☕ Auto assessments

The tech Ford uses to test vehicles.

November 04, 2024 It's Monday. Your car, be it powered by a battery or an internal combustion engine, undergoes a, well, battery of tests before it ever hits the dealership. Tech Brew's Jordyn Grzelewski went to Ford's Drivability Testing Facility in Michigan to observe the tests—and noted how things differ between ICEs and BEVs. In today's edition: A behind-the-scenes look at how Ford uses tech to test vehicles before they hit the road Stanford researcher sees finance, medicine benefiting from open-source AI Tech giants plan to spend even more on AI next year —Jordyn Grzelewski, Patrick Kulp, Annie Saunders FUTURE OF TRAVEL Testing, testing Jordyn Grzelewski The winter solstice is weeks away, but on a recent sunny October day at a Ford facility in Southeast Michigan, it was already here. At least, it felt that way in a so-called "soak room" at the automaker's Drivability Testing Facility, where temperatures plunge as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Here, engineers recreate winter conditions as part of extensive testing to validate that in-development vehicles are prepared for basically any scenario they might encounter in the real world. Every vehicle model is tested not only to meet federal safety requirements, but so that manufacturers can catch issues before the vehicles go into mass production and thereby avoid costly fixes once they're on the market. Tests touch on fuel efficiency, vehicle weight, heating and cooling systems, and much more. Tech Brew got a behind-the-scenes look at some of Ford's processes, which use continuously evolving technologies to make sure that vehicles are safe, durable, and perform well in a variety of conditions. These methods are adapting to meet some of the unique characteristics—and challenges—of electric vehicles. "Historically, everything's been combustion engines. That's what this place was built for, and every other test facility," Wind Tunnel Engineer Doug Olson told us. "Battery vehicles, they behave differently in the cold…So, we'll develop different testing to see how much the battery may degrade parked overnight in the cold." "They're pretty different vehicles," he added, "so we end up doing a lot of different tests." Keep reading here.—JG Presented By The Crew Give your B2Biz a B2Boost How? With Morning Brew's engaged audience of 22m+ monthly readers, of course. Our unique community of young, hard-to-reach readers (who are 1.7x more likely to have a household income of $150k+) can give your B2B offerings the valuable visibility you're looking for. B2B decision-makers know how crucial it is to get their business's potential in front of the right s, and the Brew's paid advertising opportunities connect your brand to our audience by leveraging our popular B2B-centric franchise newsletters, specialized events, and skyrocketing cache of multimedia content. Morning Brew is powered by the knowledge our readers trust us to deliver. From Retail Brew's trending insights to Healthcare Brew's timely updates, we've got a B2B Brew for you. Which one will you choose to grow with? Advertise with us. AI On the flip side Francis Scialabba In part two of our conversation with Rishi Bommasani, society lead at the HAI's Center for Research on Foundation Models, we discuss where AI is actually proving most dangerous, why openness is important, and how regulators are thinking about the open–closed divide. This conversation, the second of two parts, has been edited for length and clarity, and contains references to materials related to child abuse. I want to ask about the benefits. As OpenAI has moved toward a more closed model, and some of these other big companies have become more closed as more money has gone into the AI race, is there still a robust open foundation model ecosystem? It's definitely been true for a while—and I would say it's still true—that if you only care about raw capabilities, the most capable models are still on the closed side. Both the open developers and the closed developers are constantly improving capabilities…and right now, what you would see is that the open developers are closer to the closed ones than they have been in the past. But I think this also reflects that we don't have great benchmarks for really revealing the most capable models, like a lot of things are saturating at the moment. The other thing I would say, though, is where open models are doing very well is really not [in] just broad capabilities, but the capabilities-to-cost tradeoff, which is ultimately what most businesses will care about. And this appears in a few different ways. Keep reading here.—PK AI Still spending Francis Scialabba Don't expect tech giants to shut their checkbooks any time soon when it comes to AI. That was one message from last week's quarterly earnings reports as Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet each forecast big spending on data center infrastructure and other AI-related expenses continuing into the coming year. Those numbers, as well as a predicted slowing of cloud growth at Microsoft, seemed to distract investors from earnings beats as Meta and Microsoft stocks dipped on Thursday. But what else is new? Wall Street has been antsy about AI spending for months now, the companies have continued to post strong results bolstered by cloud and ad revenues, and execs have attempted to reassure investors that the returns will come eventually. "This part of the formula around building out the infrastructure is maybe not what investors want to hear in the near term, that we're growing it out," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "But I just think that the opportunities here are really big. We're going to continue investing significantly in this." Keep reading here.—PK Together With SAP Here comes big-time growth. The trick to taking your biz to the next level? You gotta find a quality Cloud ERP tool. Enter GROW with SAP. It's a quick-to-implement solution specifically designed to help midsize businesses reduce risk exposure, enhance the customer experience, and boost adaptability. Start your scaling engines. BITS AND BYTES Stat: 160%. That's how much data-center electricity use is forecast to grow by the end of the decade, which could more than double carbon dioxide emissions, Vox reported, citing data from Goldman Sachs, in a story headlined, "Should you feel guilty about using AI?" Quote: "Nobody wants a misdiagnosis…There should be a higher bar."—Alondra Nelson, the former lead of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden administration, to the Associated Press about the hallucination tendencies of OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool Read: What if AI is actually good for Hollywood? (the New York Times Magazine) SHARE THE BREW Share Tech Brew with your coworkers, acquire free Brew swag, and then make new friends as a result of your fresh Brew swag. We're saying we'll give you free stuff and more friends if you share a link. One link. Your referral count: 0 Click to Share Or copy & paste your referral link to others: emergingtechbrew.com/r/?kid=b3968dba Written by Jordyn Grzelewski, Patrick Kulp, and Annie Saunders Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.   Guide → What is AI?   Guide → What is 5G? Take The Brew to work Marketers: Marketing Brew Corporate: CFO Brew   HR Brew Tech: IT Brew   Retailers: Retail Brew Healthcare: Healthcare Brew Get smarter in just 5 minutes Business News: Morning Brew Money & Career: Money With Katie   Bossy   Brew Markets   The Playbook Interested in podcasts? Check out ours here ADVERTISE // CAREERS // SHOP // FAQ Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here. View our privacy policy here. Copyright © 2024 Morning Brew. All rights reserved. 22 W 19th St, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10011