TheChek News Flow

Artificial intelligence will put pressure on the electric grid.

The campaign to phase out fossil fuels is on a collision course with the artificial-intelligence revolution. Energy-intensive AI technologies are becoming more dependent on the electrical grid, which is largely powered by coal and natural gas. Oil, gas and pipeline companies hold the keys to Silicon Valley’s future. Yet access to cheap, reliable and abundant electricity powered by fossil fuels will soon pose a major risk to such businesses as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The irony is that Big Tech helped give life to climate catastrophism and has advocated a net-zero energy transition. Silicon Valley techies for years have financed the political and cultural movement against the extraction, refinement and transportation of fossil fuels. Now, the brilliant minds that brought us semiconductor chips, iPhones and the internet will have to fight to fuel their latest innovations.

According to Goldman Sachs, AI is likely to drive a 160% increase in data-center power demand by 2030. Wind and solar power won’t be able to rise to the occasion—and much of AI’s physical infrastructure will need to be built in the U.S., rather than, say, China or India, owing to security concerns. Barring a rapid and unlikely build-out of domestic nuclear power, natural gas will power America’s AI future.

Climate activists tend to ignore the high financial and societal costs of their policies. If AI grows as expected and restrictive policies keep fossil-fuel production flat, it’s only logical that Big Tech will buy existing power-generating facilities and focus on producing renewable energy to satisfy its energy needs and green ambition. This increased demand for a limited supply of electricity will likely lead to higher costs and create electricity reliability issues for the broader public. In short, wealthy tech industry leaders might make it more difficult for poor and middle-class families to afford power bills.

Tech companies with trillion-dollar market capitalizations and nebulous carbon-credit schemes might be able to shrug at increased electricity costs, but households, small businesses, and manufacturers won’t have that luxury.

The dilemma offers an opportunity for Big Tech to get serious about the need for American-produced fossil fuels, energy efficiency, nuclear energy, and innovations to reduce emissions. Silicon Valley should use its influence to support permitting reform, pipeline construction and the approval of new chemicals that will drive AI to new heights. The collision can be averted, but there’s no time to waste.

Confidential filing would lay groundwork for blockbuster IPO and provide a coup for faltering UK stock exchange

The online fashion giant Shein is planning to confidentially file for a London listing as soon as the coming days, laying the groundwork for a blockbuster initial public offering in the UK.

Shein is set to file privately with UK regulators its intention to float, according to people familiar with the matter, who cautioned that timing on the filing could yet shift.

Shein had been leaning towards a London listing after tensions between Beijing and Washington stalled its plans for an IPO in New York.

Shein’s executive chair Donald Tang told the Financial Times last month that the Singapore-domiciled company had made “progress” on changing the perception that China controlled Shein “but not enough” to win over US lawmakers.

The company had previously filed preparatory paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission more than six months ago, but concerns about Shein’s ties to Beijing became the biggest hurdle in the path to a US listing.

A confidential filing involves submitting preliminary information and does not necessarily mean a flotation is imminent. It will allow Shein to be ready to list more quickly if the company decides to go ahead.

The on-demand ecommerce group was valued at $66bn in its last funding round, and landing a flotation of Shein’s size would be a coup for the London Stock Exchange. London has been losing listings to its larger and more liquid New York rivals, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

Shein was founded in China and most of its suppliers are in the country. However, it is now headquartered in Singapore and does not sell its products in China.

The company hit a record of more than $2bn in profits for 2023, surpassing the $700mn of net income it generated in 2022 and $1.1bn in 2021. By comparison, rivals H&M and Zara owner Inditex reported net profits of SKr8.7bn ($820mn) and €5.4bn ($5.8bn), respectively, in their most recent fiscal years.

Sky News previously reported the filing plans on Sunday. Shein declined to comment.

The new proposal values Paramount B-shares at a roughly 26% premium to Friday’s close

Skydance Media’s revised offer to buy Shari Redstone’s family company National Amusements and merge with Paramount Global PARA 0.76%increase; green up pointing triangle gives the entertainment conglomerate’s nonvoting shareholders an option to cash out at a premium, according to people familiar with the matter.

Last week, David Ellison’s Skydance made a sweetened offer to buy up to a certain number of nonvoting Paramount shares at roughly $15 each, while also giving shareholders the option to roll into the new deal, the people said. The price per share, which could change, represents a 26% premium from where the stock closed Friday.

Under the proposed deal, Skydance and its backers would contribute funds to buy out National Amusements, inject cash into Paramount’s balance sheet and allow nonvoting shareholders to cash out some of their holdings.

Other details of the deal, which is being reviewed by Redstone’s camp, couldn’t be learned. The two parties are still negotiating, and the deal could still fall apart.

Such a transaction would usher in a new chapter for Paramount, which owns one of Hollywood’s storied studios, the broadcaster CBS and cable channels such as Nickelodeon and MTV. It follows weeks of negotiations between Ellison and Redstone, during which nonvoting shareholders opposed a deal with Skydance and Paramount parted ways with its chief executive, Bob Bakish, who had voiced concerns about the transaction.

Skydance’s offer is a two-step process. In the first step, Skydance would buy National Amusements, which owns about 77% of the voting shares of Paramount. Then, in a second step, Paramount would acquire Skydance.

Skydance’s investors, which include private-equity firm RedBird Capital Partners and Ellison’s father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, have agreed to put additional cash onto Paramount’s balance sheet, which it can use to pay down debt, some of the people said.

In an earlier proposal, Skydance had offered about $2 billion in cash to Redstone for National Amusements, and Paramount would have acquired Skydance in an all stock-deal at a $5 billion valuation. Many shareholders opposed that offer because they saw it as a sweetheart deal for Redstone.

Skydance has since revised the terms to be better for non-Redstone shareholders. It is unclear what the structure of the new deal might be.

A significant issue the two sides must agree upon is whether a Paramount and Skydance merger would need approval from non-Redstone shareholders, according to people familiar with the situation. National Amusements has signaled that it is open to making the transaction contingent upon approval from the majority of non-Redstone shareholders.

A deal would mark the end of an era for Redstone, whose family has controlled Paramount through their privately held movie-theater company National Amusements for decades. Redstone started seriously entertaining a sale of National Amusements last year, after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel pushed her to want to spend more time fighting antisemitism.

Paramount is currently run by an “Office of the CEO” made up of its divisional heads, who are expected to present their long-term plan for the company Tuesday at Paramount’s annual shareholder meeting.

The entertainment company has been contending with major headwinds across its business, including the collapse of cable television, an expensive pivot to streaming and an anemic box office.

Paramount’s market value has plummeted since Redstone years ago won a battle to succeed her father, media mogul Sumner Redstone. The stock-price decline has severely undercut her family’s fortune.

As Skydance pursued a deal, another party expressed interest in Paramount.

Private-equity firm Apollo Global Management and Sony Pictures submitted a $26 billion all-cash nonbinding offer for the company last month. Other parties that have expressed interest in Paramount in recent months include Warner Bros. Discovery and media executive Byron Allen.

In recent weeks, Redstone has considered an alternative path of only selling National Amusements, which would transfer control of Paramount to someone else but might not lead to a merger with another entertainment company, the Journal previously reported. She has received expressions of interest from at least two parties in buying all or part of National Amusements.

When English wasn't efficient enough, the robots took matters into their own hands.

Researchers have shut down two Facebook artificial intelligence (AI) robots after they started communicating with each other in their own language.

The robots, nicknamed Bob and Alice, were originally communicating in English, when they swapped to what initially appeared to be gibberish. Eventually, the researchers that control the AI realised that Bob and Alice had in fact developed their very own, seemingly more efficient language.

The new way of communicating, while unable to be interpreted by humans, is actually an accurate reflection of their programming, where AI at Facebook only undertake actions that result in a 'reward'. When English stopped delivering the 'reward' or results, developing a new language with exclusive meaning to AI was the more efficient way to communicate.

In a blog post in June, Facebook explained the 'reward system' for artificial intelligence.

"At the end of every dialog, the agent is given a reward based on the deal it agreed on... they can choose to steer away from uninformative, confusing, or frustrating exchanges toward successful ones," the blog post reads.

So it seems the AI deemed English as less efficient for communication compared to its own, English based language. Here's what some people had to say about it.

This isn't the first time that AI has started to act with a mind of its own.

In 2017, an AI security robot 'drowned itself' in a water fountain. The robot, stationed in a Washington D.C shopping centre met its end in June and sparked a Twitter storm featuring predictions detailing doomsday and suicidal robots.

In 2016, Google Translate used neural networks -- a computer system that is modeled on the human brain -- to translate between some of its popular languages, and also between language pairs for which it has not been specifically trained. It was in this way that people started to believe Google Translate had effectively established its own language to assist in translation.

While these technological developments are certainly useful, Elon Musk believes that AI poses a threat to the human world.

Speaking at the National Governors Association in Rhode Island in July 2017, Musk explained that AI robots pose a threat greater than just the demise of human jobs.

"...robots will do everything better than us," Musk said.

"AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilisation, and I don't think people fully appreciate that."

Whether this is true or not, the Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines film sure put forward a solid argument for robots that could be smarter than humans. In the mean time, it's nice to know that AI can be switched off with the pull of a plug.

Executives from Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura and Apptronik discuss the state of the industry

You could easily walk the entire Automate floor without spotting a single humanoid. There was a grand total of three, by my count — or, rather, three units of the same nonworking prototype. Neura was showing off its long-promised 4NE-1 robot, amid more traditional form factors. There was a little photo setup where you could snap a selfie with the bot, and that was about it.

Notably absent at the annual Association for Advancing Automation (A3) show was an Agility booth. The Oregon company made a big showing at last year’s event, with a small army of Digits moving bins from a tote wall to a conveyer belt a few feet away. It wasn’t a complex demo, but the mere sight of those bipedal robots working in tandem was still a showstopper.

Agility chief product officer Melonee Wise told me that the company had opted to sit this one out, as it currently has all the orders it can manage. And that’s really what these trade shows are about: manufacturers and logistics companies shopping around for the next technological leg up to remain competitive.

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment. Amid the biggest robotics hype cycle I’ve witnessed firsthand, many are left scratching their heads. After all, the notion of a “general purpose” humanoid robot flies in the face of decades’ worth of orthodoxy. The notion of the everything robot has been a fixture of science fiction for the better part of a century, but the reality has been one of single-purpose systems designed to do one job well.

While there wasn’t much of a physical presence, the subject of humanoids loomed large at the event. As such, A3 asked me to moderate a panel on the subject. I admit I initially balked at the idea of an hourlong panel. After all, the ones we do at Disrupt tend to run 20 to 25 minutes. By the end of the conversation, however, it was clear we easily could have filled another hour.

That was due, in part, to the fact that the panel was — as one LinkedIn commenter put it — “stacked.” Along with Wise, I was joined by Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas and Neura CEO David Reger. I kicked the panel off by asking the audience how many in attendance would consider themselves skeptical about the humanoid form factor. Roughly three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, which is more or less what I’d anticipate at this stage in the process.

As for A3, I would say it has entered the cautiously optimistic phase. In addition to hosting a panel on the subject at Automate, the organization is holding a Humanoid Robot Forum in Memphis this October. The move echoes the 2019 launch of A3’s Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Forum, which presaged the explosive growth in warehouse robotics during the pandemic.

“A year after we laid our initial expectations for global humanoid robot [total addressable market] of $6bn, we raise our 2035 TAM forecast to $38bn resulting from a 4-fold increase in our shipments estimate to 1.4mn units with a much faster path to profitability on a 40% reduction in bill of materials,” Goldman Sachs researcher Jacqueline Du wrote in a report published in February. “We believe our revised shipment estimate would cover 10%-15% of hazardous, dangerous and auto manufacturing roles.”

There are, however, plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Hype cycles are hard to navigate when you’re in the middle of them. The amount of money currently changing hands (see: Figure’s most recent raise of $675 million) gives one pause in the wake of various startup collapses across other fields. It also comes during a time when robotics investments have slowed after a few white-hot years.

One of the biggest risks at this stage is the overpromise. Every piece of new technology runs this risk, but something like a humanoid robot is a lightning rod for this stuff. Much like how eVTOL proponents see the technology as finally delivering on the promise of flying cars, the concept of personal robot servant looks within reach.

The fact that these robots look like us leads many to believe they can — or soon will be able to — do the same things as us. Elon Musk’s promise of a robot that works in the Tesla factory all day and then comes home to make you dinner added fuel to that fire. Tempering expectations isn’t really Musk’s thing, you know? Others, meanwhile, have tossed around the notion of a general intelligence for humanoid robots — a thing that is a ways off (“five to 10 years” is a time frame I often hear bandied about).

“I think we need to be careful about the hype cycles, because we ultimately need to deliver the promise and potential,” Cardenas said. “We’ve been through this before, with the DARPA Robotics challenge, where there’s a lot of excitement going into it, and we crashed into reality coming out of that.”

One source of disconnect is the question of what these systems can deliver today. The answer is murky, partly because of the nature of partnership announcements. Agility announced it was working with Amazon, Apptronik with Mercedes, Figure with BMW and Sanctuary AI with Magna. But every partnership so far needs to be taken for what it is: a pilot. The precise number of robots deployed in any specific partnership is never disclosed, and the figure is often single digits. It makes perfect sense: These are all operating factories/warehouses. It would be wildly disruptive to just slot in a new technology at scale and hope for the best.

Pilots are important for this reason, but they should not be mistaken for market fit. As of this writing, Agility is the only one of the bunch that has confirmed with TechCrunch that it’s ready for the next step. On the discussion panel, Wise confirmed that Agility will be announcing specifics in June. Cardenas, meanwhile, stated that the company plans to heavily pilot in the “back half” of 2024, with plans to move beyond early next year.

Neura and Boston Dynamics are simply too early stage for the conversation. Neura promised to show off some demos at some point in July, moving 4NE-1 beyond what has up until now been a series of rendered videos, coupled with the nonfunctioning units shown at Automate.

As for when we’ll see more of the electric Atlas beyond a 30-second video, Saunders says, “[the video] is just meant to be an early peek. We’re planning on getting into the pilot and some of the more pragmatic pieces next year. So far, we’re focused mainly on building up the focus and technology. There are a lot of hard problems left to solve in the manipulation and the AI spaces. Our team is working on it right now, and I think as those features get more robust, we’ll have more to show off.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t starting from scratch, of course. After more than a decade of Atlas, the company has as much humanoid expertise as any, while the launches of Spot and Stretch have taught the firm plenty about commercializing products after decades of research.

So, why did it take so long to see the company’s swing at the commercial humanoid category? “We wanted to make sure that we understood where the value is placed,” Saunders said. “It’s really easy to make demo videos and show cool things, but it takes a long time to find ROI [return on investment] cases that justify the human form.”

Neura has easily the most diverse portfolio of the companies present onstage. In fact, one gets the sense that whenever the company is finally ready to launch a humanoid in earnest, it will be just another form factor in the company’s portfolio, rather than the driving force. Meanwhile, when the electric Atlas eventually launches, it will be Boston Dynamics’ third commercially available product.

As Digit is Agility’s only offering at the moment, the company is wholly committed to the bipedal humanoid form factor. For its part, Apptronik splits the difference. The Austin-based firm has been taking a best-tool-for-the-job approach to the form factor. If, for example, legs aren’t needed for a specific environment, the company can mount the upper half of its robot onto a wheeled base.

You could easily walk the entire Automate floor without spotting a single humanoid. There was a grand total of three, by my count — or, rather, three units of the same nonworking prototype. Neura was showing off its long-promised 4NE-1 robot, amid more traditional form factors. There was a little photo setup where you could snap a selfie with the bot, and that was about it.

Notably absent at the annual Association for Advancing Automation (A3) show was an Agility booth. The Oregon company made a big showing at last year’s event, with a small army of Digits moving bins from a tote wall to a conveyer belt a few feet away. It wasn’t a complex demo, but the mere sight of those bipedal robots working in tandem was still a showstopper.

Agility chief product officer Melonee Wise told me that the company had opted to sit this one out, as it currently has all the orders it can manage. And that’s really what these trade shows are about: manufacturers and logistics companies shopping around for the next technological leg up to remain competitive.

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment. Amid the biggest robotics hype cycle I’ve witnessed firsthand, many are left scratching their heads. After all, the notion of a “general purpose” humanoid robot flies in the face of decades’ worth of orthodoxy. The notion of the everything robot has been a fixture of science fiction for the better part of a century, but the reality has been one of single-purpose systems designed to do one job well.

While there wasn’t much of a physical presence, the subject of humanoids loomed large at the event. As such, A3 asked me to moderate a panel on the subject. I admit I initially balked at the idea of an hourlong panel. After all, the ones we do at Disrupt tend to run 20 to 25 minutes. By the end of the conversation, however, it was clear we easily could have filled another hour.

That was due, in part, to the fact that the panel was — as one LinkedIn commenter put it — “stacked.” Along with Wise, I was joined by Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas and Neura CEO David Reger. I kicked the panel off by asking the audience how many in attendance would consider themselves skeptical about the humanoid form factor. Roughly three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, which is more or less what I’d anticipate at this stage in the process.

As for A3, I would say it has entered the cautiously optimistic phase. In addition to hosting a panel on the subject at Automate, the organization is holding a Humanoid Robot Forum in Memphis this October. The move echoes the 2019 launch of A3’s Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Forum, which presaged the explosive growth in warehouse robotics during the pandemic.

“A year after we laid our initial expectations for global humanoid robot [total addressable market] of $6bn, we raise our 2035 TAM forecast to $38bn resulting from a 4-fold increase in our shipments estimate to 1.4mn units with a much faster path to profitability on a 40% reduction in bill of materials,” Goldman Sachs researcher Jacqueline Du wrote in a report published in February. “We believe our revised shipment estimate would cover 10%-15% of hazardous, dangerous and auto manufacturing roles.”

There are, however, plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Hype cycles are hard to navigate when you’re in the middle of them. The amount of money currently changing hands (see: Figure’s most recent raise of $675 million) gives one pause in the wake of various startup collapses across other fields. It also comes during a time when robotics investments have slowed after a few white-hot years.

One of the biggest risks at this stage is the overpromise. Every piece of new technology runs this risk, but something like a humanoid robot is a lightning rod for this stuff. Much like how eVTOL proponents see the technology as finally delivering on the promise of flying cars, the concept of personal robot servant looks within reach.

The fact that these robots look like us leads many to believe they can — or soon will be able to — do the same things as us. Elon Musk’s promise of a robot that works in the Tesla factory all day and then comes home to make you dinner added fuel to that fire. Tempering expectations isn’t really Musk’s thing, you know? Others, meanwhile, have tossed around the notion of a general intelligence for humanoid robots — a thing that is a ways off (“five to 10 years” is a time frame I often hear bandied about).

“I think we need to be careful about the hype cycles, because we ultimately need to deliver the promise and potential,” Cardenas said. “We’ve been through this before, with the DARPA Robotics challenge, where there’s a lot of excitement going into it, and we crashed into reality coming out of that.”

One source of disconnect is the question of what these systems can deliver today. The answer is murky, partly because of the nature of partnership announcements. Agility announced it was working with Amazon, Apptronik with Mercedes, Figure with BMW and Sanctuary AI with Magna. But every partnership so far needs to be taken for what it is: a pilot. The precise number of robots deployed in any specific partnership is never disclosed, and the figure is often single digits. It makes perfect sense: These are all operating factories/warehouses. It would be wildly disruptive to just slot in a new technology at scale and hope for the best.

Pilots are important for this reason, but they should not be mistaken for market fit. As of this writing, Agility is the only one of the bunch that has confirmed with TechCrunch that it’s ready for the next step. On the discussion panel, Wise confirmed that Agility will be announcing specifics in June. Cardenas, meanwhile, stated that the company plans to heavily pilot in the “back half” of 2024, with plans to move beyond early next year.

Neura and Boston Dynamics are simply too early stage for the conversation. Neura promised to show off some demos at some point in July, moving 4NE-1 beyond what has up until now been a series of rendered videos, coupled with the nonfunctioning units shown at Automate.

As for when we’ll see more of the electric Atlas beyond a 30-second video, Saunders says, “[the video] is just meant to be an early peek. We’re planning on getting into the pilot and some of the more pragmatic pieces next year. So far, we’re focused mainly on building up the focus and technology. There are a lot of hard problems left to solve in the manipulation and the AI spaces. Our team is working on it right now, and I think as those features get more robust, we’ll have more to show off.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t starting from scratch, of course. After more than a decade of Atlas, the company has as much humanoid expertise as any, while the launches of Spot and Stretch have taught the firm plenty about commercializing products after decades of research.

So, why did it take so long to see the company’s swing at the commercial humanoid category? “We wanted to make sure that we understood where the value is placed,” Saunders said. “It’s really easy to make demo videos and show cool things, but it takes a long time to find ROI [return on investment] cases that justify the human form.”

Neura has easily the most diverse portfolio of the companies present onstage. In fact, one gets the sense that whenever the company is finally ready to launch a humanoid in earnest, it will be just another form factor in the company’s portfolio, rather than the driving force. Meanwhile, when the electric Atlas eventually launches, it will be Boston Dynamics’ third commercially available product.

As Digit is Agility’s only offering at the moment, the company is wholly committed to the bipedal humanoid form factor. For its part, Apptronik splits the difference. The Austin-based firm has been taking a best-tool-for-the-job approach to the form factor. If, for example, legs aren’t needed for a specific environment, the company can mount the upper half of its robot onto a wheeled base.

“I think at the end of the day, it’s about solving problems,” Cardenas said. “There are places where you don’t need a bipedal robot. My view is that bipedal form factors will win the day, but the question is how do you actually get them out there?”

Not every terrain requires legs. Earlier this week, Diligent Robotics co-founder and CEO Andrea Thomaz told me that part of the reason her company targeted healthcare first is the prevalence of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant structures. Anywhere a wheelchair can go, a wheeled robot should be able to follow. Because of that, the startup didn’t have to commit to the very difficult problem of building legs.

Legs have benefits beyond the ability to handle things like stairs, however. Reach is an important one. Legged robots have an easier time reaching lower shelves, as they can bend at the legs and the waist. You could, theoretically, add a very large arm to the top of an AMR, but doing so introduces all kinds of new problems like balance.

Safety is something that has thus far been under-addressed in conversations around the form factor. One of humanoid robots’ key selling points is their ability to slot into existing workflows alongside other robotic or human co-workers.

But robots like these are big, heavy and made of metal, therefore making them a potential hazard to human workers. The subject has been top of mind for Wise, in particular, who says further standards are needed to ensure that these robots can operate safely alongside people.

For my part, I’ve been advocating for a more standardized approach to robot demos. Videos of humanoids, in particular, have obscured what these robots can and can’t do today. I would love to see disclosures around playback speed, editing, the use of teleop and other tricks of the trade that can be used to deceive (intentionally or not) viewers.

“It’s very hard to distinguish what is and isn’t progress,” Wise said, referring to some recent videos of Tesla’s Optimus robot. “I think one thing that we, as a community, can do better is being more transparent about the methodologies that we’re using. It’s fueling more power for the hype cycle. I think the other problem that we have is, if we look at what’s going on with any humanoid robot in this space, safety is not clear. There isn’t an e-stop on Optimus. There isn’t an e-stop on many of our robots.”