Technology
Al Gore criticizes corporations and politicians, comparing their climate crisis promises to ‘New Year’s resolutions’
Al Gore has enjoyed a highly successful profession, including as a U.S. senator, U.S. vice chairman, U.S. presidential candidate, and even the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner for “telling the world about the dangers of climate change.” In May of this yr, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his lifetime of service.
But what still eludes him is how much progress he expected to see on the climate crisis by now, some 45 years after he attended the primary congressional hearing on fusion. What infuriates him most, he says, is that the world already has the mandate to fix what’s broken—if only there have been the financial and political will to accomplish that.
It’s not without hope. This editor spoke with Gore and his business partner Lila Preston Tuesday morning in regards to the recent, annual climate report that their investment management firm, focused on sustainability, Generational investment managementreleased. The report is definitely pretty convincing; it is also less promising than last yr’s release, and Gore sounded a bit more frustrated than once I spoke to him last yr.
We can have podcast from that interview from later this week. In the meantime, listed below are a number of excerpts from that conversation, flippantly edited for length.
TC: I read the report last night and I actually have to say that in some ways it seems gloomier and less optimistic than it did a yr ago.
AG: It’s a deliberate approach on our part. We still imagine that the world will solve this crisis, however the query is how quickly we will do it, because every single day more damage is being done and more risk is being placed on humanity. After the ultimate document was written at (the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference), all of us tried to understand the true meaning of “transition” away from fossil fuels and (that goal was then written into international law). But within the immediate aftermath, a few of the most important fossil fuel corporations resumed a large expansion of exploration and development of much more fossil fuels, despite the International Energy Agency saying that it was unnecessary and contrary to the energy transition that was so mandatory. Since then, we’ve seen some financial services corporations backtrack on their commitments as well… so those commitments sometimes start to feel like New Year’s resolutions: easy to make and hard to achieve.
So it is the “law” but there aren’t any penalties for these fossil fuel corporations for further expansion?
One of the extremely dangerous risks that they needs to be making an allowance for far more is the danger of stranded assets. Fatih Birol (head of the International Energy Agency) has highlighted this risk, but old habits die hard, especially after they are old, profitable habits.
As you said, it isn’t just industry, it is also governments. The report addresses the growing opposition to climate policy in several parts of the world, including opposition to wind farms and solar farms. How can governments overcome that? How can they higher engage the general public in supporting this energy transition?
The effectiveness of self-government is itself one in all the problems that needs to be addressed. The fossil fuel industry is the richest, strongest lobby within the history of the world. They are significantly better at catching politicians than they’re at catching emissions, and they’re deliberately slowing down this transition, and governments are slow to respond.
There’s some excellent news. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was a milestone, and it took some time to get the cash out and the assorted programs that it authorized, but now we’re starting to see them have a big impact. Europe continues to paved the way. China continues to construct out an excessive amount of fossil fuel infrastructure. But between January 1 and the tip of July of this yr, China deployed as much recent solar capability as could be provided by about 18 recent 1-gigawatt nuclear plants. That’s pretty incredible. And even after factoring in capability aspects and every thing else, that is still greater than five recent nuclear plants every month.
So we have now excellent news, but we’re still moving too slowly because we’re still using the sky as an open sewer. We’re still trapping as much extra heat every single day as 750,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs exploding on Earth every single day. It’s really crazy that we’re still allowing this to occur, and all of us need to get entangled—all sectors, all industries.
I’m sure you’ve been asked so much about fusion energy, which promises to harness the nuclear force that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. Without much evidence, VCs have poured $7.1 billion right into a handful of startups in recent times. Are they being overly optimistic, or do you’re thinking that there’s some truth to it?
Generation has innovated the concept of the time value of coal, and while it’s incredibly priceless that these early investors are attempting to speed up the event of fusion and also (small modular reactors), even probably the most optimistic of those investors will inform you in their honest moments that it’s going to be an extended time before fusion reactors play any significant role. I hope that we will speed up that point. I attended my first congressional hearing on fusion 45 years ago this yr, and the experts on the table told our subcommittee that it’s 50 years away, so now I’m getting excited. But jokes aside, while there’s real progress there, let’s be realistic; it’s going to take time and we have now an instantaneous challenge, and the time value of coal tells us that we actually need to reduce emissions… We need to give attention to the immediate solutions which might be available now to address this dire climate crisis by accelerating all efforts to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Many individuals are grateful that you simply, Bill Gates, and others like you’re putting climate change and climate solutions on the forefront. At the identical time, you’ve already enjoyed incredibly successful careers; you possibly can afford the hardships and challenges of advocating for major political and financial changes to address climate change. Who are the business and political leaders who will stand behind you to carry the torch? Do you’re feeling like we’re being embraced on this front? Are you concerned?
The people we cope with every single day, especially (at Generation), are incredible. One of the lesser-seen aspects on this transformation is that the businesses which might be leading the best way are pulling the most effective and brightest young people out of university and engineering schools, and people of all ages are changing careers to be a part of it. We meet probably the most extraordinary entrepreneurs who’re simply burning with passion to play a major role in solving this crisis. There are so many examples. One UK business leader who we have now supported very strongly, Greg Jackson from Octopus Energyis really making a major difference to the electricity retail sector. CEO H2 Green Steel is one other… business leader of the longer term who’s already doing great work.
LP: We call this basket of leaders systemic positive thinkers. They’re really changing the entire system. They’re excited about: How will we redesign supply chains? Companies like (advanced supply chain planning corporations) Solutions o9 AND Altana.ai have this huge ambition, (with) the popularity that these solutions need to be higher and cheaper and have a smaller carbon footprint and be greener and more sustainable. And that is exciting. That’s a possibility.
I wish we had more well-known, positive thinkers in regards to the system. Some of the richest people on this planet have the world’s attention and (could make a major impact by being) more visibly focused on the identical issues.
AG: We have TechCrunch!
Technology
CareYaya enables affordable home care by connecting medical students with seniors
CareYayaa platform connecting people in need of caregivers with medical students, working to introduce changes within the care industry. The startup, which exhibited as a part of Battlefield 200 on the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, wants to offer affordable at-home support while helping students prepare for a future profession in healthcare.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Neal Shah, who got here up with the thought for the startup from his own experiences as a caregiver for his wife after she contracted cancer and various other ailments. At the time, Shah was a partner in a hedge fund and needed to close his fund to function his child’s full-time caregiver for 2 years.
To provide extra care for his wife, Shah hired students studying health care to be his wife’s caregivers. Shah learned that other families were informally doing the identical, posting fliers on local campuses asking them to search out someone qualified to care for his or her loved one.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to just build a formal system for them where you don’t have to go to the local nursing school or the local undergraduate campus and send out flyers,” Shah told TechCrunch. “That’s what I used to be doing. So we thought should you could make it formal through a technology platform, you may make a huge impact.
Fast forward to 2024, and the platform currently has over 25,000 students from multiple schools including Duke University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, the University of Texas at Austin, and more.
CareYaya conducts background checks on students who want to affix the platform after which conducts video interviews with them. On the user side, people can join the platform after which detail the sort of care their loved one needs. CareYaya then matches students with families, whether for one-time sessions or ongoing care. After the primary session, each parties can submit rankings.
The startup claims it might help families save 1000’s of dollars on recurring elder care. During home care costs average In the US, $35 per hourCareYaya charges between $17 and $20 per hour.
Because student caregivers are tech-savvy, CareYaya equips them with AI-powered technology to acknowledge and track disease progression in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. The company recently launched an LLM (Large Language Model) that integrates with smart glasses to gather visual data to assist students provide higher real-time assistance and conduct early screening for dementia.
As for the long run, CareYaya is trying to expand beyond the US as people in places like Canada, Australia and the UK have shown interest within the platform.
Technology
SpaceX wants to test refueling spacecraft in space early next year
SpaceX will attempt to transfer fuel from one orbiting spacecraft to one other as early as March next year, a technical milestone that may pave the way in which for an uncrewed demonstration of the spacecraft on the Moon, a NASA official said this week.
Much has been said about Starship’s potential to transform the industrial space industry, but NASA can also be losing hope that the vehicle will return humans to the Moon under the Artemis program. The space agency has awarded the corporate a $4.05 billion contract for 2 human Starship vehicles, with the upper stage (also called Starship) landing astronauts on the lunar surface for the primary time because the Apollo era. A crewed landing is currently scheduled for September 2026.
Kent Chojnacki, deputy program manager for NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program, provided more details on how closely the agency will work with the space company on this critical mission in an interview with Spaceflight Now. It will come as no surprise that NASA is paying close attention to the Starship test campaign, which has seen five launches thus far.
SpaceX made history in its latest test on Oct. 13 when it first managed to catch a super-heavy rocket booster in mid-air using “sticks” attached to the launch tower.
“Every time it comes to (launch), we learn a lot,” Chojnacki said.
Chojnacki’s work history includes quite a few roles in the Space Launch System (SLS) program, which oversees the event of the large rocket of the identical name being built by a handful of traditional space-first aircraft. The first SLS rocket launched the Artemis I mission in December 2023, and future rockets will launch additional missions under the Artemis program. However, no a part of the rocket is reusable, which is why NASA spends greater than $2 billion on each launch vehicle.
The first contracts under the SLS program were awarded over ten years ago as a part of the so-called a cost-plus model, meaning NASA pays a base amount plus expenses. (This variety of contract has been heavily criticized for encouraging long development schedules and high expenses.) In contrast, HLS contracts are “fixed price” – so SpaceX receives a one-time payment of $2.99 billion, provided certain milestones are met.
Chojnacki said NASA has taken very different approaches to the HLS and SLS programs, even outside of the contracting model.
“SLS was a very traditional NASA program. NASA defined a very stringent set of requirements and dictated the fuel supplies, dictated everything to the various elements. They flowed downwards. These were cost-effective programs where aerospace companies responded and we worked in a very traditional way,” he said. “Moving to HLS, we’re doing a whole lot of moving parts without delay. Currently, SpaceX’s first landing contract includes 27 system requirements. Twenty-seven and we tried to be as relaxed as possible.
Under the SpaceX contract, they have to pass mandatory design reviews, but SpaceX may offer additional milestones as a part of the payment. One of the necessities required by SpaceX is an indication of ship-to-ship propellant transfer. These tests are scheduled to start around March 2025 and end in the summer, Chojnacki said.
“This could be the primary time this has been demonstrated on this scale, so it’s an enormous constructing block. And when you try this, you have really opened up the door to moving huge amounts of cargo and charge beyond the globe of the Earth. If you manage to have a spacecraft with a propellant unit, that can be the next step towards uncrewed demonstrations.
In addition to testing, Starship’s next major review can be the Critical Design Review (CDR) in summer 2025, when NASA will certify that the corporate has met all 27 system requirements. Chojnacki said NASA astronauts also meet with SpaceX once a month to provide information concerning the interior of Starship. The company is constructing mock-ups of the crew cabin, including the sleeping area and laboratory, in Boca Chica. NASA anticipates receiving a design update this month before it during next year’s CDR.
That’s not the one place NASA shared its input: it also provided feedback on some facets of the rocket’s design, similar to the vehicle’s cryogenic components, and in addition performed some tests on thermal plates that help keep the temperature of cryogenic fuels low.
If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will send astronauts to the Moon in September 2026.
“It’s definitely a date we’re working towards. We haven’t any known roadblocks. We have some things that need to be demonstrated for the primary time and we’ve a plan on how to exhibit them.
Technology
Microsoft and A16Z are putting aside their differences and joining hands in protest against artificial intelligence regulations
The two biggest forces in two deeply intertwined tech ecosystems – large incumbents and startups – have taken a break from counting money and together they demand this from the federal government to stop even considering regulations that might affect their financial interests or, as they prefer to call it, innovation.
“Our two companies may not agree on everything, but it’s not about our differences,” writes this group with very different perspectives and interests: A16Z founders, partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and president/director legal affairs Brad Kowal. A very cross-sectional gathering, representing each big business and big money.
But they are supposedly taking care of little boys. That is, all the businesses that may be impacted by this latest try to abuse the regulations: SB 1047.
Imagine being charged a fee for improperly disclosing an open model! A16Z General Partner Anjney Midha he called it a “regressive tax” on startups and a “blatant regulatory capture” by Big Tech firms that, unlike Midha and his impoverished colleagues, could afford the lawyers needed to comply with the regulations.
Except that was all disinformation spread by Andreessen Horowitz and other wealthy interests who actually stood to suffer as supporters of billion-dollar enterprises. In fact, small models and startups would only be barely affected since the proposed law specifically protected them.
It’s strange that the identical form of targeted carve-out for “Little Tech” that Horowitz and Andreessen routinely advocate for was distorted and minimized by the lobbying campaign they and others waged against SB 1047. (In an interview with the bill’s sponsor , California State Senator Scott Wiener talked about this whole thing recently on Disrupt.)
This bill had its problems, but its opposition greatly exaggerated compliance costs and didn’t significantly substantiate claims that it will chill or burden startups.
It’s a part of a longtime pattern in which Big Tech – to which, despite their stance, Andreessen and Horowitz are closely related – operates on the state level, where it could possibly win (as with SB 1047), while asking for federal solutions that it knows will won’t ever come, or which can have no teeth because of partisan bickering and congressional ineptitude on technical issues.
This joint statement of “political opportunity” is the second a part of the sport: After torpedoing SB 1047, they will say they did it solely to support federal policy. Never mind that we’re still waiting for a federal privacy law that tech firms have been pushing for a decade while fighting state laws.
What policies do they support? “A different responsible market approach”, in other words: down with our money, Uncle Sam.
Regulations needs to be based on a “science-based and standards-based approach, recognizing regulatory frameworks that focus on the use and misuse of technology” and should “focus on the risk of bad actors exploiting artificial intelligence.” This signifies that we must always not introduce proactive regulation, but quite reactive penalties when criminals use unregulated products for criminal purposes. This approach has worked great in this whole FTX situation, so I understand why they support it.
“The regulation should only be implemented if the benefits outweigh the costs.” It would take 1000’s of words to clarify all of the ways this idea expressed in this context is funny. But they are principally suggesting that the fox needs to be included on the henhouse planning committee.
Regulators should “allow developers and startups the flexibility to choose AI models to use wherever they build solutions, and not tilt the playing field in favor of any one platform.” This suggests that there may be some agenda requiring permission to make use of one model or one other. Since this is just not the case, it’s a straw man.
Here is a lengthy quote that I have to quote in full:
The right to education: Copyright goals to advertise the progress of science and the applied arts by extending protection to publishers and authors to encourage them to make recent works and knowledge available to the general public, but not on the expense of society’s right to learn from those works. Copyright law mustn’t be co-opted to suggest that machines needs to be prevented from using data – the premise of artificial intelligence – to learn in the identical way as humans. Unprotected knowledge and facts, whether or not contained in protected subject material, should remain free and accessible.
To be clear, the clear statement here is that software operated by billion-dollar corporations has the “right” to access any data since it should give you the chance to learn from it “in the same way as humans.”
First of all, no. These systems are not like people; they generate data in their training data that mimics human activity. These are complex statistical projection programs with a natural language interface. They haven’t any more “right” to any document or fact than Excel.
Second, the concept that “facts” – by which they mean “intellectual property” – are the one thing these systems are interested in, and that some type of fact-gathering cabal is working to forestall them, is an artificial narrative we have seen before. Perplexity made the “facts belong to everyone” argument in its public response to a lawsuit alleging systematic content theft, and its CEO Aravind Srinivas repeated that mistake to me on stage at Disrupt, as in the event that they were being sued for knowing tidbits just like the Earth’s distance from the Moon.
While this is just not the place to totally discuss this particular straw man argument, let me simply indicate that while facts are indeed free agents, there are real costs to how they are created – say, through original reporting and scientific research. This is why copyright and patent systems exist: not to forestall the wide sharing and use of mental property, but to encourage its creation by ensuring that it could possibly be assigned real value.
Copyright law is much from perfect and is more likely to be abused as often as used. However, this is just not “co-opted to suggest that machines should be prevented from using data” – it’s used to be sure that bad actors don’t bypass the worth systems we’ve got built around mental property.
This is a fairly clear query: let’s allow the systems we own, operate and take advantage of to freely use the worthwhile work of others without compensation. To be fair, this part is “in the same way as people” because people design, run and implement these systems, and these people don’t desire to pay for something they do not have to, and they don’t desire to. I don’t desire regulations to alter that .
There are many other recommendations in this small policy document, which were little question covered in greater detail in the versions sent on to lawmakers and regulators through official lobbying channels.
Some of the ideas are undoubtedly good, if slightly selfish: “fund digital literacy programs that help people understand how to use artificial intelligence tools to create and access information.” Good! Of course, the authors invest heavily in these tools. Support “Open Data Commons – collections of accessible data managed in the public interest.” Great! “Examine procurement practices to enable more startups to sell technology to the government.” Excellent!
But these more general, positive recommendations are something the industry sees yearly: invest in public resources and speed up government processes. These tasty but irrelevant suggestions are merely tools for the more vital ones I described above.
Ben Horowitz, Brad Smith, Marc Andreessen and Satya Nadella want the federal government to step back from regulating this lucrative recent development, let industry resolve which regulations are value compromising, and invalidate copyright laws in a way that kind of acts as a blanket reprieve for illegal or unethical practices that many imagine have enabled the rapid development of artificial intelligence. These are principles that are vital to them, whether children are acquiring digital skills or not.
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