Author: peterjang73

It’s crunch time at Tesla Inc, where Elon Musk is looking to crack the code for making better, cheaper batteries.

The electric-vehicle maker is recruiting Chinese and Korean materials suppliers to help lower the cost and boost the energy of its newest battery cells, even as the company struggles with battery-related performance and production issues that have helped delay the launch of its futuristic Cybertruck, according to people familiar with the plans.

Tesla has tapped China’s Ningbo Ronbay New Energy and Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing to help trim materials costs as it ramps up production of 4680 battery cells in the United States, according to the sources, who asked not to be named.

The details of these arrangements have not previously been reported.

If the Austin, Texas-based EV maker is able to work out the performance and process kinks and meet its ambitious production targets, the 4680 ultimately could be the linchpin – rather than choke point – in CEO Musk’s dream of building 20 million vehicles annually by 2030.

Neither Tesla nor Musk could be reached for comment.

As part of its efforts, Tesla also has signed a deal with Korea’s L&F Co to supply high-nickel cathodes that could increase the energy density of its 4680 cells, one of the sources said.

The automaker aims to augment its own output with 4680 cells from Korea’s LG Energy Solution and Japan’s Panasonic – an insurance policy to secure future EV production, two of the sources said. LG and Panasonic are expected to supply cells for Cybertruck, one of the sources said.

A shortage of batteries means “the factories stall,” Musk told investors in early March.

The new battery is expected to play a key role in the launch late this year of the edgy, stainless-steel Cybertruck, the company’s first new model in more than three years.

Tesla had considered three battery options to ensure that launch is not delayed again: smaller 2170 cells used widely in other Tesla models, 4680 cells and less-expensive lithium iron phosphate cells, but the EV maker favored waiting until the 4680 cells are ready, the sources said.

Details about Tesla’s Cybertruck battery strategy, including use of 4680 cells and consideration of other options, have not been reported.

In 2022, Musk said he did not expect 4680 batteries would be a ”limiting factor for Cybertruck or anything else.”

The Tesla-designed 4680 cell — so named for its external dimensions (46mm diameter, 80mm length) — is crucial to future production plans. Tesla intends to make versions at factories in Texas, California, Nevada and Berlin for use in vehicles from Model Y to Cybertruck, the sources said.

But Tesla is still struggling to ramp up the first wave of production, Musk acknowledged at Tesla’s investor day on March 1.

‘TESLA IMPACT UNDERESTIMATED’

Despite the immediate problems, some analysts remain optimistic Tesla will resolve these issues.

“While execution risk remains and many details are unknown, Tesla’s impact on the global battery industry may still be underestimated,” Morgan Stanley said after investor day.

Musk first announced the new cell at Battery Day in September 2020. At that event, he promised a 50% reduction in cell cost through a series of innovations, from a larger cell size to a new “dry” electrode coating process that could dramatically reduce the size and cost of a battery factory while boosting cell performance.

Repeated delays in moving the new cell from the initial prototype phase to full-scale production also have pushed back introduction of the long-awaited Cybertruck, which was designed to take advantage of the cell’s potential improvement in energy density and power — advances that have yet to materialize.

But it will take time for suppliers to ramp up production.

Panasonic is running a pilot 4680 production line at its Wakayama factory in Japan, and plans to start volume production later in the fiscal year that ends in March 2024.

Shoichiro Watanabe, chief technology officer of Panasonic Energy, last month said the company’s new Kansas battery plant will focus initially on 2170 cells, but it will eventually shift 4680 production to North America.

Last year, LG said it planned to open a new 4680 production line at its Ochang plant in Korea in the second half of 2023.

Tesla’s first-generation 4680 cells, built at its Fremont, California, factory, failed to hit an energy density target, people involved say.

The automaker so far has been able to dry-coat the anode — the negative electrode — but is still having issues with dry-coating the cathode, where the most significant gains are expected to be made, the sources said.

Tesla’s attempt to ramp up production of the dry coating process has thus far resulted in enough batteries only for about 50,000 vehicles annually, Musk and company executives have said.

In 2020, Musk said Tesla would have enough 4680 capacity in-house to supply 1.3 million Model Ys.

While executives said it seems likely Tesla will be able to increase 4680 output five-fold by year-end, the company is hedging.

Musk is betting if Tesla ends up with too many batteries this year, that is a good problem to have. It can use those for the energy storage systems it sells to utilities and consumers.

Tesla also has been installing first-generation 4680 cells with “wet” cathodes in so-called structural packs in Texas-built Model Ys. A majority of those vehicles use the older 2170 cells.

Tesla plans to use a cathode with more than 90% nickel in the next generation of 4680 cells, two sources said. L&F is expected to be one of the suppliers of that high-nickel cathode, another source said.

(Reporting by Zoey Zhang in China and Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Norihiko Shirouzu in Austin, Texas, and Daniel Leussink in TokyoAdditional reporting by Paul Lienert in DetroitEditing by Ben Klayman and Matthew Lewis)

Related video:

Audrey Kim’s dog Murphy uses a combination of head nods and 10 buttons on the ground to communicate, she says, and has a habit of making friends with crows. She taught him to use the buttons because she believes consciousness is a spectrum and intelligence is mysterious. Those tenets also led her to become curator of the Misalignment Museum, a temporary exhibition about the future of artificial intelligence that opens today in San Francisco, ground zero for recent excitement about generative AI and chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Misalignment Museum imagines a future in which AI starts to take the route mapped out in countless science fiction films—becoming self aware and setting about killing off humanity. Fortunately, in Kim’s vision the algorithms self-correct and stop short of killing all people. Her museum, packed with artistic allegories about AI and art made with AI assistance, is presented as a memorial of humankind’s future near-miss with extinction.

“It’s weird, because it’s such a terrifying topic, but it makes me happy people are interested,” Kim says from a coffee shop across the street. As we talk, we watch passersby peer into the gallery space—fittingly located eight blocks from the offices of OpenAI—that has a prominent “Sorry for killing most of humanity” sign along one wall.

The project started five months ago, shortly before ChatGPT sparked expectation in the tech industry and beyond that we are on the cusp of a wave of AI disruption and somehow closer to the nebulous concept of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. There’s no consensus about the definition of AGI, but the museum calls it the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can.

Kim says the museum is meant to raise conversations about the destabilizing implications of supposedly intelligent technology. The collection is split across two floors, with more optimistic visions of our AI-infused upstairs, and dystopian ones on the lower level.

Upstairs there’s piano music composed with bacteria, an interactive play on Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel, and soon an installation that uses computer vision from Google to describe people and objects that appear in front of a camera.

Downstairs is art from Matrix: Resurrections (a set designer on the movie, Barbara Munch Cameron, helped plan the museum’s layout), a never-ending AI-generated conversation between Slavoj Žižek and Werner Herzog, and a robotic arm holding a pen that writes notes from the perspective of an AI that views humans as a threat.

“This is the gates-to-hell selfie spot,” Kim says, pointing out a quote from Dante above the entrance to the lower section of the museum: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” The museum is also home to a deepfake of Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking from a script generated by ChatGPT, a statue of two people embracing made from 15,000 paper clips that’s meant to be an allegory about AI safety, and robots flown in from Vienna made from Spam tins with little arms that type.  

Pesky lunar dust is an annoying obstacle for astronauts landing on the Moon—it sticks to pretty much everything. New research from Washington State University may have cracked the code for keeping space suits dust-free, in which pressurized liquid nitrogen was used to literally blow the dust from surfaces.

During testing, the research team found that a sprayer full of liquid nitrogen could remove an average 98% of the dust stuck to fabric when used in a vacuum to simulate an airlock. The spray resulted in minimal damage to the spacesuits worn by simulated astronauts—Barbie dolls in Moon suits—as a result of the treatment. The research was published last month in Acta Astronautica.

At the same time, the team found that over the course the 233 total cycles of treatments on 26 spacesuit samples, the liquid nitrogen spray resulted in little degradation to the spacesuit fabric. To simulate lunar dust, the researcher used volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens, and also materials from Offplanet Research and Exolith Labs.

Lunar dust “degrades human health and equipment making mitigation paramount for lunar missions,” the scientists wrote in their study. “Cryogenic liquid sprays are a recently developed, simple, and convenient concept for dust mitigation in a lunar environment.”

Astronauts on the Apollo missions to the Moon used a brush in an attempt to remove lunar dust from their suits, but this method wore down the fabric due to the constant rubbing and rough Moon dust.

“Moon dust is electrostatically charged, abrasive and gets everywhere, making it a very difficult substance to deal with,” said Ian Wells in a Washington State University press release. Wells is the first author on the paper and a student in Washington State University’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. “You end up with a fine layer of dust as a minimum just covering everything.”

The liquid nitrogen spray forgoes the use of physical abrasion in favor of the Leidenfrost effect, which is most commonly seen when a bubble of cold water dances atop a hot frying pan, as it’s insulated from the hot surface by a layer of vapor underneath it. Wells and his colleagues say that the spray works in a similar fashion; the cold liquid nitrogen beads up on the warmer spacesuit, enveloping the dust particles before floating off the surface of the fabric.

Moon dust is a incredibly fine substance, but it is also incredibly sharp—it can actually create small tears in space suits and boots and even cause health issues. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt referred to “lunar hay fever,” in which Moon dust clings to lungs and causes inflammation and congestion. Particles of dust can hitch a ride into habitats and modules on spacesuits, and since the Moon’s gravity is so much less than Earth’s, these particles will stay suspended for longer only to be inhaled by an unsuspecting astronaut. This is why effective spacesuit cleaning is so important.

“[Lunar dust] posed a lot of problems that affected the missions as well as the astronauts once they returned home,” Wells said in the press release.

The researchers obviously don’t know how this spray will function inside a lunar lander parked on the Moon, where gravity is about 16.6% that of Earth’s. Also, this cleaning technology would require sprayers and canisters engineered for spaceflight, and missions having to include extra shipments of liquid nitrogen. With all that said, the pros appear to outweigh the cons, making the liquid nitrogen cleaning technique a worthwhile investment for future missions to the Moon.

NASA is sending more astronauts to the Moon as part of the Artemis program, with two crew members landing on the lunar south pole no earlier than 2025. As the Artemis program ushers in a new era of Moon exploration—where humans will be spending more time than ever on the surface—an effective method for cleaning space suits is one of the details that agencies need to account for in order to foster a seamless foothold for humanity on the Moon.

More: We Need Moon Standard Time

Google’s reliance on commonly used messaging systems that automatically delete conversations after a day has landed the company in hot water with the Department of Justice.

In filing Thursday evening, the DOJ accused Google of using so-called “history off” communications that they say “routinely destroyed” written communication after 24 hours. Some of those destroyed chats, the DOJ alleges, may have discussed “sensitive topics.” That’s a bad look as the tech giant faces not one, but two antitrust investigations by the nation’s leading law enforcement division.

“For nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours.” the DOJ alleges.

These “history off” chats—also referred to as off the record chats—allegedly occurred on Google Hangouts and instant messages. To Google’s credit, anyone who uses Google communications, even outside the company, has the ability to have their communications automatically deleted after 24 hours. Not everyone is under investigation from the feds though. In its filing,the DOJ claims Google use of history of chats, maliciously or not, may run afoul of laws requiring companies to preserve communications for litigation.

Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comments, however a spokesperson for the company told CNBC it “strongly refute[s] the DOJ’s claims.”

“Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”

The DOJ maintains Google should have suspended its auto-delete practices by 2019, when it was clear litigation was coming. Amazingly though, the DOJ claims Google employees continued communicating using history off chats up until the week of the filling. Up until then, the DOJ says Google left it largely up to employees when chats could be relevant to preserve for future legal action. During all of that time, the agency claims Google falsely said it had “put a legal hold in place” suspending the auto deletion practice. Now, according to the filing, the DOJ says Google has finally committed to a “permanently set history on.”

The allegations make Google’s already rocky start to 2023 even worse. The tech giant, which was already busy fighting off a federal suit claiming it has built a monopoly in search and search advertising markets, got slapped with another major antitrust suit last month. That lawsuit, filed by the DOJ and eight state attorneys general, claims Google maintains an illegal monopoly in the digital ad markets. If the DOJ gets its way, Google will be forced to break up its ad business.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s reason to believe more legal action may be brewing. This week, reporting from Bloomberg and Politico claims the DOJ is investigating to determine if the company’s dominant Google Maps app violates antitrust practices. Bottom line, Google has a long legal year ahead of it.

I hate to break it to you, but a world where your every move can be tracked using facial recognition has gone from science fiction to an everyday reality. Facial recognition is common at airports, concerts, and stores, its in our schools, and you might even have to use it to file your taxes. Some people are willing to trade privacy for safety, but facial recognition has serious, built-in flaws that limit its accuracy. The technology may already be responsible for putting innocent people in jail.

But with a little ingenuity and a flexible definition of style, there are clothes and accessories you can wear that can confuse the algorithms and keep your face undetectable. I wouldn’t bet my life on them working in all circumstances, but some of these outfits have science backing their anti-face-rec claims.

Facial recognition is a tool that uses so-called “computer vision” technology to identify patterns. Sometimes it’s just recognizing that there is a human face in an image, but it can be trained on the contours of individual faces to spot specific people as well.

Essentially, these dystopian duds work by introducing new patterns specially designed to distract or confuse the image recognition software, leaving you to go about your business undetectable. Some of them look pretty cool too.

Click through for our selection of some of the more interesting garments. Some of them are available for purchase, though some are just forward-looking art-objects.

Flying killer robots used to be a nightmarish sci-fi fantasy—something that only existed in James Cameron movies or Michael Crichton novels. These days, not so much. Not only is drone warfare close to two decades old, but innovations to this lethal technology are being developed all the time.

Case in point: New Scientist magazine recently unearthed a contract between the U.S. Air Force and a little known defense firm that shows the government is using reconnaissance and surveillance drones equipped with facial recognition to aid in special operations missions. While the magazine notes that those smaller drones aren’t typically armed (unlike, say, their big siblings, the Predator and the Reaper), they clearly present dizzying new possibilities for America’s most shadowy and deadly cadres. The Air Force’s provider is a Seattle-based firm, RealNetworks, which sells a platform dubbed Secure Accurate Facial Recognition, or SAFR. The government paid $729,056 for SAFR, which will be deployed “on an autonomous sUAS for special ops, ISR, and other expeditionary use-cases,” according to the contract. While not a ton is known about how the U.S. is using this technology or how long it’s been using it, one thing is certain: it’s creeping people out.

“Big huge NOPE to everything here,” tweeted Jake Wiener, a lawyer with the digital privacy organization EPIC, in response to the news.

Another critic, Nicholas Davis, of the University of Technology Sydney, told Newsweek: “There are innumerable ethical implications, from the way such devices might redistribute power or threaten groups within a society, to the ways in which they threaten established international humanitarian law in conflict zones.”

Skeptics have dutifully noted the horrifying nature of this particular integration. Given the fact that special operations units are most well known for their clandestine and lethal activities (read: assassinations and raids), the deployment of an AI-powered airborne robot affixed with face recording tech means America’s goon squads now have a powerful new tool to carry out their dark deeds. Motherboard notes that such drones could easily be used for “intelligence and target acquisition,” meaning that anybody being trailed by these little contraptions is probably in deep shit.

The scariest thing about this development, frankly, is that it’s clearly only the beginning of the race to make drones faster, smarter, more sophisticated and, potentially, more lethal. From the Navy’s planned drone swarm warfare to the surge in drone use in the Russo-Ukrainian war, to the specter of flying robots that could come equipped with chemical or biological payloads, get ready for your worst sci-fi nightmares to come true.

Governments in 35 countries shut down the internet for a record total of at least 185 times in 2022 alone, a new study shows. The New York-based watchdog group, Access Now, published the report on Tuesday noting that the rate of online shutdowns has not only skyrocketed but is lasting longer and are often targeting the populations during times when it is needed the most.

Access Now launched its Keep It On campaign in 2016, and has found that India accounted for nearly half of the outages recorded last year. The majority of the outages occurred during humanitarian crises, mass protests, active conflicts, elections, and war, with India reportedly carrying out 84 internet shutdowns last year, making it the number one country to censor internet access for the fifth year in a row.

People in Tigray, Ethiopia have suffered more than two years of a full communication blackout, making it the longest active shutdown, while some regions in Myanmar continue to struggle with a continued blackout for more than 500 days. “Authorities ordered shutdowns for many of the same reasons they have for years, some using the same tired justifications,” Access Now wrote in the report. “For prolonged periods of time, those in power used shutdowns to silence people, often targeting specific communities through complete blackouts, mobile shutdowns, and platform blocking.”

The report shows that not only are governments using internet outages to silence protestors or block alleged misinformation, it has also acted as a cover for countries whose government, military, and police carried out war crimes as well as covering up violent human rights violations including murder, torture, or rape.

Russia reportedly cut internet access 22 times amidst its invasion of Ukraine, using the outages to destroy telecommunications infrastructure and issue cyberattacks while Iran used the outages to combat protests in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was killed by the country’s “morality police.”

Although the rate of internet blackouts is growing at an unprecedented rate, Access Now says it has seen progress as it works alongside the United Nations to bring an end to global shutdowns. The group says in the report that it “successfully mobilized against election-related shutdowns globally,” including mobilizing against outages during the Kenya general election, progress toward ending the two-year blackout in Ethiopia, and working with the United Nations High Commissioners for Human Rights (OHCHR) organization. 

The UN conducted a similar report last year, reflecting similar findings to Access Now, and describing the severity of the human rights violations. “When a state shuts down the internet, both people and economies suffer. The costs to jobs, education, health, and political participation virtually always exceed any hoped-for benefit,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a press release last year.

She added, “What this report clearly highlights is that swift action is needed to end Internet shutdowns, including through more prominent reporting of their impacts, more transparency by involved companies, and ensuring that we all defend connectivity from self-imposed disruptions.”