From Microsoft Bing’s sometimes devious character Sydney to Google’s early Bard bot, tech companies have spent much of the past two years attempting to sculpt generative AI into a usable and up-to-date search product.

OpenAI made its long-awaited foray into this space with the recent rollout of ChatGPT Search, which augments the bot’s conversational capabilities with realtime web access.

It marks a big expansion of the kinds of queries the system can field; GPT-4o otherwise has a broad training knowledge cutoff of October 2023. The search leans heavily on the startup’s growing collection of media partners, which include the Associated Press, News Corp, Vox Media, Axel Springer, and many others. (Axel Springer acquired a majority stake in Morning Brew in 2020.)

But while OpenAI has enjoyed a first-mover advantage with ChatGPT, rivals have already laid stakes in the AI-powered search market. One of Google’s key selling points with Gemini has been its ability to ground AI in years of search dominance. Well-heeled upstarts like Perplexity have also amassed a substantial share of users.

These efforts have sometimes been met with lawsuits from publishers whose information has been swallowed up. Dow Jones and the New York Post recently sued Perplexity, and the New York Times has taken action against OpenAI, despite a roster of its peers joining forces with the company.

Against this backdrop, Tech Brew wanted to try out ChatGPT Search and see how it stacks up against its dominant search rival across a set of use cases suggested in the announcement.

Keep reading here.—PK

We all know the type: the friend who always has the latest iPhone, the smartest appliances, the fully loaded car. That person has probably been driving an EV for years.

Now, the auto industry faces a trickier proposition: winning over mainstream consumers. These drivers, per a new study by consulting firm Accenture, are less focused on sustainability or having the snazziest tech and more on reliability, safety, and value.

The report, “What Electric Drivers Want,” offers insights into how industry stakeholders can win over this next cohort of EV buyers. Despite recent negativity around EVs, from pared-back production plans to a second Trump administration that’s expected to pump the brakes on electrification, the survey found that the majority of North American consumers—54%—plan to go electric in the next decade. Only 11% said they never would.

“The transition to EVs is facing challenges that demand a deeper understanding of the needs and expectations from car buyers to accelerate the adoption in key markets still lagging behind,” Juergen Reers, Accenture’s global automotive and mobility lead, said in a statement.

Keep reading here.—JG

When picturing a field of crops, Amazon and Microsoft are probably among the last things to come to mind. But investments into climate tech companies aim to make Big Tech and agriculture an unlikely pair.

Aigen, a company that is building solar-powered farming robots that can weed farms and collect data on crops using AI, was one of the winners of Amazon Web Services’s (AWS) Compute for Climate Fellowship, announced earlier this month. And through its Climate Innovation Fund, Microsoft invested in three companies that are focused on regenerative farming and land resilience over the last 18 months: Yard Stick, Vibrant Planet, and Farmland LP.

Yard Stick says its tech makes measuring soil organic carbon simpler and more affordable, and Vibrant Planet partners with the US Forest Service and other government agencies to combat wildfires, conserve water, and remove carbon with the goal of creating “climate resilient ecosystems.” Farmland LP, an investment fund, buys farmland and aims to make it more sustainable using regenerative agricultural practices, like using less synthetic pesticides and sequestering carbon.

Through the AWS fellowship, Aigen will receive graphics processing unit resources, guidance, and computing power from Amazon that it might not be able to create itself—plus some networking opportunities like introducing winners to potential customers.

“We collect pretty huge amounts of data: Last season, our fleet of a couple dozen robots collected almost 50 terabytes of data,” Aigen’s Director of AI and Software Yuri Brigànce told Tech Brew. “We need compute resources to be able to analyze and make sense of this data and utilize it for our purposes.”

Keep reading here.—TC