Morning Brew - ☕ Red team

Plus, a day in the life of a vertical farmer.
Morning Brew June 15, 2022

Emerging Tech Brew

Workiva

It’s Wednesday, and about one year and one bear market later, some of the EV startups that SPAC’d in 2021 have found themselves on a rocky road.

The most extreme example so far is Electric Last Mile Solutions, a fleet-focused EV startup that SPAC’d at a $1.4 billion valuation last year. On Sunday, it announced it plans to file for bankruptcy and liquidate due to an inability to raise more money or find a buyer. A capital-intensive business + liquidity crunch + supply-chain issues = a bad time.

In today’s edition:

🟥
Big Tech’s AI model breakers
A day in the life of a vertical farmer

Hayden Field, Jordan McDonald, Dan McCarthy

AI

The Big Tech teams that break AI for a living

The Big Tech teams that break AI for a living Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photos: Getty Images

It was a snowy day in February, and Amanda Minnich was attacking an AI system.

With one block of code—and no other details—she needed to hack into one of the most complex machine learning systems operated by a Microsoft partner.

  • Minnich tried a few different approaches, first attempting to use a single image to confuse the system, then trying it with multiple images.
  • Finally, she made a last-ditch effort to hoodwink the AI by replaying a sequence of images on a constant loop—Minnich described it as being like Ocean’s Eleven, where the robbers fool security by replacing the live feed with older security-camera footage.

It worked: She was in, with control over the AI system. Microsoft congratulated Minnich—breaking into AI systems was her job, after all. As a member of Microsoft’s AI “red team,” Minnich helps stress-test the company’s ML systems—the models, the training data that fuels them, and the software that helps them operate.

Big picture: “Red teams” are relatively new to AI. The term can be traced back to 1960s military simulations used by the Department of Defense and is now largely used in cybersecurity, where internal IT teams are tasked with thinking like adversaries to uncover systems vulnerabilities.

But since 2019, Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google have implemented versions of AI red teams to reveal shortcomings, bias, and security flaws in their machine learning systems. The teams are part of a larger push for AI ethics and governance in recent years, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill.

Read the full story on Microsoft and Google’s AI-breakers here.HF

        

VERTICAL FARMING

Tending the vertical fields

Tending the vertical fields Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photos: Bowery Farming Inc.

Farming tends to be a generational business, with legacy farms often being handed down between family members. And for its part, the USDA considers anyone who has operated a farm for less than 10 years to be a “beginning farmer or rancher.”

The great indoors: But hands-on experience is less important for some roles in the world of indoor farming. Although indoor farming is far from dominating agricultural output, money has poured into the space in the past decade, with multimillion-dollar funding rounds fueling an industry now valued at $79.3 billion, which is expected to grow to $155.6 billion by 2026, per Pitchbook.

  • One example: Bowery Farming, an over-600-person operation that has the capacity to produce more than 47 million servings of leafy greens per year across its three US-based vertical farms, with the help of a proprietary OS and a slew of other technologies.
  • At Bowery’s Nottingham, Maryland, farm, “very few” of the facility’s 70+ full-time employees have backgrounds in traditional farming, Bowery Chief Science Officer Henry Sztul told Emerging Tech Brew during a May visit to the facility.

“I define a grower as someone with horticultural experience that can diagnose what’s going well and what needs improvement from the perspective of the plants in the system. We have one grower,” Sztul said. “The profile of our modern farmers are people who might be more akin to working in a manufacturing-type setting. There doesn’t need to be many people here. What we call our ‘farmers’ are really out helping with the seeding, with the transplanting, with the harvesting, with the packing.”

Day in the life: One of Bowery’s farmers is Autumn Hopkins, a Bel Air, Maryland, resident who has risen to become a farm operations supervisor at the Nottingham facility. Hopkins started at Bowery in June 2020, not long after the facility opened. Previously, her only experience with food was in the restaurant industry—she said she joined Bowery based on a whim with a desire to try something new.

Read more about Hopkins’s role as a vertical farmer here.JM

        

TOGETHER WITH WORKIVA

Where ESG experts align

Workiva

When you strengthen your ESG strategy, you drive stakeholder value.

So why not learn how to do this while you network with industry innovators and collect CPE credits? You, too, can enjoy this win-win scenario at Amplify by Workiva, the conference dedicated to helping you elevate your ESG strategy for success.

Join in person or online from September 12–15 and attend tracks on ESG, accounting and finance, or audit, risk, and compliance featuring Workiva and industry experts. You can earn up to 18 CPE credits just for attending and soaking up all the knowledge. Select CPE-eligible sessions will be live-streamed, so there’s plenty of Amplify action for everyone.

Register now to snag early-bird pricing.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

  • Amazon announced it will begin testing its “Amazon Prime Air” drone delivery service for the ~3,500 residents of Lockeford, California, later this year.
  • Royal Caribbean is exploring adding Starlink wi-fi to its cruise liners, according to an FCC filing.
  • The DOT proposed new rules on minimum standards for a national EV charging network, one of the first steps toward widespread EV adoption.
  • We’re hosting our first-ever Emerging Tech Brew Summit: The Next Decade of Tech, where we will chat with leaders and innovators about everything from EVs to lab-grown meat to Crispr.
  • Google engineer Blake Lemoine was placed on leave after claiming that its LaMDA machine learning model was sentient. The company, and the vast majority of AI experts, disagreed with Lemoine’s assessment.

Snap poll: Do you expect to experience sentient AI in your lifetime?

Yes

No
IDK

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

Vanta

Compliance doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, with Vanta it can be super simple. Trusted by thousands of SaaS companies, Vanta automates the pricey, time-consuming process of prepping for and obtaining the most accepted security certifications, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more. Connect Vanta to your business tools for smooth sailing—and get a $1k discount here.

BITS AND BYTES

Stat: South Korea has the highest industrial-robot density in the world at 932 per 10,000 industrial workers, per International Federation of Robotics data cited by Rest of World.

Quote: “Lithium-ion is the best battery we’ve ever had…However, it can’t do everything.”—George Crabtree, director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, on the potential of solid-state

Read: How one company is automating beehives.

Inflation intel: For CFOs, tracking external inflation is a huge priority. That’s why Oracle NetSuite’s guide, 4 Inflation Metrics to Watch Now, breaks down tracking tools and offers free resources for pivotal decision-making. Get it here.*

*This is sponsored advertising content.

READER POLL

Last week, another Apple event passed by without the company mentioning the worst-kept secret in tech: Its AR/VR headset ambitions.

We asked all of you which company you’d rather purchase an AR/VR headset from—Apple or Meta (or neither). Here are the results, courtesy of 3,341 Emerging Tech Brew readers:

  • 17% said Meta.
  • 56% said they’d choose Apple.
  • And, interestingly, 27% said they would never buy an AR/VR headset at all!

Last July…We ran a similar survey with the general US population—and more brand options—and the consensus was more or less the same: Apple > Meta…and any other option.

  • Over one-third (35%) of respondents to that survey named Apple as their first-choice company to buy a device from, while only 5% named Facebook (#throwback).

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For a fresh slice of pi: For 157 days, a Google engineer ran a program to calculate 100 trillion digits of pi, officially breaking the record for most-calculated digits of pi. In case you’re wondering, the 100 trillionth decimal place is…zero.

For layoff-era hiring content: Tech companies have cut at least 19,000 jobs since the start of this year, and there’s no sign of a slowdown on that front. Here’s a report on the state of developer hiring.

FROM THE CREW

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The Excel shortcuts you need can be at your fingertips… literally. Shop Excel Dictionary’s Excel Shortcut Guide Mouse Pads—available in Mac and PC versions.

Shop now.

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Written by Hayden Field and Jordan McDonald

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