Happy Friday. Nearly 30 years ago this week, the World Wide Web’s first search giant dropped. AltaVista was released in December of 1995, and until Google overtook it in 2001, per Comscore, it was one of the most popular search engines around.
Fast-forward to today, and despite predictions of the ChatGPT-precipitated erosion of Google’s dominance, the search giant commands 92% of the global search-engine market, per Statcounter data.
In today’s edition:
 A 70-year-old homebuilding company looks to climate tech
 The state of AI adoption in 2022
—Jordan McDonald, Hayden Field, Dan McCarthy
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KB Home
Wood. Cement. Steel. Solar panels?
As consumer demand for more environmentally friendly products and services increases, one of the biggest home builders in the US is looking to test the market for fully electrified, solar-powered homes.
KB Home, a home builder in operation since 1957, recently announced two all-electric solar- and battery-powered communities—a total of 219 homes—in Menifee, California, designed for first-time homeowners.
- The houses, the first of which will be delivered early next year, represent the company’s first foray into fully electrified developments.
The goal: The 219 homes would be a drop in the bucket compared to the 9,952 homes the company delivered through Q3 of 2022, but right now, according to Dan Bridleman, senior VP of sustainability, technology, and strategic sourcing at KB Home, the project is an early experiment with microgrid communities and an attempt to learn what works.
Looking ahead...Though Bridleman said in a follow-up email that KB doesn’t currently have plans to build additional microgrid communities, if this project is successful, he said, it could lead to further developments as the home builder studies and learns from this initial microgrid project. Keep reading on-site.—JM
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91 million miles (the distance from Earth to the sun) is nothing for truckers.
Big rigs are forced to waste 29 billion miles of potential revenue annually by traveling without cargo. All because shippers have to use greedy brokers to connect with them—ones that charge $200b in annual fees.
Ship this: LaneAxis is cutting out the middleman, saving up to 50% in fees. Plus, their platform uses machine learning to schedule shipments and identify truckers’ capacity so there are no more empty miles or lost revenue.
The result is never-before-seen control for shippers and carriers alike.
Honk if you love LaneAxis. Now you have the exclusive opportunity to become a shareholder as they pioneer a more efficient, less costly supply chain.
Invest in LaneAxis today.
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Francis Scialabba, Dianna “Mick” McDougall
From AI-generated movie scripts to “magic avatars,” the AI buzz has continued through 2022—and in the business world, adoption of the tech has more than doubled over the last five years, per a new report.
In 2017, one in five businesses surveyed reported using AI in “at least one business area,” compared to one in two today, according to McKinsey’s annual Global Survey on AI.
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But that’s not the only thing that’s grown: The average number of AI “capabilities” those businesses are using has also doubled from 1.9 to 3.8, with robotic process automation, computer vision, and natural language text understanding leading the charge.
In other words…More businesses are using AI for more things.
Zoom out: A large share of businesses using AI may get a failing grade in the “risk mitigation” category. Despite increases in AI adoption, researchers wrote, “there have been no substantial increases in reported mitigation of any AI-related risks from 2019—when we first began capturing this data—to now.” Read the full story on-site.—HF
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 Cyber threats: Increased online activity during the holiday season = a greater risk of cyber threats. This means IT managers are firing on all cylinders. Make sure you have your bases covered with IT Brew’s latest guide.
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Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall; Photo: Getty Images
Stat: Battery prices rose in 2022, per BNEF, reversing a decade-long trend of rapid cost declines. But no need to panic: Experts told us they expect prices to calm down in the next few years.
Quote: “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”—OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, in a tweet about ChatGPT’s current limitations
Read: Gartner’s 10 strategic predictions for 2023.
Learn: In uncertain times, you need to be certain about your decisions. Learn how data dashboards can back up your choices and never wonder “what if?” again with our Data Storytelling sprint. Sign up now.
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Google’s AI chief said in an all-hands meeting that it’s moving “more conservatively than a small startup” in releasing AI chatbots, citing potential “reputational risk.”
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Tesla plans to drill for water sources to support an expansion of its German factory, following concerns from environmental advocates regarding the plant’s water use.
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Microsoft is partnering with Viasat to offer satellite-broadband access to 5 million people across several African countries.
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Jack Dorsey, in response to Twitter turmoil, articulated his vision for a “native internet protocol for social media.”
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Apple’s satellite iPhone feature went live in a handful of European countries on Wednesday.
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Frontier, the carbon-removal fund formed by Shopify, Stripe, Alphabet, McKinsey, and Meta, announced $11 million in new purchase agreements for CO2 removal projects.
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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?
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A company built a GPT-3-powered chatbot that specializes in…negotiating bills with service providers.
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A new Tesla update added more video games to the center console screen in its cars.
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A professor was caught using ChatGPT to grade final exams.
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The US Senate voted to ban TikTok from government devices.
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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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There’s been a lot of chatter about students potentially using ChatGPT to cheat, but we haven’t come across anything about professors using the bot as a TA.
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Written by
Jordan McDonald, Hayden Field, and Dan McCarthy
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