Leaps and bounds in AI capabilities in recent months are making their mark up and down supply chains, from manufacturing to warehousing.

When it comes to product design, AI is bringing streamlined processes and even advancements in sustainability. But standing between product design and an AI automation takeover is a data problem.

Dirk Hartmann, head of technology innovation at Siemens Digital Industries Software, explained that product design requires an immense number of inputs, including materials, shapes, and the exact internal mechanisms. That means that algorithms need more data to learn from than if they were just asked to create, say, an image. And a lot of that data is protected intellectual property.

To illustrate the IP problem, Hartmann used the example of an image generator trained on pictures of cars made by a single company. It would produce limited results and likely fail to drive innovation, he told Tech Brew.

“Obviously, the big vision is there, that you can use the AI to automate what the designers do,” Hartmann said. “But under the constraint that, on the one hand…[we’re working with] very limited data. And on the other hand, if you look at ChatGPT as an example, it starts to hallucinate at some point. That is not something you can afford in engineering.”

Keep reading here.—MA

That’s Brave’s mission in a nutshell—to deliver a suite of internet privacy tools all in one easy package.

The Brave browser blocks ads and trackers on every website, even YouTube. It also blocks fingerprinting, cookies, and those annoying cookie consent notices.

Without all that junk, every webpage you visit looks cleaner, loads faster, and is *way* more private. You’ll also save time, mobile data, Wi-Fi bandwidth, and device battery life.

Here’s the cherry on top: Brave has a truly independent search engine, a built-in VPN that works across desktop and mobile, and even encrypted video calling.

Ready for the privacy super app? It takes only 60 seconds to switch. Upgrade your browser now.

Despite a challenging economy and an ever-warming climate, a majority of Fortune 1000 companies will increase their spending on sustainability initiatives in the next 12 months, investing in technologies like battery storage and energy optimization software.

That’s according to a survey of Fortune 1000 C-suite executives conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of clean energy storage provider Stem, Inc., which found that the vast majority of surveyed executives (93%) said energy challenges, including record temperatures, high prices, and limited power supply during periods of peak demand, will have a negative impact on their businesses in the next year.

To mitigate those challenges, they’re taking advantage of a wide range of technologies, including smart energy storage, energy optimization software, and artificial intelligence, Stem CTO Larsh Johnson told Tech Brew.

This diverse approach demonstrates a high level of “detail and understanding of what it’s going to take” to reach sustainability goals, Johnson said.

“That level of understanding appeared stronger than I thought it would,” he added.

Keep reading here.—MA

The Cigna Group, the healthcare company that employs over 70,000 people globally, says that on any given day, it’s hiring for 3,000–5,000 open positions.

But a few years ago, the firm’s vice president of talent acquisition, Amanda Day, realized those open positions weren’t on the radar of some of Cigna’s most promising candidates: its own employees.

“There’s no greater talent pool than your own,” Day told HR Brew. “And unfortunately, our ability to get out to the masses internally was not working well for us.” She said that employees had an easier time finding open positions at Cigna on LinkedIn than through their internal talent system.

Fearing Cigna would lose valuable talent to external competition, Day and her team decided to overhaul their internal talent management system using artificial intelligence.

Keep reading here.—CV

Unleash the smart revolution, from idea to reality. Join us for our virtual event on July 25, sponsored by NI, as we dive into the minds of tech innovators. Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Emerson Collective, will unveil the secret steps bridging big ideas and product launches. Sign up today!

*This editorial content is supported by NI.

Stat: 92.6%. That’s the accuracy rate of a Google AI model’s responses to medical queries, Bloomberg reported. The journal Nature published research on the model, with Bloomberg noting that “when the model was posed medical questions, a pool of clinicians rated its responses to be 92.6% in line with the scientific consensus, just shy of the 92.9% score that real-life medical professionals received, according to a statement from Nature.”

Quote: “The most unsettling aspect of AI-generated text is how it tries to divorce the act of writing from the effort of doing it, which is to say, from the processes of thought itself.”—New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka, in an article detailing “a robot version of [his] writer self”

Read: Meet the psychedelic boom’s first responders (Wired)

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Pull the threads: The terminally online may have chosen the heir to Twitter. The Wall Street Journal reported that the introduction of Meta’s Twitter dupe, Threads, appears to be hitting Twitter where it hurts: Traffic to Twitter’s website was down by 5% “in the first two days that Threads was fully available.”

Heads up: We’re not terribly worried about an AI apocalypse just yet, but there are real dangers to the technology happening right now. Morning Brew’s Money Scoop has tips on how to avoid falling victim to an AI voice scam.