With President-elect Trump less inclined to prioritize climate action at the federal level, the results of the 2024 election in many ways passed the buck on handling the climate crisis to states and corporations.

Nonprofits stand to play a part, too. Climate Solutions, which works with state legislatures to pass climate policy and partners with corporations to help them decarbonize, has long worked with states and companies to help them move climate policy forward.

Tech Brew talked with Climate Solutions Executive Director Gregg Small about his work and the organization’s efforts to advance climate policy.

Tell me about you, how you got to Climate Solutions, and what you do there.

I’ve been at Climate Solutions for 17 years. I’ve been the executive director here that whole time, and before that, I had been the executive director of a couple other organizations that had worked more on public health, toxic chemicals, pesticides, those types of issues. I got this job in 2008, and around that time, I just was feeling the intense pull to work on climate change for fairly obvious reasons. And, well, here I am, 17 years later—still at it.

What are some examples of what you’re advising companies to do? What are some processes that they’re starting to engage in because they worked with Climate Solutions to decarbonize?

Every sector is different, right? Like fleets is different than buildings, is different than trying to get solar panels on your building, etc.…[But] at a certain level, a lot of the basics are the basics.

Keep reading here.—TC

Even after AI developers spend millions on computing power to train a model on billions of human-written words, it still takes an intensive regimen of human feedback and fine-tuning before the system is ready to interact with humans.

That process is called post-training, and there’s a big gap in the level of sophistication between open-source AI and often-better-funded closed rivals, according to the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). It’s why the nonprofit research lab is releasing its latest family of LLMs, Tülu 3, along with a post-training toolkit encompassing datasets, code architecture, and an evaluation framework to help other open-source developers replicate the regimen the team used for those models.

Open models like Meta’s Llama family, Mistral AI, and Google Gemma are especially useful for companies that need more control over models and businesses dealing with sensitive information. But AI2 said even most open models don’t release full post-training details.

“[Post-training] is a challenging process,” Hannaneh Hajishirzi, senior director of NLP research at AI2, told Tech Brew. “The big companies have figured it out. The open-source community, I would say, haven’t figured this out. Why? Because it’s a big effort.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Investors are banking on a future in which drinking water is harvested from the sky and sea, and have placed bets on two startups building the tech.

Aquaria, a startup that builds atmospheric water generators (AWG) at the consumer level, uses heat exchange systems to turn air into water by taking in surrounding air, filtering it, and then condensing the humidity in the filtered air into water. The company recently announced that it secured $112 million in funding to bring its AWGs to commercial and residential properties.

Backers of Aquaria include ag tech investment firm Mistletoe, tech investment fund Soma Capital, and former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, who said he sees Aquaria as one of many solutions to the climate crisis.

“Aquaria has built an innovative technology that will solve the water challenges that are so prevalent in this country,” Gephardt said in a statement, “by integrating and enhancing our existing water infrastructure to harvest clean water from our greatest natural resource: the air.”

Keep reading here.—TC