, VC funding for agtech startups was ~$230.1 million. Since then, funding has grown to $10.5 billion in 2021, a 41.6% compound annual growth rate, per Pitchbook.

FarmWise’s robots can identify and cut a weed from the ground in less than half a second, removing weeds at 10x–15x the speed of a single farmer, according to Boyer. The company also claims its tech has comparable accuracy to manual processes, and “typically leaves less than 10% of the weeds behind while leaving intact more than 99.5% of the crops it works on,” per Boyer.

The round was led by Fall Line Capital and Middleland Capital, with participation from Taylor Farms and GV, as well as existing investors Playground Global and Calibrate Ventures.

Looking ahead…This latest round of funding brings FarmWise’s total to over $65 million since its founding in 2017.

Boyer said the money will be used to expand the scope of the 75-person company, training the Titans to be able to distinguish additional crops like tomatoes, peppers, and melons, while also expanding the company’s geographical scope into states like Iowa, Oregon, and Florida.

Read the full story here.—JM

As we mentioned earlier: new month, new theme. And that, of course, means we’re leaving May’s theme in the rearview. But not without a quick recap.

Here’s what we wrote about space tech last month:

This startup wants to help space companies navigate increasingly crowded night skies. Privateer, Steve Wozniak’s new venture, created a tool to help space companies with a simple but elusive task—figuring out exactly where things are located in space.

Starlink struck its first in-flight wi-fi deals. Here’s what it means. In April, Starlink made a flurry of announcements surrounding airline partnerships. So, does that mean the satellite-broadband company is about to make in-flight wi-fi actually…good? We spoke with a satellite industry expert to break it all down.

NASA’s Planetary Defense team builds software to detect asteroids before they hit. Ever wonder how scientists scan the sky for, uh, “potentially destructive objects”? At least part of the process involves asteroid detection software, which Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helped create. We spoke with Farnocchia about the tech behind asteroid detection.

NASA is about to launch a CubeSat trial balloon for its moon-mission reboot. The legendary US space agency is at it again (read: going back to the moon). But first it has to test out the route—a task for which it’s using a 55-pound CubeSat. These are the companies behind NASA’s trial balloon.

And you can view all of the stories in one place by clicking here.—DM

Last month, we launched IT Brew specifically for IT professionals looking to stay in the know—and have a little fun while doing it.

From cybersecurity to big data to software development to gaming, IT Brew drops all the latest industry news, trends, and insights right into your inbox twice a week.

Click here to subscribe.

Stat: New York State is giving out robot companions to more than 800 older people.

Quote: “At the end of the day, the market is too big and the opportunity is too great to completely dissipate.”—Paul Mulé, senior vice president of finance at climate software startup Arcadia, to E&E News, re: the climate tech’s prospects in a potential recession

Read: Can the most abundant element in the universe be a clean fuel source?

Stay up to date on e-commerce trends. Retail Brew covers DTC, CPG trends, sustainability, and more. Join 150,000+ e-commerce pros who already subscribe to stay in the know on the biggest issues, pain points, and trends in the industry. Sign up here.

• The US once again has the fastest supercomputer in the world—maybe. There could be speedier ones in China, but the operators of those computers didn’t submit test results for evaluation.
• Venture funding in China fell at nearly double the rate of the US across the first four months of 2022, and almost four times faster than the global pace.
• Stellantis and Samsung are partnering to build a $2.5 billion battery plant in Indiana.
• Oura, the smart-ring company, has collabed with…Gucci…on a fancy new ring.

Snap poll: Would you buy a wearable device that is worn somewhere other than the wrist (e.g., smart ring, smart clothing)?
Yes
No

Already own one

Last week, we asked all of you if you’d hail a fully driverless robotaxi, if given the chance. Of the nearly 2,500 respondents…

• Nearly two-thirds, or 64%, said yes.
• More than one-third, or 36%, said no.

And last year, we asked pretty much the same question to a representative group of US adults via the Harris Poll. The data is a bit more detailed and better shown in chart form, so, uh, here it is:

+ While we’re here: Here’s what it’s like to ride in a fully driverless robotaxi.

For mRNA’s next act: The biotech could help repair broken hearts.

For proton photos: New visualizations show the quarks and gluons that make up protons.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• The lightest and most abundant element could also be key to a net-zero future
• NASA is about to launch a CubeSat trial balloon for its moon mission reboot
• A primer on machine learning operations