A few weeks ago, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index—a report that aims to quantify the current state of AI across industries and the world.

Now in its fifth year, the report has added a new global survey of robotics researchers, data on AI policy in 25 countries, and a chapter on AI ethics.

The big number: Global private investment in AI surged to $93.5 billion, more than 2x that of 2020. But at the same time, fewer new companies are being created: Over the past three years, the number of newly funded AI companies dropped from 1,051, to 762, to 746, per the report.

“It’s becoming clearer and clearer that not only is investment going up in AI, but it’s going mostly to more mature firms. It’s going in bigger chunks to more mature firms, which I take as an indication that…applications of AI [are] more likely to see their way into real use on a significant scale,” Ray Perrault, one of the authors of the AI Index, told us.

• But, Perrault added, there’s a downside: “It’s not clear from these figures how much easier it is for innovation that comes out of small startups to get funded.”

Cheaper, faster, better?: The cost of training an AI image-classification system has plummeted by almost 64% since 2018, while the training time for such a system has sped up by nearly 95%. The cheaper and faster trend also applies to other AI areas like object detection, recommendation, and language processing.

• Robotic arms have also gone on sale, with the median price falling more than 45% in five years.
• As of last year, one of the contraptions will set you back “just” $22,600—compared to $42k in 2017.

Bottom line: We’re seeing the AI industry mature. Not only is it consolidating—from a VC perspective, at least—but machine learning models are also becoming cheaper, faster, and more accessible.

That’s good news for budget-minded companies, but it’s likely not so good for preventing the potential harms that can result from the use of AI.

Click here to read the full breakdown of the 2022 AI Index.—HF

It’s not just the US government that’s spending big to try and scale up carbon removal, but private companies too.

Last week, Shopify announced it would buy carbon-removal credits from nine more companies, bringing its total carbon-removal purchase commitments to $32 million.

Why it matters: Along with Stripe and Microsoft, Shopify is one of a handful of companies attempting to help the carbon-removal industry scale by purchasing removal credits before it’s economical to do so, i.e., paying the “green premium.”

The hope is that purchases like this will both push down the cost of carbon removal and also send “demand signals” that make it easier for these startups to raise money.

• Your regular reminder: To meet Paris Agreement targets, carbon-removal techniques must be capable of pulling 10 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050. Right now, we’re removing a fraction of a fraction of that amount.

In total…Shopify has purchase commitments with 22 carbon-removal firms, spread across a variety of techniques—from direct air capture to reforestation—and it is the largest buyer for eight of the newly announced companies.

• For its part, Microsoft has established a $1 billion fund to invest in carbon reduction and removal tech, and announced in January that it had so far funded the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 from 26 companies.
• Stripe, meanwhile, has purchased $15 million worth of carbon removal from a total of 14 projects.

In addition to large purchasers like Shopify, Microsoft, and Stripe, at least one startup—London-based Supercritical—is working to aggregate demand from smaller companies to make carbon removal more accessible.

Looking ahead…Carbon-removal execs recently told us that they’re seeing more and more demand from the commercial sector.

“The commercial market, the voluntary market for carbon removal, is growing really, really significantly,” according to Max Scholten, head of commercialization at Heirloom, a direct air capture (DAC) startup that raised a $53 million Series A in mid-March.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I work on the user interface for a browser extension that creates and manages virtual credit cards for you when you’re shopping online. Think: the buttons you click on, the places you type in your username, etc.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

A machine-learning model that runs in the browser to determine if web pages are checkout pages. It’s really cool, and what’s even cooler about it is Capital One actually sent us to AWS re:Invent in November to demo this on the expo floor. It’s what we call “edge machine learning,” so it runs in the browser, not server-side, which makes it really fast but also makes it really aware of privacy issues and things like that.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I’m most optimistic about serverless. In the same way that public cloud made infrastructure on demand available to just about anyone, serverless takes it a step further by drastically reducing costs and allowing for quicker iteration.

I’m least optimistic about facial recognition. Pitfalls aplenty, and [it] really seems like an unnecessary innovation. Who amongst the “good guys” is asking for this?

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

The name of my band in high school. Played bass guitar, did a lot of gigs in the Phoenix metro area, put out a not-great album on Spotify.

Stat: Solar and wind power accounted for more than 10% of global power generation in 2021, per climate think tank Ember. The renewable energy sources are on track to meet climate goals, assuming deployments are rolled out at the same speed through 2030.

Quote: “We’re in the middle of a race for capacity.”—Jesper Wigardt, vice president of communications and public affairs at Northvolt, the leading European battery-maker

Read: Want to get your paycheck in bitcoin? Have fun with that.

Peeps wanna know: How does your company report on its environmental impacts, social relationships, and overall governance? Workiva can streamline this complex process for you. Read all about ESG reporting—and how Workiva can help—here.*

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A short list of things that can make you feel alert on a Monday: A hot cup of coffee. A shower. Someone laying on their horn outside of your apartment at 7am.

And…Our weekly news quiz—take it here.

Hey, look at that, the first quarter of 2022 ended last week. We pubbed over 100 stories between January 1 and March 31—here are five of the most popular ones:

• A primer on vertical farming, which is growing like a weed
• Before layoffs hit Google-owned Looker, workers unknowingly trained their replacements
• Creator of the viral “neural net guesses memes“ Twitter account explains how it works
• The rise of digital health in five charts
• ‘It’s all coming at the worst time:’ How sky-high nickel price could hamper EV efforts

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

• Europe’s top battery maker has $6 billion—and a plan to scale rapidly
• Apple’s new, lower-cost 5G-enabled iPhone won’t move the needle on 5G adoption
• Record-high steel prices could hamper renewable rollout in near term