While it may seem like startups and Big Tech companies never miss an opportunity to crow about a new AI tool, for Gecko Robotics, incorporating AI into its robots wasn’t a marketing ploy or a twinge of FOMO: It was a matter of life and death.

Pittsburgh-based Gecko, which manufactures a line of robots capable of inspecting everything from military ships and missile silos to pipelines and boilers, faced a critical problem in 2018. One of its clients, co-founder and CEO Jake Loosararian told Tech Brew, was experiencing repeated shutdowns at a chemical site due to pressure tube explosions.

Loosararian knew that to figure out what was going wrong, his team would have to parse “terabytes of acoustic data sets.”

He says what happened next is “like folklore at the company”—Gecko sent an email offering every employee $1,000 to help analyze the raw data by looking for patterns and anomalies and writing sorting algorithms. The whole company, then around 100 people, “literally spent 24 straight hours” going through thousands upon thousands of readings, Loosararian said.

“At that point, we were dealing with, one, really important information; if we don't get this right, it could take down a facility and hurt somebody, potentially kill them,” he said. “But then, two, to get the answers right, you just need a crap ton of data…So at that point, 2018, we just realized we have to figure out ways of using machine learning and neural nets to be able to parse through all this information.

“And so that’s kind of where the journey began. But it was birthed from an excruciatingly painful experience that if we got it wrong, it could have killed people.”

Keep reading here.—AS

Sometimes when the wi-fi is out, the situation can be remedied by unplugging the router, waiting a beat, and plugging it back in. And turns out easing the strain on the electrical grid as a result of increasing power demand from data centers might follow a similar pattern.

A new study from Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability found that the grid might be able to handle the incoming additional power demand from data centers if plants use on-site generators, reduce their workloads, or temporarily transfer workloads to their other facilities during peak demand hours. Many new data centers will be brought online in the near future as generative AI tools are more widely used by corporations and individuals alike.

Observers used to think that the power demanded by data centers—which will be the largest growing power sector in the coming years—could overwhelm the grid.

“The US power system’s existing headroom, resulting from intentional planning decisions to maintain sizable reserves during infrequent peak demand events, is sufficient to accommodate significant constant new loads, provided such loads can be safely scaled back during some hours of the year,” the study states.

All that said, curtailing data center power usage from time to time by using power storage or reducing operations isn’t a complete solution to the “unprecedented” amount of power the grid will need to provide in the coming years—it’ll still need to be expanded.

Keep reading here.—TC

Elon Musk promoted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a vehicle to rapidly modernize federal IT systems and software. But as the temporary organization rolls from agency to agency demanding access to sensitive systems, cybersecurity experts worry that irreparable damage is being done.

As of Feb. 10, according to New York magazine, DOGE’s teams have gained access to IT systems at departments including Commerce, Education, and Energy, as well as one of the most sensitive federal systems that exists—the Treasury department’s payments systems—and numerous other federal agencies, such as the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration.

Musk also claimed to be behind the unilateral shutdown of the US foreign aid agency USAID and is trying to do the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He has repeatedly suggested DOGE staff are personally halting payments to US contractors.

The intrusion into these systems at Musk’s request has been controversial, to say the least. President Donald Trump has said his administration will delegate even more power to DOGE, despite a slew of lawsuits and numerous legal experts questioning its sweeping powers. Critics have pointed out Musk’s innumerable potential conflicts of interest, questioned whether several of its staffers would pass background checks, and accused DOGE of violating federal laws. The Trump administration has also tried to exclude DOGE from open records laws.

Musk has portrayed federal IT processes as antiquated, but experts who spoke to IT Brew emphasized DOGE’s apparent disregard for those processes poses a far more immediate threat.

Keep reading here.—TM

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