Tool Boxx

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/t5IHG4j

Generative AI, though still an emergent technology, has been in the headlines since OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked a global frenzy in 2023. The technology has rapidly advanced far beyond its early, human-like capacity to enhance chat functions. It shows extensive promise across a range of use cases, including content creation, translation, image processing, and code writing. Generative AI has the potential not only to reshape key business operations, but also to shift the competitive landscape across most industries.

The technology has already started to affect various business functions, such as product innovation, supply chain logistics, and sales and customer experience. Companies are also beginning to see positive return on investment (ROI) from deployment of generative-AI powered platforms and tools.

While any assessment of the technology’s likely business impact remains more forecast than empirical, it is necessary to look beyond the inevitable hype. To examine enterprises’ technological and business needs for effective implementation of generative AI, 300 senior executives across a range of regions and industries were surveyed. Respondents were asked about the extent of their corporate rollouts, implementation plans, and the barriers to deployment. Combined with insights from an expert interview panel, this global survey sheds light on how companies may or may not be ready to tackle the challenges to effective adoption of generative AI.

The overarching message from this research is that plans among corporate leaders to disrupt competition using the new technology—rather than being disrupted–—may founder on a host of challenges that many executives appear to underestimate.  

Executives expect generative AI to disrupt industries across economies. Overall, six out of 10 respondents agree that “generative AI technology will substantially disrupt our industry over the next five years.” Respondents that foresee disruption exceed those that do not across every industry.

A majority of respondents do not envision AI disruption as a risk; instead, they hope to be disruptors. Rather than being concerned about risk, 78% see generative AI as a competitive opportunity. Just 8% regard it as a threat. Most respondents hope to be disruptors: 65% say their businesses are “actively considering new and innovative ways to use generative AI to unlock hidden opportunities from our data.”

Despite expectations of change, few companies went beyond experimentation with, or limited adoption of, generative AI in 2023. Although most (76%) companies surveyed had worked with generative AI in some way in 2023, few (9%) adopted the technology widely. Those that used the technology experimented with or deployed it in only one or a few limited areas.

Companies have ambitious plans to increase adoption in 2024. Respondents expect the number of functions where they aim to deploy generative AI to more than double in 2024. This will involve frequent application of the technology in customer experience, strategic analysis, and product innovation.

Companies need to address IT deficiencies, or risk falling short of their ambitions to deploy generative AI, leaving them open to disruption. Fewer than 30% of respondents rank each of eight IT attributes at their companies as conducive to rapid adoption of generative AI. Those with the most experience of deploying generative AI have less confidence in their IT than their peers.

Non-IT factors also undermine the successful use of generative AI. Survey respondents also report non-IT impediments to the extensive use of generative AI. These factors include regulatory risk, budgets, the competitive environment, culture, and skills.

Executives expect generative AI to provoke a wave of disruption. In many cases, however, their hopes to be on the right side of this innovation are endangered by impediments that their companies do not fully appreciate.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

via TechSpot https://ift.tt/6sX8CzU
EA CEO Andrew Wilson told staff in note that the company is reacting to "accelerating industry transformation where player needs and motivations have changed significantly." He added that EA will be streamlining operations, with the cuts part of an ongoing effort to "optimize our global real estate footprint to best...

Read Entire Article

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/JjroOcK

When two black holes spiral inward and collide, they shake the very fabric of space, producing ripples in space-time that can travel for hundreds of millions of light-years. Since 2015, scientists have been observing these so-called gravitational waves to help them study fundamental questions about the cosmos, including the origin of heavy elements such as gold and the rate at which the universe is expanding. 

But detecting gravitational waves isn’t easy. By the time they reach Earth and the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in Louisiana and Washington state, the ripples have dissipated into near silence. LIGO’s detectors must sense motions on the scale of one ten-thousandth the width of a proton to stand a chance. 

LIGO has confirmed 90 gravitational wave detections so far, but physicists want to detect more, which will require making the experiment even more sensitive. And that is a challenge. 

“The struggle of these detectors is that every time you try to improve them, you actually can make things worse, because they are so sensitive,” says Lisa Barsotti, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nevertheless, Barsotti and her colleagues recently pushed past this challenge, creating a device that will allow LIGO’s detectors to detect far more black hole mergers and neutron star collisions. The device belongs to a growing class of instruments that use quantum squeezing—a practical way for researchers dealing with systems that operate by the fuzzy rules of quantum mechanics to manipulate those phenomena to their advantage. 

Physicists describe objects in the quantum realm in terms of probabilities—for example, an electron is not located here or there but has some likelihood of being in each place, locking into one only when its properties are measured. Quantum squeezing can manipulate the probabilities, and researchers are increasingly using it to exert more control over the act of measurement, dramatically improving the precision of quantum sensors like the LIGO experiment.  

“In precision sensing applications where you want to detect super-small signals, quantum squeezing can be a pretty big win,” says Mark Kasevich, a physicist at Stanford University who applies quantum squeezing to make more precise magnetometers, gyroscopes, and clocks with potential applications for navigation. Creators of commercial and military technology have begun dabbling in the technique as well: the Canadian startup Xanadu uses it in its quantum computers, and last fall, DARPA announced Inspired, a program for developing quantum squeezing technology on a chip. Let’s take a look at two applications where quantum squeezing is already being used to push the limits of quantum systems.

Taking control of uncertainty

The key concept behind quantum squeezing is the phenomenon known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In a quantum-mechanical system, this principle puts a fundamental limit on how precisely you can measure an object’s properties. No matter how good your measurement devices are, they will suffer a fundamental level of imprecision that is part of nature itself. In practice, that means there’s a trade-off. If you want to track a particle’s speed precisely, for example, then you must sacrifice precision in knowing its location, and vice versa. “Physics imposes limits on experiments, and especially on precision measurement,” says John Robinson, a physicist at the quantum computing startup QuEra. 

By “squeezing” uncertainty into properties they aren’t measuring, however, physicists can gain precision in the property they want to measure. Theorists proposed using squeezing in measurement as early as the 1980s. Since then, experimental physicists have been developing the ideas; over the last decade and a half, the results have matured from sprawling tabletop prototypes to practical devices. Now the big question is what applications will benefit. “We’re just understanding what the technology might be,” says Kasevich. “Then hopefully our imagination will grow to help us find what it’s really going to be good for.” 

LIGO is blazing a trail to answer that question, by enhancing the detectors’ ability to measure extremely tiny distances. The observatory registers gravitational waves with L-shaped machines capable of sensing tiny motions along their four-kilometer-long arms. At each machine, researchers split a laser beam in two, sending a beam down each arm to reflect off a set of mirrors. In the absence of a gravitational wave, the crests and troughs of the constituent light waves should completely cancel each other out when the beams are recombined. But when a gravitational wave passes through, it will alternately stretch and compress the arms so that the split light waves are slightly out of phase.

The resulting signals are subtle, though—so subtle that they risk being drowned out by the quantum vacuum, the irremovable background noise of the universe, caused by particles flitting in and out of existence. The quantum vacuum introduces a background flicker of light that enters LIGO’s arms, and this light pushes the mirrors, shifting them on the same scale as the gravitational waves LIGO aims to detect.

Barsotti’s team can’t get rid of this background flicker, but quantum squeezing allows them to exert limited control over it. To do so, the team installed a 300-meter-long cavity in each of LIGO’s two L-shaped detectors. Using lasers, they can create an engineered quantum vacuum, in which they can manipulate conditions to increase their level of control over either how bright the flicker can be or how randomly it occurs in time. Detecting higher-frequency gravitational waves is harder when the rhythm of the flickering is more random, while lower-frequency gravitational waves get drowned out when the background light is brighter. In their engineered vacuum, noisy particles still show up in their measurements, but in ways that don’t do as much to disturb the detection of gravitational waves.“ You can [modify] the vacuum by manipulating it in a way that is useful to you,” she explains. 

The innovation was decades in the making: through the 2010s, LIGO incorporated incrementally more sophisticated forms of quantum squeezing based on theoretical ideas developed in the 1980s. With these latest squeezing innovations, installed last year, the collaboration expects to detect gravitational waves up to 65% more frequently than before.

Quantum squeezing has also improved precision in timekeeping. Working at the University of Colorado Boulder with physicist Jun Ye, a pioneer in atomic clock technology, Robinson and his team made a clock that will lose or gain at most a second in 14 billion years. These super-precise clocks tick slightly differently in different gravitational fields, which could make them useful for sensing how Earth’s mass redistributes itself as a result of seismic or volcanic activity. They could also potentially be used to detect certain proposed forms of dark matter, the hypothesized substance that physicists think permeates the universe, pulling on objects with its gravity. 

The clock Robinson’s team developed, a type called an optical atomic clock, uses 10,000 strontium atoms. Like all atoms, strontium emits light at specific signature frequencies as electrons around the atom’s nucleus jump between different energy levels. A fixed number of crests and troughs in one of these light waves corresponds to a second in their clock. “You’re saying the atom is perfect,” says Robinson. “The atom is my reference.” The “ticking” of this light is far steadier than the vibrating quartz crystal in a wristwatch, for example, which expands and contracts at different temperatures to tick at different rates.

In practice, the tick in the Robinson team’s clock comes not from the light the electrons emit but from how the whole system evolves over time. The researchers first put each strontium atom in a “superposition” of  two states: one in which the atom’s electrons are all at their lowest energy levels and another in which one of the electrons is in an excited state. This means each atom has some probability of being in either state but is not definitively in either one—similar to how a coin flipping in the air has some probability of being either heads or tails, but is neither.

Then they measure how many atoms are in each state. The act of measurement puts the atoms definitively in one state or the other, equivalent to letting the flipping coin land on a surface. Before they measure the atoms, even if they intend to wind up with a 50-50 mixture, they cannot precisely dictate how many atoms will end up in each state. That’s because in addition to the system’s change over time, there is also inherent uncertainty in the state of the individual atoms. Robinson’s team uses quantum squeezing to more reliably determine their final states by reducing these intrinsic fluctuations. Specifically, they manipulate the uncertainties in the direction of each atom’s spin, a property of many quantum particles that has no classical counterpart. Squeezing improved the clock’s precision by a factor of 1.5.

To be sure, gravitational waves and ultra-precise clocks are niche academic applications. But there is interest in adapting the approach to other, potentially more mainstream uses, including quantum computers, navigation, and microscopy.

The increased use of quantum squeezing is part of a wider technological trend toward higher precision—one that encompasses cramming more transistors on chips, studying the universe’s most elusive particles, and clocking the fleeting time it takes for an electron to leave a molecule. Squeezing benefits only measurements so subtle that the randomness of quantum mechanics contributes significant noise. But it turns out that physicists have more control than they think. They may not be able to remove the randomness, but they can engineer where it shows up.

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/uHCa8M6

At a showroom in a Boston suburb, Patrick Elisha sat down and began to play the opening measures of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 to demonstrate why Steinway & Sons grand pianos are celebrated in concert halls around the world. 

Steinways are meticulously crafted instruments: it takes around 250 workers a year to assemble each grand piano’s 12,000 individual parts. Everything, from the hand-bent rims (made of more than a dozen layers of rock maple, each heated and shaped to form a grand piano’s classic curves) to the small felt rollers in the piano’s action (which help dictate how much pressure it takes to play an individual note), is crafted to produce clarion, resonant tones that range from the pianissimo bell-like chimes that open the concerto to the thundering fortissimo chords that seem to rise from the depths over its next eight measures.

Elisha, who runs the education division of M. Steinert & Sons, the world’s oldest Steinway dealer, is an award-winning pianist and composer—but I wanted to hear how the piano handled a virtuoso like Lang Lang going to town on, say, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit from the Disney film Encanto. 

No problem: Elisha called up a video of Lang performing in New York’s Steinway Hall on a nearby wide-screen TV. Once he hit Play on the video, whatever Lang played was perfectly reproduced on the piano in front of me. When Lang’s right hand flew up the keyboard to produce the opening flourish in the “Bruno” video, the keys on the piano in the room where I stood were depressed with precisely the same velocity for precisely the same amount of time. 

This was, I realized, the first time I had ever heard a truly lossless recording. Acoustically, I was getting the equivalent of a private concert from one of the most famous pianists alive, courtesy of Steinway’s Spirio. It’s a thoroughly modern take on the player piano—a device, popular in the early 20th century, that used rolls of paper with holes punched in them to play specific tunes, no pianist required. 

Roughly half of all new Steinways sold last year included Spirio technology, which adds between $29,000 and $48,000 to what is already a $150,000 instrument. The most recent addition to the line is the Spirio | r, which has recording, editing, and playback technology. A pianist who’s learning a new piece can play it, record the effort, and then essentially watch the piano play it back—making it possible to pick up on nuances in timing and tone that might be harder to discern from an audio recording alone. 

The Spirio, which launched in 2015, added an entirely new set of engineering challenges to what was already one of the most deliberately constructed instruments in history. Before it came to market, Steinway had to ensure that the Spirio tech was, as Elisha puts it, “non-parasitic.” In other words, adding pressure sensors and anything else that could cause friction between the musician and the instrument was verboten; altering the feel in any way would destroy what makes a Steinway a Steinway.

Instead, performances are recorded by dozens of gray-scale optical sensors mounted behind the keyboard that calculate the velocity at which hammers strike the piano wires whenever any of the piano’s 88 keys is pressed. (The sensors have 1,020 levels of sensitivity and can take 800 measurements per second.) A different set of sensors underneath the piano measures the pedal-guided dampers; playback of both the keys and the pedals is controlled by solenoid plungers. 

Each Spirio comes with a dedicated iPad; with a couple of swipes, Spirio | r users can edit their performances in an almost infinite number of ways. Everything from individual notes to entire chords can be erased or transposed, elongated or shortened, made louder or softer—if you can imagine it, you can hear what it will sound like as it’s played back to you. 

But it’s the constantly updated Spirio library, which currently includes more than 4,000 recordings and more than 100 videos, that really makes this an instrument like no other. The vast majority of these performances are captured live, but Steinway also employs musicologists who re-create archival recordings. (Programming a single minute of archival music typically takes between 40 and 60 hours.) Thelonious Monk died when I was nine years old—but thanks to Spirio, I could close my eyes and hear what it would have sounded like if I’d been standing in the room with him when he played the eponymous tune “Thelonious” in a Paris television studio before I was born. It felt like magic. 

Seth Mnookin is a former music critic and the director of MIT’s master’s program in science journalism. 

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/75B8W4R

A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can’t see it or reach it. Something about this tantalizing proximity has fascinated us throughout history. The blank spaces on the map that Joseph Conrad referred to in Heart of Darkness were, to Europeans, hidden worlds. The moon was (and is again) perhaps the best example of a hidden world—extremely visible to us, but inaccessible and mysterious. 

Hidden worlds exist in the great depths of the ocean and high above us in the planets of the night sky. But they are also all around us in the form of waves and matter and microbes, nocturnal animals and clandestine passages, waiting to be exposed. 

Technology has long played the spoiler to these worlds in hiding. We have used ships, airplanes, and rockets to shrink distances. Telescopes, cameras, satellites, drones, and radar help us peer into and map the places we cannot go ourselves. Advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence are creating accessible replicas of complete physical worlds in virtual spaces. All this peels away the concealing layers of time and distance.

This issue is all about using technology to explore and expose those hidden worlds, whether they are in the ocean depths, in the far reaches of our galaxy, or swirling all around us, unseen. 

The moon that graces our cover is Europa, one of Jupiter’s many orbiting bodies. Europa is covered in ice with water below, and scientists have long wondered whether the planet could support life. Later this year, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper. The spacecraft is scheduled to reach Europa in 2030 and spend the next four years studying its environs. Stephen Ornes takes you to this mysterious Jovian moon. 

From 300 meters below the surface, Samantha Schuyler has the incredible story of a brute-force breakthrough that is allowing divers to go deeper than ever before possible. In an attempt to descend to these unprecedented depths in some of Florida’s deepest underwater caves, divers turned to a combustible gas that’s capable of sucking all the heat out of their bodies: hydrogen. 

In a story that also starts out under the water, Matthew Ponsford describes the effort to build an Internet of Animals. Scientists intend to monitor on the order of 100,000 animals—including rodents and birds—with GPS-equipped tags that can be tracked by a system of microsatellites in low Earth orbit. This network could reveal not only migration patterns and ways in which animal populations interact, but also new information about our planet itself. 

Back onterra firma, Meg Duff brings us a glimpse of a world that is all around us: Wi-Fi sensing. This technology, which is already in millions of homes, uses Wi-Fi waves to detect motion. For now, much of its usefulness is limited to detecting whether a space is occupied or not. But in the coming years it will quite literally be able to see through the walls of your home and monitor your movements inside. This means Wi-Fi sensing will be increasingly employed to monitor people’s health, their micro-­motions, and even their movements through crowded buildings. 

One other reason hidden worlds fascinate us so much is that they often, despite our best efforts, remain hidden. Dan Garisto brings us the story of how particle physicists are trying to push the field forward into the post-Higgs era. At stake are unanswered questions about the fundamental constituents of the universe.

And I hope you’ll find plenty of other stories to grab your attention—about everything from Antarctica to Wikipedia—hidden all throughout this issue. 

Thank you,

Mat Honan

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/VeHdfwJ

Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub one of the main characters.

But you won’t find Adored by the CEO on TV or Netflix. Instead, it’s on FlexTV, a Chinese app filled with short dramas like this one. The shows on FlexTV are shot for phone screens, cut into about 90 two-minute episodes, and optimized for today’s extremely short attention span. Coker calls it “soap operas for the TikTok age.”

In the past few years, these short dramas have become hugely popular in China. They often span nearly a hundred episodes, but since each episode is only one or two minutes long, the whole series is no longer than a traditional movie. The most successful domestic productions make tens of millions of dollars in a few days. The entire market of short dramas in China was worth over $5 billion in 2023.

This success has motivated a few companies to try replicating the business model outside China. Not only is FlexTV translating and dubbing shows already released in China, but it has also started filming shows in the US for a more authentically American viewing experience.

It’s easy to compare apps like these to Quibi, a high-profile video service that infamously failed after less than a year in 2020. 

But these latest Chinese apps are different. They don’t aim for slick, expensive productions. Instead, they choose simple scripts, shoot an entire series in two weeks, market it heavily online, and move on to the next project if it doesn’t stick. 

“The biggest difference between short dramas and films is that they provide different things. We have to analyze the psychological needs of our audience and understand what they want to see … and we try to provide some emotional values,” Xiangchen Gao, the chief operations officer of FlexTV, tells MIT Technology Review. 

When a show finds the right audience, it can generate significant revenue in the US too. The top-grossing show on FlexTV can bring in $2 million a week, while the production costs less than $150,000, Wang says.

Several other apps, like ReelShort and DramaBox, are also racing to bring Chinese short dramas to an international audience. They frequently top app stores’ download charts and produce blockbuster shows. Short dramas have been proven to work in China. It’s not always easy to replicate a business model in a different market, but if they succeed, they could be China’s next big cultural export.

The roots in Chinese web novels

Short dramas like Adored by the CEO are often adapted from another cultural product that is distinctly Chinese: web novels.

Web novels are a unique form of literature that has been popular on the Chinese internet for much of the last two decades: long stories that are written and posted chapter by chapter every day. Each chapter can be read in less than 10 minutes, but installments will keep being added for months if not years. Readers become avid fans, waiting for the new chapter to come out every day and paying a few cents to access it.

While some talented Chinese book authors got their big break by writing web novels, the majority of these works are the popcorn of literature, offering daily bite-size dopamine hits. For a while in the 2010s, some found an audience overseas too, with Chinese companies setting up websites to translate web novels into English.

But in the age of TikTok, long text posts have become less popular online, and the web-novel industry is looking to pivot. Business executives have realized they can adapt these novels into super-short dramas. Both forms aim for the same market: people who want something quick to kill time in their commute, or during breaks and lunch.

Many of the leading Chinese short-drama apps today work closely with Chinese web-novel companies. ReelShort is partially owned by COL Group, one of the largest digital publishers in China, with a treasure trove of novels that are ready for adaptation.

To get a quick sense of what these stories are like, you just need to take a look at their titles: President’s Sexy Wife, The Bride of the Wolf King, Boss Behind the Scenes Is My Husband, or The New Rich Family Grudge.

One of the highest-grossing shows on FlexTV is called Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying. It’s a corny romance story about a love triangle, ultra-rich families, cancer, rebirth, and redemption, and it was adapted from a Chinese web novel that has nearly 1,300 chapters. The original story has been turned into a Chinese short drama, but FlexTV decided to shoot another version in Los Angeles for an international audience.

These short dramas prioritize quick, oversimplified stories of love, wealth, betrayal, and revenge, sometimes featuring mythical creatures like vampires and werewolves. Stories of marrying into a rich family attract men, while stories with a powerful female protagonist in control of her life appeal to women, says Gao, the COO of FlexTV. 

“Quibi mostly served the [artistic] pursuits of directors and producers. They thought their tastes were better than the general public and their work was to be appreciated by the elites,” he says, “What we are making is more like fast-moving consumer goods. It’s rooted in the needs of ordinary users.”

Translating the story to a US audience

Still, no matter how universal the plots are, these short dramas need to be adapted to their local audience. 

Ty Coker’s work is one example. The character they voiced, a personal assistant to the male protagonist, was named Dawei Hu in the original Chinese production. But in the English dubbing, “Dawei Hu” became “David Hughes.” All the other characters, as well as the geographical references, received similar treatments, while the visuals didn’t change. Sometimes the results of this straightforward swap method are a little jarring. “They would mention: ‘Oh, so and so is coming in from New York. And it was like, okay, I don’t think that character is originally from New York, but we’ll roll with it,” Coker says.

This “Americanization” could make it easier for some viewers to follow and remember the show. “My mom, who watches a lot of soap operas—she’d probably find it easier to follow if everyone has American names,” Coker says. It reminds Coker of anime shows they watched as a child, which would substitute Western names for the Japanese ones.

But that’s not where the localization efforts end. With shows that are later dubbed into a different language, there’s always going to be a feeling of mismatch. That’s why short-drama platforms are now filming their own productions with translated scripts and non-Chinese actors, sometimes even in Hollywood. It costs much more than dubbing an already-made show, but they believe it’s worth it.

FlexTV has just finished filming a new show in Los Angeles. Named Lost in Darkness, it is about a visually impaired woman trying to figure out which of two male characters murdered her father. The production took 10 days in total, with 34 actors filming over 150 scenes. It cost between $150,000 and $200,000. 

Roger Chen, a producer of the show, has been instrumental in bringing short dramas to the US. He originally produced traditional-length movies and animations in the States but formed a new company called Purple Filter last year, after noticing the demand for Chinese-adapted stories. His company now coordinates between Chinese platforms and the LA filming industry, scouting actors, directors, and producers who are interested in this new form of content.

He admits these shows can be a hard sell for actors in the US. 

“An episode of a short drama is only one and a half minutes long, so the plot buildup is short, if there is any … Actors who are accustomed to traditional scripts find it hard to accept,” Chen says. “But we discovered that it’s necessary to have strong conflicts and quick plot twists. This is the unique content that suits the smartphone medium.”

His company has worked with most of the major platforms, including DramaBox and FlexTV. Meanwhile, there are more and more teams like Chen’s joining the American short-drama industry. “We believe that media content for phones will become a mainstream trend,” he says.

A well-oiled business in targeted ads 

The business model of these short dramas is one that American TV audiences are mostly not familiar with. Unlike most American streaming services, which require subscriptions, Chinese platforms for streaming and web novels use a business model of paying by the episode or chapter. Essentially, the first 10 or so episodes are always available for free, but once users are hooked, they need to pay a certain amount to watch each episode. It resembles the microtransaction mechanism in mobile games, which Chinese companies, like the developer of the global hit Genshin Impact, also perfected. Users can quickly rack up thousands in payments by buying small items in-game here and there.

FlexTV has a similar tactic. You can pay $5 for 500 in-app coins, which in return unlock about seven episodes. A whole series therefore can cost around $50, but there are also small tasks users can do in the app to earn free rewards, like watching ads, posting about the app on social media, and doing daily check-ins. 

Evidently, some people are willing to pay, as some of these shows are starting to see serious revenues. Gao shares that Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying is bringing in over $2 million in user payments a week. Similar apps have also reported significant revenues. ReelShort made $22 million in December 2023, the company told the Wall Street Journal, and its global download count has already surpassed that of the ill-fated Quibi. 

But there’s a caveat: these phenomenal numbers are also driven by heavy ad spending, which is an essential part of the business model. While it’s cheap to make these shows (around $150,000 per show if filmed in the US), millions of dollars are then spent on pushing them to prospective audiences. For Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying, for example, the company had to spend $1 million on ads to get over $2 million in revenues. 

FlexTV relies on targeted advertising through major platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok. These platforms allow them to choose what kind of audience they want the ads to impress. For Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying, FlexTV targeted “young women between the ages of 20 and 40, who like romance content and reading,” says Gao.

For each dollar spent on advertising, the target return on investment is at least $1.30 to $1.50, says Gao. The viral popularity of short dramas in China is no accident but the result of a well-oiled digital marketing industry that has adjusted to the TikTok age. 

Despite early successes, the short-drama business inside China is now starting to run into difficulties. As its popularity grows, the Chinese government has started to censor it much as it does the film and TV industry. In a three-month period ending in February 2023, the government banned 25,300 short-drama series (totaling 1.3 million episodes) for being too violent, too sexually suggestive, or too trashy. Chinese short-video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou have since been routinely removing shows or restricting their producers from buying targeted ads. 

This is also part of the reason why companies like ReelShort and FlexTV are looking to expand in foreign markets, where the risks of censorship are much lower. The short-drama industry in the US is akin to what it was like in China in 2021, says Gao, which means there’s little competition and plenty of room to grow. The company plans to produce shows in six languages in the future, but North America will remain its most important market. 

Ultimately, they’re betting that these dopamine-inducing mini soap operas will appeal to audiences regardless of their culture or language. “We don’t think Chinese and American audiences have fundamental differences in taste,” Gao says. “Chinese web novels have studied human nature deeply, and they do a great job at evoking emotions. Scriptwriters and directors who excelled in China can capture everyone’s universal desires.”

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/Cfz1Fei

President Joe Biden’s crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation’s largest investment into addressing the rising dangers of climate change. 

Yet Donald Trump’s advisors and associates have clearly indicated that dismantling the landmark law would sit at the top of the Republican front-runner’s to-do list should he win the presidential election. If he succeeds, it could stall the nation’s shift to cleaner industries and stunt efforts to cut the greenhouse-gas pollution warming the planet. 

The IRA unleashes at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, and more. It is the “backbone” of the Biden administration’s plan to meet the nation’s commitments under the Paris climate agreement, putting the US on track to cut emissions by as much as 42% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm. 

But the sprawling federal policy package marks the “biggest defeat” conservatives have suffered during Biden’s tenure, according to Myron Ebell, who led the Environmental Protection Agency transition team during Trump’s administration. And repealing the law has become an obsession among many conservatives, including the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, widely seen as a far-right road map for the early days of a second Trump administration. 

The IRA’s tax credits for EVs and clean power projects appear especially vulnerable, climate policy experts say. Losing those provisions alone could reshape the nation’s emissions trajectory, potentially adding back hundreds of millions of metric tons of climate pollution this decade. 

Moreover, Trump’s wide-ranging pledges to weaken international institutions, inflame global trade wars, and throw open the nation’s resources to fossil-fuel extraction could have compounding effects on any changes to the IRA, potentially undermining economic growth, the broader investment climate, and prospects for emerging green industries.

Farewell to EV tax credits

The IRA leverages government funds to accelerate the energy transition through a combination of direct grants and tax credits, which allow companies or individuals to cut their federal obligations in exchange for buying, installing, investing in, or producing cleaner power and products. It is enacted law, not a federal agency regulation or executive order, which means that any substantial changes would need to be achieved through Congress.

But the tax cuts for individuals pushed through during Trump’s time in office are set to expire next year. If he wins a second term, legislators seeking to extend those cuts could crack up the tax code and excise key components of the IRA, particularly if Republicans retain control of the House and pick up seats in the Senate. Eliminating any of those tax credits could help offset the added cost of restoring those Trump-era benefits.

Numerous policy observers believe that the pair of EV tax credits in the IRA, which together lop $7,500 off the cost of electric cars and trucks, would be one of the top targets. Subsidizing the cost of EVs polls terribly among Republicans, and throughout the primaries, most of the party’s candidates for president have fiercely attacked government support for the vehicles—none more than Trump himself. 

On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly, erroneously referred to the policy as a mandate rather than a subsidy, while geographically tailoring the critique to his audience.

At a December rally in Iowa, the nation’s biggest corn producer, he pledged to cancel “Crooked Joe Biden’s insane, ethanol-killing electric-vehicle mandate on day one.”

And in the battleground state of Michigan in September, he pandered to the fears of autoworkers.

“Crooked Joe is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy the country itself,” Trump said. “The damn things don’t go far enough, and they’re too expensive.”

Other Trump targets

Other IRA components likely to fall into Trump’s crosshairs include tax credits for investing in or operating emissions-free power plants that would come online in 2025 or later, says Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington, DC.

These so-called technology-neutral credits are intended to replace earlier subsidies dedicated to renewables like solar and wind, encompassing a more expansive suite of energy-producing possibilities like nuclear, bioenergy, or power plants with carbon capture capabilities.

Those latter categories are more likely to have Republican support than, say, solar farms. But any policy primarily designed to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels would likely be a ripe target in a second Trump administration, given the industry’s support for the candidate and his ideological opposition to climate action.

A number of other provisions could also come under attack within the law. Among them:

• additional measures supporting the growing adoption of EVs, including tax credits for individuals and businesses that install charging infrastructure; 
• fees on methane emissions from wells, processing plants, and pipelines, when they exceed certain thresholds;
•  a series of environmental-justice grants and bonus tax credits available for projects that help reduce pollution, provide affordable clean energy, and create jobs in low-income, marginalized areas;
• a reinstated Superfund excise tax on crude oil and petroleum products, which could raise billions of dollars to fund the cleanup of hazardous-waste sites;
• and a series of tax credits incentivizing consumers to add solar panels, install heat pumps, and improve the energy efficiency of their homes. 

Pushback

Observers are quick to note, however, that a wholesale repeal of the IRA is unlikely, because—well—it’s working.

By some accounts, the law has helped spur hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment into projects that could create nearly 200,000 jobs—and get this: eight of the 10 congressional districts set to receive the biggest clean-energy investments announced in recent quarters are led by Republicans, according to one analysis (and backed up by others). 

A disproportionate amount of the money is also flowing into low-income areas and “energy communities,” or regions that previously produced fossil fuels, according to data from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group. 

As more and more renewables projects, mineral processing facilities, battery plants, and EV factories bring jobs and tax revenue to red states, the politics around clean energy are shifting, at least behind the scenes if not always in the public debate. 

All of which means some sizable share of Republicans will likely push back on more sweeping changes to the IRA, particularly if they would raise the costs on businesses and reduce the odds that new projects will move forward, says Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, DC, think tank.

“Most of the tax credits are pretty popular within industry and in red states, which are generally the constituency that the Republican Party listens to when they shape their policies,” Mackler says. “When you start to go beyond the top-line political rhetoric and look at the actual tax credits themselves, they’re on much firmer ground than you might initially think just reading the newspaper and looking at what’s being said on the campaign trail.”

That means it might prove more difficult to rescind some of the hit-list items above than Trump would hope. And there are other big parts of the legislative package that Republicans might avoid picking fights over at all, such as the support for processing critical minerals, manufacturing batteries, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, and producing biofuels, given the broader support for these areas.

DC sources also say that clean-energy-focused policy shops and some climate tech companies themselves are already playing defense, stressing the importance of these policies to legislators in the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, if staffers at the Department of Energy and other federal agencies aren’t already rushing to get as much of the grant-based money in the IRA out the door as possible, they should be, says Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who advised Democrats on crafting the law.

Among other funds, the law appropriates nearly $12 billion for the DOE’s loans office, which provides financing to accelerate the development of clean-energy projects. It also sets aside $5 billion in EPA grants designed to help states, local governments, and tribes implement efforts to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. 

“If DOE and EPA work fast enough, that money should be difficult to somehow claw back, because it will have been spent,” Stokes says.

Impact

Still, there’s no question that Trump and legislators eager to curry his favor could do real damage to the IRA and the clean-energy industries poised to benefit from it.

How much damage depends, of course, on what he succeeds in unraveling.

But take the example of the power sector subsidies. A study last year in the journal Science noted that with the IRA’s support for clean electricity, around 68% of the country’s power generation would come from low-emission sources by 2030, as opposed to 54% without the law. 

The Rhodium Group estimates that the IRA could cut power-sector pollution by nearly 500 million tons in 2030, as a central estimate. 

How much these projections change would depend on which and how many of the provisions supporting the shift to cleaner power legislators manage to remove. In addition to the technology-neutral credits noted above, the IRA also provides federal support for extending the life of nuclear plants, deploying energy storage, and adding carbon capture and storage capabilities.

Meanwhile, an earlier report from RMI (formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute) offered a hint at what’s at stake for the EV sector. The research group noted that the assorted provisions within the IRA, when combined with the EPA’s proposal to tighten tailpipe rules, could propel electric passenger vehicles to 76% of all new sales by 2030. Without it, they will only make up about half such sales by that point. (Notably, however, the Biden administration is now reportedly considering relaxing those rules to give automakers more time to ramp up EV production.)

All told, some 37 million additional EVs could hit the nation’s roads between now and 2032, eliminating more than 830 million tons of transportation emissions by that year and 2.4 billion tons by 2040, RMI estimates.

That adds up to a huge difference in the market prospects for EV makers, and in the economics of building new plants. 

The loss of the EV credits could create another notable ripple effect. For a purchased vehicle to qualify for one of the $3,750 tax credits, at least 60% of the battery components must be manufactured or assembled in North America. The other credit is available only if the batteries include a significant share of critical minerals extracted or processed in the US or through free-trade partners, or recycled in North America.  

The varied goals of these “domestic content requirements,” which helped drive the law past the legislative finish line, included ensuring that the US produces more of materials and components for cleantech industries domestically, creating more jobs, reducing the nation’s reliance on China, and safeguarding US energy security as the country moves away from fossil fuels.

Losing the tax credits could dim hopes for reaching those goals—though some critics argue that trade deals and IRS interpretations have already watered down the credits’ provisions, ensuring that more manufacturers and models qualify.

Trump’s broader agenda

Trump has made clear he intends to hamstring additional climate efforts and bolster the oil and gas sector through numerous other means, potentially including federal regulations, executive orders, and Department of Justice actions. All of these would only magnify any impact from changes he might make to the IRA.

If he wins in November, he’s also likely, for instance, to direct the EPA to eliminate those tailpipe rules altogether. He may work to slow down, cut off, or claw back some of the $7.5 billion allocated under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build out a national EV charging network.

Trump could also remove and refuse to replace the staff necessary to implement and oversee programs and funding throughout the DOE, the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies. And he would very likely pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement again. 

How much of this Trump accomplishes could depend, in part, on how emboldened he feels upon entering office for a second term, when he’d likely still be battling multiple criminal cases against him. 

“It just depends if we assume he’s going to respect the law and color within the lines of our legal system, or if he’s going to be a fascist,” Stokes says. “That’s a huge question—and we should take it very seriously.”

In the end, it may also prove difficult to disentangle the effects of rolling back climate policies from any success he achieves in implementing his broader policy agenda. Trump has pledged to impose a 60% or higher tariff on Chinese goods, as well as a “pro-America system of universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products.” He has said he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies and is reportedly considering  pulling the US out of the military alliance. He’s discussed deploying military forces to suppress US protests, seal the southern border, and attack drug cartels in Mexico.

The potentially chaotic economic and geopolitical effects of such policies, at a point of spiraling global conflicts, could easily dwarf any direct consequences of altering climate laws and regulations.

As Freed puts it: “A world that is less stable and much more dangerous, economically and militarily, would have incalculable damage on climate and energy issues in a second Trump term.”

And on much else.

via TechSpot https://ift.tt/U5thFyM

Portable flash memory has never been more versatile, and you will be pleasantly surprised by the widespread availability of high-speed, large-capacity microSD and SD cards these days. In this guide, we explain all the speed classes, plus give you handy buying recommendations.

Read Entire Article

via MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/vcCgxT4

MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. 

In the nuclear magnetic resonance facility at Mississippi State University, three powerful magnets make it possible to see how atoms form bonds. Chemists there use the technology to design new polymers and study how bacteria bind to surfaces. To make it all work, they need an element that’s commonly found in grocery stores, but is also in perpetually short supply: helium. 

Every 12 weeks, the university pays $5,000 to $6,000 to replenish the liquid helium required to cool the superconducting wire coiled up inside the magnets down to -452 °F (-269 °C). 

“It’s by far the biggest expense we have,” says Nicholas Fitzkee, the facility’s director. “The price that drives our user fees is the purchase of liquid helium, and that has pretty much doubled over the past year or so.”

Helium is excellent at conducting heat. And at temperatures close to absolute zero, at which most other materials would freeze solid, helium remains a liquid. That makes it a perfect refrigerant for anything that must be kept very cold.

Liquid helium is therefore essential to any technology that uses superconducting magnets, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners and some fusion reactors. Helium also cools particle accelerators, quantum computers, and the infrared detectors on the James Webb Space Telescope. As a gas, helium whisks heat away from silicon to prevent damage in semiconductor fabs. 

“It’s a critical element for the future,” says Richard Clarke, a UK-based helium resources consultant who co-edited a book about the element. Indeed, the European Union includes helium on its 2023 list of critical raw materials, and Canada put it on a critical minerals list too. 

Again and again throughout the history of technology development, helium has played a critical role while remaining in tight supply. As part of MIT Technology Review’s 125th anniversary series, we looked back at our coverage of how helium became such an important resource, and considered how demand might change in the future. 

Countries have at times taken extreme measures to secure a steady helium supply. In our June 1975 issue, which focused on critical materials, a Westinghouse engineer named H. Richard Howland wrote about a controversial US program that stockpiled helium for decades. 

Even today, helium is not always easy to get. The world’s supply depends primarily on just three countries—the US, Qatar, and Algeria—and fewer than 15 companies worldwide. 

With so few sources, the helium market is particularly sensitive to disruptions—if a plant goes offline, or war breaks out, the element may suddenly be in short supply. And as Fitzkee noted, the price of helium has climbed rapidly in recent years, putting hospitals and research groups in a pinch. 

The global helium market has experienced four shortages since 2006, says Phil Kornbluth, a helium consultant. And the price of helium has nearly doubled since 2020, from $7.57 per cubic meter to a historic high of $14 in 2023, according to the United States Geological Survey. 

Some research labs, including Fitzkee’s, are now installing recycling systems for helium, and MRI manufacturers are making next-generation scanners that require less of it. But many of the world’s highest-tech industries—including computing and aerospace—will likely need even more helium in the future. 

“At the end of the day, what’s happening is helium’s just getting more expensive,” says Ankesh Siddhantakar, a PhD student in industrial ecology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “The era of cheap helium is probably gone.”

A high-tech need

Helium is the second element on the periodic table, which—as you may recall from high school chemistry class—means it has just two protons (and thus two electrons). 

Thanks to their simple structure, helium atoms are some of the smallest and lightest, second only to hydrogen. They’re extremely stable and don’t easily react with other stuff, which makes them easy to incorporate into industrial or chemical processes. 

One major use of liquid helium over the years has been to cool the magnets inside MRI scanners, which help doctors examine organs, muscles, and blood vessels. But the cost of helium has risen so much, and the supply has been so volatile, that hospitals are eager for other options. 

MRI manufacturers including Philips and GE HealthCare now sell scanners that require much less helium than previous generations. That should help, though it will take years to upgrade the roughly 50,000 MRI scanners already installed today. 

Other industries are finding ways around helium too. Welders have substituted argon or hydrogen on some jobs, while chemists have switched to hydrogen for gas chromatography, a process that allows them to separate mixtures. 

But there’s no good alternative to helium for most applications, and the element is much harder to recycle when it’s used as a gas. In semiconductor fabs, for example, helium gas removes heat from around the silicon to prevent damage and shields it from unwanted reactions. 

With rising demand for computing driven in part by AI, the US is investing heavily in building new fabs, which will likely drive more demand for helium. “There’s no question that chip manufacturing will be the biggest application within the coming years, if it isn’t already,” says Kornbluth. 

Overall, Kornbluth says, the helium industry expects to see growth in the low single digits over the next few years. 

Looking further out, Clarke predicts that most industries will eventually phase out nonessential uses of helium. Instead, they will use it primarily for cryogenic cooling or in cases where there’s no alternative. That includes quantum computers, rockets, fiber-optic cables, semiconductor fabs, particle accelerators, and certain fusion reactors. 

“It’s something that, for a cost reason, all these new technologies have got to take into account,” Clarke says. 

Given its importance to so many industries, Siddhantakar thinks helium should be a higher priority for those thinking about managing strategic resources. In a recent analysis, he found that the global supply chains for helium, lithium, and magnesium face similar risks. 

“It is a key enabler for critical applications, and that’s one of the pieces that I think need to be more understood and appreciated,” Siddhantakar says. 

A delicate balance

The helium we use today formed from the breakdown of radioactive materials millions of years ago and has been trapped in rocks below Earth’s surface ever since. 

Helium is usually extracted from these underground reservoirs along with natural gas, as John Mattill explained in an article from our January 1986 issue: “Helium can be readily separated from the gas before combustion, but the lower the helium concentration, the higher the cost of doing so.” 

Generally speaking, helium concentrations must be at least 0.3% for gas companies to bother with it. Such levels can be found in only a handful of countries including the US, Qatar, Algeria, Canada, and South Africa. 

Helium shortages are not caused by a lack of helium, then, but the inability of producers in those few countries to deliver it to customers everywhere in a timely manner. That can happen for any number of reasons. 

“It is a very global business, and any time a war breaks out somewhere, or anything like that, it tends to impact the helium business,” says Kornbluth. 

Another challenge is that helium atoms are so light Earth’s gravity can’t hold onto them. They tend to just, well, float away, even escaping specially designed tanks. Up to 50% of helium we extract is lost before it can be used, according to a new analysis presented by Siddhantakar last week at the International Round Table on Materials Criticality. 

Given all this, countries that need a lot of helium—Canada, China, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and the UK are among the top importers—must constantly work to ensure a reliable supply. The US is one of the largest consumers of helium, but it’s also a leading producer.

For decades, the global helium market was closely tied to the US government, which began stockpiling helium in Texas in 1961 for military purposes. As Howland wrote in 1975, “The original justification of the federal helium conservation program was to store helium until a later time when it would be more essential and less available.” 

But the US has slowly sold off much of its stockpile and is now auctioning off the remainder, with a final sale pending in the next few months. The consequences are not yet clear, though it seems likely that agencies such as NASA will have to pay more for helium in the future. As Christopher Thomas Freeburn wrote in a 1997 article titled “Save the Helium,” “By eliminating the reserve, the federal government … has placed itself at the mercies of the market.”

Customers everywhere are still overwhelmingly dependent on the US and Qatar, which together produce more than 75% of all helium the world uses. But the US has produced and exported significantly less in the past decade, while demand from US consumers rose by 40%, according to the USGS’s Robert Goodin. 

Eager to fill the void, new countries are now starting to produce helium, and a flurry of companies are exploring potential projects around the world. Four helium plants opened last year in Canada, and one started up in South Africa. 

Russia is set to open a massive new plant that will soon supply helium to China, thereby edging out Algeria as the world’s third-largest producer. 

“Russia is going to become the number-three producer as early as 2025, and they’ll end up accounting for a quarter of the world’s supply within the next five years,” says Kornbluth. 

Qatargas in Qatar is opening a fourth plant, which—together with Russia’s new facility—should expand global helium supply by about 50% in the next few years, he adds. 

Some companies are now considering sites where they could extract helium without treating it as a by-product of natural gas. Helium One is exploring several such sources in Tanzania.  

Will it be enough? 

Back in 1975, Howland described the helium market as “an example of the false starts, inefficiencies, and economic pitfalls we must avoid to wisely preserve our exhaustible resources.”

He also predicted the US would use up much of its known helium reserves by the turn of the century. But the US still has enough helium in natural-gas reservoirs to last 150 more years, according to a recent USGS analysis. 

“As with a lot of other things, it’s going to be about the sustainable management of this resource,” says Siddhantakar.