The country’s biggest automaker said it will turn a significant portion of its cars into backup power sources for homes in the next two years.

GM announced this week that it plans to expand vehicle-to-home (V2H) charging for all electric vehicles on its Ultium platform by model year 2026. That means drivers who own vehicles compatible with GM’s Ultium battery and energy management system will be able to tap their cars for extra power in the event of blackouts or strained energy grids.

Plug it in, plug it in: The news comes as power companies and government agencies are increasingly experimenting with how such power sharing between cars and homes—as well as between cars and the grid at large—can help relieve utilities taxed by rising energy usage.

Keep reading here.—PK

A new AI champion has arrived. Miso Robotics is bringing AI to the single-largest employer in the US: fast-food restaurants.

Fast-food restaurants need help filling up to 2m jobs, creating a massive opportunity for AI to help bridge the gap. It’s one of the big reasons investors have poured $28b into food tech over the last year.

And Miso Robotics is quickly cementing its place atop the AI podium.

They’ve launched 16x more AI-powered robotics than all their competitors combined, cooking for brands ranging from Jack in the Box to Chipotle.

Now accredited investors have the exclusive opportunity to join Miso Robotics as a shareholder. Accredited? Invest in Miso Robotics here.

There’s a generative AI craze sweeping Silicon Valley, but so far, much of the attention has centered on Microsoft, Google, and, to a lesser extent, Meta. In contrast, Apple’s earnings call this month was mostly bereft of AI buzzwords—the only mentions of the technology came from a brief analyst question toward the end.

And while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy proclaimed in the company’s earnings call that “every single one of our businesses inside of Amazon” has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,” the quarterly update was light on specific projects beyond an AI-assisted “coding companion.”

That doesn’t mean Apple and Amazon are sitting out the race to commercialize large language models (LLMs).

• Bloomberg reported last month that Apple is “quietly” readying a framework called Ajax for the creation of foundation models, as well as an internal chatbot service.
• There’s also the question of how each company might integrate LLMs into their respective voice assistants.

Apple’s slumping sales: Apple CEO Tim Cook told Reuters that a jump in research and development spending for the fiscal year was in part related to the tech giant’s funding of AI projects.

Keep reading here.—PK

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a business association whose member companies include Apple, Uber, Google, and Meta, is placing its bets on a handful of climate-related policy initiatives that California voters could see on the ballot in 2024.

Last Tuesday, SVLG, which was founded in 1977 by HP’s David Packard, announced the start of three new initiatives to create a more synchronous power grid, boost climate resiliency, and promote clean energy investments in the region.

• One initiative, the Transmission + Interconnection Working Group, supports the creation of a coordinated power market in the West via a Western Regional Transmission Organization (WRTO).

Translation? Silicon Valley wants to integrate the management of California’s power grid with that of other Western states. Proponents of a proposal to do just that—which is making its way through the California legislature—claim Regional Transmission Organizations are the most efficient way to move toward 100% clean energy production.

Keep reading here.—MA

Stat: 158. That’s the number of “mostly rural” counties in which Verizon says it’s expanding its 5G bandwidth availability to customers. (The Verge)

Quote: “We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews, and with the recent advancements in generative AI, we believe we have the technical means to address this long-standing customer need.”—Vaughn Schermerhorn, Director of Community Shopping at Amazon, in a blog post announcing the company’s AI integration into its customer reviews system

Read: Lina vs. the dark arts: The FTC wants Big Tech to know it’s watching (The Information)