EV

Charging ahead

The Biden admin has made big promises with respect to automotive electrification. In the last week, we’ve gotten clarity on some of the specifics, both in terms of supercharging...charging stations…and electric vehicle (EV) sales. 

A jolt of funding 

Later this week, we could experience something rarer than finding a seat on a crowded train: The US Senate expects to pass legislation that invests in the country’s infrastructure. The bill aims to both update old infrastructure (e.g., bridges) and build out new, increasingly necessary services like EV charging stations.

On that last point...Biden’s lofty-but-crucial goal of building out a network of 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030 was knocked down a few pegs. Initially, he asked for $15 billion, but the number in the latest fact sheet is $7.5 billion. It’s double the total amount of public money that’s flowed into charging stations so far, but just half of what he asked for. 

• The US currently has ~41,400 chargers.
• Consulting firm AlixPartners estimates it will cost $50 billion to build out a US charging network that meets 2030 demand.  

“In context, it’s a big investment, but relative to the amount that’s needed to really set us up for 100% electrification, it’s a down payment,” Nick Nigro, founder of EV research firm Atlas Public Policy, told Automotive News. 

The bill also earmarks $5 billion in funding to “deliver thousands of electric school buses nationwide...and replace the yellow school bus fleet for America’s children.” But it probably won’t be enough to transition 50,000 transit buses over the next five years, as Biden has promised. 

How ’bout those cars? 

The Biden admin is also going directly to the source on EVs. The White House wants automakers to promise that by 2030, 40% of new vehicle sales will be electric. The two sides are still negotiating the details, like to what extent the US government will help promote EVs.

• US EV sales have more than doubled in H1 2021, but they’re still only about 3% of the total market.

For comparison...the European Union proposed a climate plan in July that would outright ban the sale of new gas- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. There, too, EV production will need to ramp up quite a bit—16 million passenger vehicles are sold in the EU each year, but just over 2 million EVs were sold worldwide last year. 

Bottom line: Biden’s electrification efforts are significantly more than what the US has made in the past, but they’re also far from enough to meet ambitious goals on their own.—DM 

SEMICONDUCTORS

Silic-on my own

Google is dropping Qualcomm chipsets from its flagship Pixel phones, striking out on its lonesome to develop smartphone processors. Qualcomm is the no. 2 player in the smartphone chipset market, accounting for 29% of market share in Q1 2021.

The decision to take over this process follows other big-name companies doing the same, either due to computing limitations (Google’s rationale) or the ongoing chip shortage. For example, Apple ditched Intel last year after 15 years, opting instead to use its Arm-produced M1 chip in MacBooks. 

• Google had a hold on just ~0.3% of the smartphone market share, as of Q1 2021.

The soon-to-be-released Pixel 6 will be the first to use Tensor, the chip Google designed in-house that’s purpose-built for Pixel phones.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted that the chip has been in the works for four years and called it Google’s “biggest innovation in Pixel to date.”
• The company says the new chips will boost Pixel's AI and machine-learning software, which is used for things like speech recognition and translation or song identification, as well as improved security, camera, and more. 

Big picture: Google’s relationship with Qualcomm hasn’t fallen apart completely—it will still use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform for its low-end offerings. But this move indicates the lengths device-makers might have to go to in order to deliver cutting-edge features to consumers.—JM 

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AI

Executive dysfunction

Last week, DeepMind—the AI research lab and Google subsidiary—made headlines for a biotech breakthrough. This week, it’s making headlines for a very different reason. 

Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind’s cofounder and an influential figure in AI, was placed on leave in July 2019 after employees reported his misconduct. Recently, it has come to light that these years of complaints tended to follow a similar thread, Insider reports: bullying and public humiliation. At least two incidents reportedly led to confidential settlements in excess of $150,000 each. 

• “He used to say, ‘I crush people,”’ one former DeepMind employee told Insider. 

It didn’t end there: In December 2019, after his return from leave, Google awarded Suleyman a promotion to VP of AI policy, putting just two layers between him and CEO Sundar Pichai. He also landed a seat on Google’s Advanced Technology Review Council (ATRC), which Bloomberg has called the Google AI ethics board “with actual power.” 

Big picture: Google’s reported willingness to put up with Suleyman's behavior stands in stark contrast to its swift termination of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, former co-leads of its AI ethics team who produced research that challenged the company’s direction on large language models.—HF 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Worldwide, the market for autonomous trucking is projected to grow to over $166.8 billion by 2035, according to PitchBook.

Quote: “It can be an Oculus, whatever, and you say, ‘I like the way that person looks in that shirt. I want to order that shirt.’ And it’s an Nvidia prod—uh, based on Nvidia."—CNBC’s Jim Cramer dipping his toes into metaverse definitions

Read: The sprawling, low-wage backbone of self-driving cars. 

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WEIB

• Facebook is hiring researchers to find ways to read encrypted data without actually decrypting it. The company is hoping to one day read WhatsApp messages to target ads to its users.
• The Senate’s draft of the infrastructure bill has a provision in it that expands the definition of a “broker” in the cryptocurrency community and requires them to collect user data. 
• The UK is looking at the national security implications of Nvidia’s $40 billion plan to takeover British chip designer Arm.
• Microsoft will require US employees, vendors, and office visitors to present proof of vaccination, following similar moves by Facebook and Google. 

TRIVIA

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FROM THE ARXIVES

Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Insider (which itself owns a majority stake in the Brew) and some of Germany’s most popular publications, recently released a paper on automating news headlines. 

More specifically...the researchers used a variation of Google’s BERT language model to generate search engine optimized (SEO) headlines from an article’s text.
Based on this model, the authors built a browser plugin that recommends headlines. 

• The researchers now plan to test how often journalists use the plugin and how much traffic the AI-inflected headlines can drum up. 

Comforting detail: “Automated headline generation for online news articles is not a trivial task.” (Phew.)

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• NFT startup Bitski wants to make decentralization approachable
• How mixed reality could transform the travel industry in unexpected ways
• What’s on tap for the National AI Research Resource Task Force

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