Tech Brew [inactive]

It’s not a New York City heat wave if the utility doesn’t send customers alerts asking them to limit usage of large appliances and air conditioners. And New Yorkers aren’t alone: In response to mounting energy demand, utility companies across the country are asking customers to curtail their energy use.

Titanium dioxide’s journey from the Earth’s crust to our lips is a long one. The food additive—which is used in foods like candy, cottage cheese, and frosting—starts as a metal found in a handful of minerals. It’s mined via earth blasting and drilling, and then processed into titanium dioxide. Once in the form of a fine, white powder, it can be added as a pigment to foods to make them look brighter and more opaque.

Like many human workers, AI agents might struggle to make a living off online gig work. For these autonomous AI systems, however, it’s not for lack of work, but because they overwhelmingly fail to complete projects sourced from online freelance platforms. That’s what researchers at the Center for AI Safety along with Scale AI found when they tested agents on their ability to perform economically valuable work as part of a new benchmark, the Remote Labor Index (RLI).

A little over a year ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on what he saw as some best-case scenarios for AI. Much of it focused on potential scientific progress in biology, medicine, and neuroscience. Now the AI company is making its first foray into that space with a new tool called Claude for Life Sciences, which upgrades the model to support biotech R&D labs with tasks like literature reviews, lab protocols, data analysis, and regulatory compliance.

The numbers are in—and they show that the EV market has officially started a new chapter. Battery-electric vehicles made up just over 5% of new-vehicle retail sales in October, according to JD Power and GlobalData. That’s down more than half from September’s all-time high of nearly 13%. The drop-off comes after the Sept. 30 expiration of federal tax credits for EVs of up to $7,500, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tax and budget bill.

Northern Michigan is famously scenic, with access to three Great Lakes and ample opportunities to see peak fall foliage. But its roadways don’t always provide the most direct route. That’s just one of the challenges of delivering healthcare services, according to Tracy Cleveland, VP of supply chain for Munson Healthcare, the region’s largest healthcare system.

Every time you pop an idle thought into ChatGPT or another AI interface, it triggers a far-flung journey. Your query—“What is this rash?” perhaps—races to a hulking data center in a place like Abilene, Texas, where it’s routed to the right stack of servers. The traffic directors of all this activity are a series of high-bandwidth network switches—devices that coordinate data between servers—made by companies like Broadcom.

As the EV market enters choppy waters, legacy automakers are pulling back on electrification plans, delaying EV launches, and cutting production at EV plants. That’s not an option for pure-play EV makers like Rivian. Instead, the Irvine, California-based manufacturer has its sights set firmly on the launch next year of its second-generation product: a midsize SUV called the R2 that’ll start at $45,000.

A story played out in Wednesday’s Big Tech earnings bonanza that’s become very familiar in this leg of the AI race. Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta all surpassed topline analyst expectations around earnings and revenue. All three also upped their estimates of the massive amounts they had spent or plan to spend on AI infrastructure. Investors were left to pick a narrative.

Bay Area, prepare for even more driverless cars on your streets. Next year, the hot spot for self-driving startups like Waymo will be the first market where Uber launches robotaxis in partnership with AV tech company Nuro and EV maker Lucid, the companies announced Wednesday. “We need to make it work everywhere. Therefore, we said, OK, yes, San Francisco is not the easiest city to drive around in, but that’s where all of our engineers are.