On a recent Saturday, I faced a new dilemma in a Washington, DC, parking garage: Skip an artist I like (Fletcher) at a music festival, or rent an electric vehicle to get to the show.

I’d already missed part of the All Things Go lineup that afternoon while Hertz sorted out a rental-car shortage. The company eventually offered to fulfill my prepaid reservation with a Polestar 2, a boxy silver unit that boasted, well, earlier availability—but no gas tank.

As a city dweller who hasn’t owned a car in years and rarely drives, I already have some roadway anxiety, and throwing an unfamiliar vehicle into the mix didn’t help. But how hard could it really be, I thought as I sat in the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirrors. As it turns out: not super intuitive in some aspects, shockingly user-friendly in others.

EV Rider: As of July, about 10% of Hertz’s fleet was composed of EVs, meaning that many drivers could potentially be plunged into the world of EVs out of necessity. (Other rental companies are investing in EV fleets, just not as heavily.) While Hertz tries to make the experience accessible for the uninitiated—for example, by emailing guides to drivers who request EV rentals—I found many of the norms associated with gas-guzzlers simply aren’t there for reference, like the initial rev to indicate the engine is on.

Keep reading here.—KG

Tech startup with traction: Turn your phone from a cost to an income source. Intriguing idea, isn’t it?

This is why eyes are on the launch of Mode’s pre-IPO offering, the latest in a series of impressive raises among smartphone innovators, likely spurred by Apple’s recent $3t valuation.

Mode saw 150x revenue growth from 2019 to 2022, a leap that has made them one of America’s fastest-growing companies. That’s all thanks to EarnPhone, a budget smartphone that’s helped consumers earn and save $150m+ for activities like listening to music, playing games, and...even charging their devices.

Claim your exclusive 80% bonus: $0.16/share.

Like cryptocurrency and virtual reality before it, the new hype wave of generative AI may be losing some of its luster.

That’s according to a new set of tech predictions from analysts at research firm CCS Insight, who forecast a “cold shower” for the hype around AI in 2024 as “cost, risk, and complexity” start to bog down big dreams.

• The firm said risks around potential regulation and societal implications could also put a damper on early excitement.

“We think that the hype in 2023 has somewhat ignored some of the big obstacles that generative AI faces, and that ultimately, when people kind of wake up to the fact that there are huge challenges around this technology, it will slow progress in the short term,” CCS Insight Chief Analyst Ben Wood told Tech Brew.

Stuck between stations: While Wood predicts that deep-pocketed tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and Google will continue to compete in the space, he expects developers and smaller organizations will soon wake up to the astronomical costs and compute power needed to make generative AI work.

Keep reading here.—PK

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

My job as a machine learning sales engineer at Howso is to interface between the customers, the engineering team, and the sales and marketing teams to help facilitate understanding of our AI products. Often, each of these groups—all of which have a stake in how our products are utilized—are siloed, and bridging communication between them can be difficult. Translating the technical into nontechnical language, and vice versa, is a skill I strive to constantly improve.

Perhaps the time I spent during my chemical engineering PhD struggling to describe my complex research in accessible terms helped me recognize the importance of this. Technologists like myself often forget how critical clear communication is for any product to be successful. In the field of AI in particular, there is so much hype, but very little clear and concise communication around how products will directly impact companies and society. I see my role as the mediator who makes that type of communication happen.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

I’m really excited about the future of Howso’s understandable AI technology, which is a totally different AI paradigm than the mainstream neural network-driven modeling methods getting so much attention right now. The Howso team has developed our AI Engine, where predictions are made directly from data, not an inexplicable mathematical equation. Thus, every modeling decision the AI makes is fully auditable because each prediction can be attributed directly back to the data that influenced it.

Keep reading here.—AS

Stat: 21 months. That’s about the amount of time it took for Microsoft to acquire Activision-Blizzard, if you measure it between the day the company announced its intention to do so and the recent conclusion—and de facto approval—of a British government investigation into the proposed deal.

Quote: “Cloud gaming is an important new way for gamers to access games and this deal could have seriously undermined its potential development. On that we, the European Commission and the US Federal Trade Commission are in full agreement. Where we differ is on how we solve that problem.”—Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel that reviewed the original Microsoft deal, in a press release from the UK Competition and Markets Authority

Read: US antitrust enforcer says pressing on with fight against Microsoft/Activision deal (Reuters)

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