At times, it’s possible for an audience member at Matthew Gasda’s play, Doomers, to feel like a fly on the wall in a San Francisco startup “war room.”

Characters bicker about product releases and name-drop venture firms, only breaking to have boba or tacos delivered. Then a polycule joke or a weighty monologue will return one to the satire at hand in the small Manhattan art gallery where the play is being staged.

Doomers is maybe the first artistic dramatization of events that rocked the tech industry in the fall of 2023, when OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman over AI safety and interpersonal concerns. The play is very loosely based on the hours after Altman was fired, though all of the names have been slightly changed and some characters are composites or archetypes.

Billed as “a Glengarry Glen Ross for the AI age,” the action takes place in two closed-room acts—one featuring the company’s inner circle and the other, the board.

Through Succession-esque banter, they each reflect on humanity’s AI future and increasingly loony doomsday scenarios. That philosophizing is set amid interpersonal squabbling, status jockeying, and plenty of satire of the San Francisco AI scene’s cultish feel.

Keep reading here.—PK

Evelyn Valdez is usually on the go.

The Alexandria, Virginia, resident is an avid traveler, a foodie, a tandem biker, a federal government worker who will soon resume her commute to Washington, DC—and someone who simply loves trying things and meeting people.

Valdez, who is blind, relies primarily on public transit to get to and fro. This typically means using a combination of a cane, muscle memory from previous trips, and asking other people for help.

She now has a new tool in her arsenal: Waymap, a navigation app designed for people with vision impairments. The app just launched across the entire service area of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or Metro, which encompasses 98 rail stations, more than 11,000 bus stops, and 325 bus routes.

“I have a very free spirit,” Valdez, 43, told Tech Brew. “So for me, being able to get up and go when I want, how I want, is exactly how I want to continue to live my life.”

Offline: Unlike many navigation apps, Waymap’s tech doesn’t rely on GPS or cell connectivity.

Keep reading here.—JG

As more EVs, data centers, and other energy-intensive assets connect to the US power grid, utilities across the country face the prospect of making expensive upgrades to strained, aging infrastructure.

At the same time, there are efforts underway to leverage emerging technologies to help solve this conundrum––like vehicle-to-grid tech that promises to transform EVs into assets that can send electricity back to the grid when demand is high.

New research commissioned by software startup Rhythmos makes the case that another strategy, what it calls grid-edge EV charging optimization, could yield even more significant benefits in the quest to meet growing electricity demand while making the grid more resilient and reliable.

The white paper, assembled by consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics (E3), suggests that this strategy could help utilities reduce transformer upgrade costs by as much as 60%, potentially yielding millions of dollars in savings and buying utilities more time to make infrastructure improvements.

“What that translates into is greater resilience, greater grid stability,” Rhythmos CEO Ken Munson told Tech Brew. “And that translates into lower energy rates for customers.”

Doing research: The study puts its findings into the context of rapid growth in EV adoption in recent years, with some 3.5 million light-duty EVs on US roadways at the end of 2023.

“As EV adoption accelerates, capacity constraints on distribution infrastructure will become acute, risking infrastructure reliability and requiring costly distribution upgrades that a 2021 study estimates could range from $7 billion to $47 billion by 2035 in the US under a high electrification scenario,” per the report.

Keep reading here.—JG