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Rivan Industries and other startups are betting their new techniques will make green fuel cost-competitive

LONDON—On a quiet industrial estate, engineers at British startup Rivan Industries are working to perfect a system to produce synthetic natural gas from water, sunlight and air.

Their work involves splitting hydrogen from water and capturing carbon-dioxide directly from the air, then combining the two gases to make green methane, a cleaner substitute for natural gas, the source of energy for around a quarter of European households. The entire process takes place in a modular unit, a sort of self-contained mini-power plant, powered by solar energy and that Rivan plans to mass produce.

Green fuel hasn’t been cost-competitive with fossil fuels because making it requires a lot of energy and the equipment needed to do it is expensive. What’s more, green-fuel makers typically have to acquire the carbon dioxide they need from outside sources, such as ethanol and biomass facilities that produce the gas as a byproduct.

But now Rivan—along with companies such as Terraform Industries in California, Brineworks in the Netherlands and OXCCU in the U.K.—are betting they can streamline production and bring down the cost of green fuel by doing everything under one roof, in a self-contained system that runs on renewable power. The three-year-old Rivan says it ultimately hopes to place its modular fuel systems near where gas is needed, such as factories or data centers.

Besides cutting costs, the new technologies would make it easier for green-fuel companies to secure carbon dioxide. They would no longer have to compete for supply with carbon-capture companies that sequester the gas underground and sell carbon-removal credits to heavy polluters, long a more profitable business than making clean fuel.

By capturing carbon directly from air on site, and taking advantage of big drops in the cost of renewables such as solar and wind, Rivan and the others believe they can create a future where industries that can’t be electrified because they require high heat to operate, such as steel, cement and chemicals, move toward greener sources of energy.

Importantly, they say the fuel they make could be fed into the wider power grid, reducing companies’ reliance on imports. Almost 60% of the European Union’s energy needs are met with imports currently, according to Eurostat, leaving the region vulnerable to geopolitical shocks such as the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, which has strained supplies and sent prices of fossil fuels soaring.

Since natural gas is already piped through towns and cities from refineries, no major overhaul of infrastructure would be needed to support the technology, says Oleksiy Tatarenko, senior principal in the Climate-Aligned Industries Program at energy nonprofit RMI, which was an early investor in Brineworks but no longer holds a stake.

“It’s essentially a drop-in molecule that can piggyback on existing infrastructure,” he says.

The right moment

The startups are all working on the same basic idea—integrate direct-air carbon capture with the equipment that synthesizes natural gas.

Harvey Hodd, chief executive and founder of Rivan, says the rapid fall in the cost of renewable energy in recent years has made his company’s method of producing natural gas feasible.

“Now is potentially the only time ever in history that you can take very cheap electricity and turn it into something like a synthetic fuel,” he says.

Rivan’s technology involves capturing carbon dioxide from the air with large fans that have specialist materials to absorb the gas from the atmosphere. Such techniques were pioneered by direct-air capture companies such as Climeworks and Heirloom, which largely focus on selling carbon credits to companies needing to lower their overall emissions.

Brineworks, founded in 2023, uses a different method for capturing CO₂, one that involves saltwater electrolysis. But its goal is similar to Rivan’s: pull carbon from the air at a lower cost, produce green hydrogen and combine the two to make cheaper e-fuels.

Gudfinnur Sveinsson, the company’s chief executive, says his company’s systems are designed to be flexible, capable of producing different synthetic fuels based on what customers request.

“We see our role in just enabling every single synthetic fuel producer on earth to get to fossil-fuel [cost] parity faster,” he says. “Regardless of the fuel, you need hydrogen and CO₂, so we can do whichever of those.”

Uncertainties remain

Rivan, which has raised 35 million pounds, or $46 million, in series A funding, recently moved from a pilot facility to a much larger factory in South London, where it plans to scale up production of its fuel systems. At another site two-hours from the capital, the company has deployed one of its systems and is producing synthetic gas to be fed to the grid.

Rivan says the cost of the methane it is making at that site is below benchmark natural-gas prices in Europe, which currently sit around 90 euros, or roughly $100, a megawatt hour. The company declined to provide specific pricing, saying it was commercially sensitive.

Of course, European, and global fossil fuel prices are relatively high because of the war in Iran. Whether the startups can undercut conventional fossil-fuel prices on a large scale and over the long term remains to be seen.

Falko Ueckerdt, senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, says that while the startups are moving ahead, both the hydrogen and renewable carbon used to make green fuels are scarce and expensive resources that struggle with competitiveness and bankability, meaning near-term uptake is likely to be limited.

And while climate policies encouraging carbon pricing can help make these fuels more competitive with conventional ones, green methane will often just be competing with other low-carbon options. “Green-methane competes with hydrogen or electrification,” he says. And “electrification is often the cheapest option, where possible,” he adds.

Still, RMI’s Tatarenko says it’s important to work on these technologies now and not wait until 2030 and 2040s, adding that the past few years of energy shocks only provide more impetus.

“Each of these shocks show the fragility of the fossil-fuel supply chain and that creates tailwinds for alternative supply chains,” he says.

On Wednesday, a decades-old open-source web technology called PHP almost broke the internet, thanks to two vulnerabilities that had sat dormant for years until researchers recently figured out a way to exploit them.

The bugs are dubbed PHP2Shell, officially designated as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. In simple terms, the bugs allow anyone who knows how to exploit them to break into an online system running PHP, such as a website or internet-facing server, without needing a password to access or modify its data.

As situations go, this was a pretty sizable one, forcing millions of people around the world to scramble to patch their systems before malicious hackers could abuse them.

The PHP Foundation, which maintains the PHP web software, publicly released patches on Wednesday that fixed the bugs, which when installed prevent web-facing servers from being attacked. The foundation had already given some of the biggest internet companies and web hosts that rely on PHP an early headstart on patching.

Thanks to weeks of backroom chatter and careful coordination across the industry, the world — so far — broadly avoided mass internet exploitation. From Wednesday, governments began urging citizens and companies with websites to take action to mitigate the risks on their ends. A wide range of industries shuttered their websites and pulled services offline to patch their systems. Banks, retailers, gaming sites, online stores, hospitals, and some government agencies took down their servers to prevent attacks.

But security researchers are warning that the situation isn’t over yet, and that a large number of systems around the world remain unpatched and vulnerable to hacks and data theft.

This is also unlikely to be the last major internet software scare, with some expecting the advent of AI to rapidly uncover as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities that are waiting to be found and abused.

What happened?

Security researchers at Calif found two bugs in PHP, a programming language widely used around the world for building websites and web apps, both on the internet and hosted locally on company networks, like intranets and internal sites.

PHP is open-source, meaning it’s free and available to be used by anyone for almost any reason. As such, it’s become one of the most popular and broadly used web programming languages on the web today.

The two bugs were first discovered in 2024 but weren’t considered exploitable at the time, and weren’t patched. Security researchers recently found a way to exploit them, prompting them to alert the makers of the software to get them fixed.

Calif alerted the PHP Foundation, which began a period of fixing the bugs and coordinated disclosure. The foundation did this by offering the information and patches about the security issues under a tightly guarded embargo — essentially held confidentially until a specific deadline — to give big companies an opportunity to get ahead of installing the fixes.

Why are the bugs so serious?

PHP2Shell is pretty serious because it can be abused remotely over the internet and without the victim having to click on a link or open a file. This is known as remote code execution, and it’s one of the more damaging kinds of bugs to exploit because they can grant a hacker anywhere in the world effectively full control over an affected and unpatched system.

Worse, these specific PHP bugs make it possible to break into any unpatched system on the internet without needing a password or any other credential over the internet, known as unauthenticated access.

This would allow a malicious hacker to then plant malware on the computer, such as to steal data or simply to maintain a long-term foothold that they can return to later.

Why was 70% of the web affected?

The bugs are particularly risky because PHP is wildly popular software, in part because it’s free and relatively easy to use, but also because it’s been around for decades. Around 70% of the web-facing internet relies on PHP, though its usage has been slowly declining over the years in favor of newer, more secure programming languages.

Given its popularity, some of the world’s most popular websites are run on web software that rely on PHP, such as WordPress (which hosts TechCrunch!), as well as Drupal, Joomla, and MediaWiki, which powers online encyclopedia giant Wikipedia.

PHP is just one of many aging but functional technologies that have survived waves of the internet and generations that are now so ubiquitous, they’re akin to the glue that holds much of the internet together. Oftentimes these tools are developed by open source maintainers, who are not paid for the work that they do, and as such cannot afford third-party security reviews — but are still widely relied on by companies who do not contribute financially to the projects.

Was AI used to discover the bugs?

Security researchers at Calif were credited with discovering the bugs earlier this year as part of a security audit of PHP’s code. Calif was participating in the Hack the Planet initiative by AI model maker OpenAI and cloud security giant Wiz, which subsequently verified the proof-of-concept exploits that Calif made.

In Calif’s write-up (featuring comics — it’s great, check it out), the researchers explained that AI was used in assistance with exploiting the bug, but that the bulk of the work relied on knowledge that the researchers already had, and that they knew PHP’s codebase and exploitation history well.

“No model is simply capable of unearthing ‘all bugs’ with simple prompts. At least for now,”wrote Calif.

Why were the bugs exploited ahead of disclosure?

Despite efforts to keep details of the bugs under wraps until Wednesday, it does appear that there was some PHP2Shell exploitation prior to the release of patches.

Amazon, which has enormous visibility into online threats due to its size and scale, said in a blog post that it detected exploitation of PHP2Shell about a week before the PHP patches were available, suggesting that someone, somewhere, knew how to exploit the bugs before their details were broadly available. Amazon said it wasn’t clear how the hacker learned of the vulnerabilities, but that defenders should look for evidence of exploitation as early as October 17.

There are a few theories as to what happened. Once a bug is patched, the details of the patch can become immediately apparent, especially if the code — like in PHP’s case — is open source, making it public and inspectable. Exploiting the bugs might not be easy, but knowing where the bug is and how it was fixed can allow malicious hackers to understand where to target and how to develop their exploits.

It’s possible that there was a leak or a breakdown in communication somewhere during the embargo. The open source community is enormous and controlling information in this fashion relies on good-faith.

It’s also possible that hackers discovered the bugs ahead of time, either independently or through espionage.

The PHP Foundation blamed one company for pushing the patches live hours before the embargo period was up, which could have given some attackers a headstart if they obtained details of the patch before others. But this doesn’t account for the week-long activity detected by Amazon.

Researchers say that bugs require a lot of work to become exploitable and weaponizing the bug has been a challenge — but not impossible — which explains why we haven’t seen a scale of mass-exploitation just yet.

But as of late Friday, there are now confirmed compromises and post-exploit activity related to the PHP bug, according to security giants Palo Alto Networks and Trail of Bits. That means the bug was detected being abused to hack in and actively do malicious activity on an as-yet-unknown target.

Large parts of the internet shut down, but are returning. Did we dodge the worst of it?

It’s still early days but it’s an encouraging sign that there haven’t been any signs of mass-exploitation — but we’re not out of the danger-zone just yet.

Matthew Prince, the chief executive of network security and monitoring giant Cloudflare, which also has telemetry into a vast portion of the internet, said this week that it’s seen an exponential number of attempts to exploit the bugs following their disclosure. This gives some perspective as to how quickly malicious actors are seeking to abuse the flaws for their own gains.

PHP isn’t just found on web servers, but also used in developer tools, command line and terminal packages, and other software components used by routers, storage devices, and enterprise security devices, like firewalls and VPNs.

We should expect to see exploitation of PHP2Shell down the line as smaller IT teams and sole developers may be slower to update. There will also be a period in which various companies that rely on and integrate PHP into their own products and software, which will also need updating.

As more devices and systems get updated, the attack surface will reduce in time. But the ripple effects of these bugs could still be felt for years to come, particularly in legacy systems that have no means to be updated.

Will this happen again?

This was one of those rare internet-stopping days I’ve seen during my time as a security reporter. In 2016, a massive botnet flooded internet registry Dyn with junk traffic causing much of the web’s top services to crawl to a halt. In 2017, North Korea used leaked U.S. government hacking tools to infect the U.K.’s health system with ransomware. And in 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update sparked a massive global outage causing most of the world’s Windows computers to crash at once.

By all accounts with PHP2Shell, the internet escaped what could have otherwise been an extremely painful and damaging day. But it’s unlikely to be the last major incident to hit the web, and this may be the first in a trend of incidents that exploit weaknesses in legacy technology. Much of this is due to inherent flaws in aging but omnipresent software that haven’t yet been discovered, coupled with AI tools that are making it easier to find flaws.

PHP, much like other web programming languages and technologies from decades ago, are “memory unsafe,” which means they can be attacked through an entire class of vulnerabilities that can force the software to leak or spill sensitive data from the software’s memory storage. The National Security Agency says around 75% of all actively exploited vulnerabilities abuse memory-related flaws, which is to say, hackers use them a lot.

This has helped to prompt a move to using memory-safe languages, like Python, Rust, and Swift, which can’t be abused in the same way that memory vulnerabilities can be. As such, these languages make them broadly immune to a broad swath of vulnerabilities that still affect their predecessors.

But that still leaves an entire chunk of the internet running a bunch of technologies, like PHP, media and video codecs, compression libraries, and other software from decades ago — which, when they break, will have massive implications for the rest of the web.

German billionaire says €250mn Bayern Munich deal about more than money

Family stake in Germany’s most successful football club driven by passion as much as financial returns, Maximilian Viessmann says

The German billionaire whose family business has invested €250mn in Bayern Munich said the deal was not driven solely by expectations of financial gain but by the long-term value of football and his passion for the club.

Maximilian Viessmann, head of Viessmann Generations Group, told the FT he was seeking a “return on life” by purchasing a stake in Germany’s most successful football team that makes his family its fourth outside shareholder.

“This is a strategic investment” aimed at “long-term value creation”, said Viessmann, adding that his company, which made €12bn by selling its heating division, had not invested for the dividends.

He said there were no plans to capitalise on the wave of investment in football clubs by flipping the newly acquired 6.7 per cent holding for a quick profit. “We’re convinced the stake will gain in value over time, even if we have no plans to sell it. For us, it is an evergreen investment,” he said.

Viessmann, 37, pointed instead to the “return on life” he derived as a supporter from “seeing Bayern Munich succeed on the pitch . . . and knowing you can make a contribution as a businessman”. 

Viessmann Generation Group this week joined German corporate giants Adidas, Audi and Allianz as investors in the Munich club, paying €250mn for the stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.

This valued the six-times European champions’ equity at €3.7bn, almost three times the figure when Allianz bought its stake in 2014. The size of Viessmann’s investment was first reported by Bild Zeitung.

The deal lifts the share of Bayern Munich held by outside investors to 30 per cent, the maximum possible under its constitution, with the rest owned by its 450,000 members. The club last year held talks with EQT, a private equity firm, over selling a minority stake but the negotiations fell apart.

Bayern Munich is ranked by Deloitte as the third-richest football club in the world, above any teams in the English Premier League. That is in large part due to the strength of its commercial income, notably lucrative sponsorship deals with the likes of Allianz, which has naming rights for its 75,000-seater stadium, and Deutsche Telekom.

German football has largely been sealed off from the wave of private investment into European football due to strict ownership rules, which require at least 50 per cent of the voting rights to remain with the club’s members.

Several attempts to bring in private equity investment at the league level have failed, most recently in 2024 when fan protests led the Bundesliga to abandon a planned stake sale. The league is instead exploring a lending arrangement with outside investors.

The German system has helped maintain the link between clubs and supporters, who are among the most passionate and vocal in the world, notably by keeping ticket prices down.

Yet critics say it puts German football at a financial disadvantage compared with international rivals by stopping deep-pocketed foreign investors from buying clubs and spurring investment. Only three of Europe’s top 20 clubs by revenue are German.

Bayern Munich’s financial firepower has enabled it to compete with European rivals and attract big-name players, including England captain Harry Kane and French winger Michael Olise.

However, Germany’s domestic league is now increasingly one-sided. Bayern has won the Bundesliga title 13 times in the past 14 years.

The Viessmanns were catapulted up the German wealth list when they agreed a €12bn sale of their heat pump business to US rival Carrier Global Corp in 2023. Manager Magazin, the German business monthly, ranked the family as the 12th richest in Germany.

Viessmann Generations Group, which still holds a 5 per cent stake in Carrier, owns businesses focused on electricity grid infrastructure, district heating and cooling and refrigeration technology with €2bn in revenue and is an investor in start-ups.

The Bayern stake is its second sports-related investment after a 3.5 per cent holding in professional sailing team Germany SailGP. Viessmann said sport was a “strategic” business area for his company.

He also said it “helped foster social cohesion” and was “one of the few remaining spaces where people come together and find common ground”.

Sport emphasised the “principle of meritocracy, which unfortunately can no longer be taken for granted in today’s world,” he said.

Airbus to hold talks with BAE over role in GCAP fighter jet programme

Germany weighs joining UK, Italy and Japan in project after collapse of its rival FCAS partnership with France and Spain

Airbus executives will meet counterparts from BAE Systems to explore how the pan-European group could join the UK company’s next-generation fighter jet programme, as it seeks to chart a new course for its military aircraft business. 

Executives will discuss opportunities in the coming week for collaboration between the two companies across several areas in future combat air, including the Global Combat Air Programme between BAE and its partners from Italy and Japan, according to four people familiar with the plans. They stressed that no final decisions were expected at this stage.   

The talks come just over a fortnight after Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the UK would be open to Germany joining GCAP. Berlin has been seeking new partners since the collapse in the summer of its own project with France and Spain, known as FCAS, after a bitter industrial dispute between Airbus and French jet maker Dassault Aviation. 

An initial plan for a German-led alternative by Airbus, its Spanish partner Indra and other industrial groups has been dropped, leaving Berlin with the option of either joining GCAP or forging an alliance with Sweden’s defence champion Saab.

Bringing Airbus and Indra into GCAP would not be straightforward. BAE and its partners, Italy’s Leonardo and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, have already agreed on the key workshare elements of the programme, as well as on ownership of intellectual property.

The UK, Italy and Japan have also made clear that they do not want to delay their plan to have a supersonic jet in service by 2035.

“Our programme is marching on and we don’t want to affect timescales,” said one British official. The message from Burnham to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, he said, was: “Are you interested? If so, let’s get a discussion going.”

Despite the industrial hurdles, Berlin’s entry would bring money — and more orders — for GCAP. Airbus also has a history of working with BAE on combat air and the two are partners on the pan-European Eurofighter Typhoon programme, which also includes Leonardo. 

Mike Schoellhorn, head of Airbus’s Germany-based Defence and Space business, said in an interview this month with business paper Handelsblatt that Airbus would insist on playing a “key role” in shaping the project. “We won’t just be making the fin or a wing,” he added.

That view is shared by German officials, who stress the importance of an industrial agreement that secures a “fair” workshare, not only for Airbus but also for other German industrial groups including MTU Aero Engines.

At the upcoming meeting, Airbus and BAE will also discuss alternative areas for co-operation such as on autonomous “collaborative combat aircraft”, according to one of the people familiar with the plan. Another would be the so-called combat cloud — the software architecture to connect aircraft with sensors, radars, drones and satellites.

Germany’s other main option is Sweden, which offers a potentially more straightforward partnership on fighters with Saab, the builder of the Gripen jet. Airbus’s Schoellhorn said in the Handelsblatt interview that his company had “always had a good working relationship with Saab” and that it could be quicker to have just “two or three” big defence groups working together rather than “five or six”.

However, Saab is doing exploratory work for the Swedish government on a next-generation project that would succeed the Gripen. With the jet expected to be in service until 2060, the country is under no pressure to make a decision. 

Airbus declined to comment but pointed to the recent remarks by Schoellhorn.

BAE said the upcoming meeting with Airbus was “routine”, declining to comment further.

Oxford Street’s controversial pedestrianisation comes as big brands invest in flagship stores

Some of the world’s biggest retailers, including brands from Asia, are investing in flagship stores on Oxford Street as London prepares to pedestrianise and rejuvenate its most famous shopping street.

After decades of campaigns and failed proposals, a half-mile stretch of road will be closed to traffic on Monday in a bid to regenerate what mayor Lord Sadiq Khan calls “our nation’s high street”.

The closure, between Selfridges and Ikea, is part of a long-term £150mn plan to develop public spaces that can hold promotional events to compete with rivals such as New York’s Fifth Avenue, Rome’s Via del Corso and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

The revamp comes as retailers and politicians push to restore Oxford Street’s image after a difficult decade in which the demise of department stores Debenhams and House of Fraser was followed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Vacancies rose to 13.7 per cent in 2022 and rents on the western part Oxford Street tumbled from a peak of an average £1,100 per sq foot in 2016 to just £600 during the pandemic in 2021, according to data from property agents Savills.

To secure tenants, landlords offered discounted or longer rent-free periods, which led to a surfeit of souvenir shops and American candy stores, exacerbating the public perception of an area in decline. The downbeat mood was compounded by a government move to end tax-free shopping for tourists.

But in recent years local businesses and developers have begun to regain confidence. The old Debenhams and House of Fraser stores have been redeveloped to include more office space, and a new local development corporation has been established to speed up planning decisions.

“Whether you’re from the UK or if you’re an international visitor, you will have heard of Oxford Street,” said Dee Corsi, chief executive of the New West End Company, which represents more than 800 retail, hotel and property businesses in central London. “We recognise it’s important as an economic driver, not just for London but for all of the UK.”

Although the plan to close the road to traffic has been controversial with residents and Londoners who face changes in transport routes, the majority of retailers are behind the scheme.

“We see this as a massive opportunity to create a really brilliant space for both our customers and wider visitors to Oxford Street and the West End. We’ve got such global competition that all the investment that both the retailers and other parties put in is really important,” said Naomi Simcock, chief operations officer for John Lewis, which has had a presence on street since 1864.

Retailers have been snapping up space in the past year. In recent weeks, emerging Chinese lifestyle brands such as Miniso and Pop Mart have joined Zara, Nike and Warner Bros in investing heavily in Oxford Street flagship stores.

There have been a total of 39 deals signed for stores in the past year, according to Savills data, while vacancy rates have dropped below 1 per cent.

While rents on the more upmarket western side of Oxford Street have been rising since 2022, they have rebounded more slowly than on the eastern side, Savills found.

The £850-per-sq-ft average for the western side is still more than 20 per cent below the 2016 peak. Moreover, footfall “is not where it was pre-pandemic and that’s probably because worker patterns and other things have changed”, Corsi said.

But property agents say the opening of the Elizabeth Line, which has cut journey times to Oxford Street from eastern and western suburbs, has helped persuade some of the world’s top brands to reinvest.

Fashion chains Zara and Mango and sportswear makers Nike and Puma are among those choosing Oxford Street for their flagship stores, while Warner Bros’ UK flagship Harry Potter store opens next month.

“It’s the one place [in central London] where you have large space with interesting buildings where you can stand out,” said Sam Foyle, co-head of global retail at Savills.

He pointed to the Miniso deal, in which the Chinese toys and collectibles brand said it would take over the space that will be vacated by music store HMV near Bond Street tube station and turn it into a “theme park-style” shopping experience.

“It’s the confidence that Asian businesses have got in London. There’s been talk of a wave of Asian retailers coming over to London and Europe since before Covid but that’s really started to accelerate,” Foyle said.

Jack Dorsey’s Block released a new voice model out of the company’s research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human with its expressions like laughs, pauses, and cries. The company said the model, called Dessa, is trained fully on human speech and a single NVIDIA GPU rack.

Dessa is a full-duplex model, which means it can talk and listen at the same time, just like the GPT-Live model OpenAI released earlier this year. Typically, speech models are paired with a large language model for knowledge retrieval. Block said that Dessa’s knowledge stems from the conversational data it has.

https://x.com/jack/status/2113697902916751661?s=20

Block said that the current models can sound unnatural and annoying because they have text in the pipeline that drives speech generation. A lot of models like ElevenLabs v4 or Fish Audio Drama 3 use voice tags to drive emotion in speech generation. Dorsey’s company claims that emotion is built into its model. It’s not clear if that emotion is being steered by some kind of tags.

“Interacting with current voice AI can just plain suck. It turns your voice into text and throws away an incredible amount of information text alone can’t carry. The most powerful AIs in the world can’t hear how you feel. We think that’s ridiculous, leads to a worse experience, and is potentially dangerous,” the company said in a blog post.

The company’s researchers posted multiple examples of conversations with Dessa where the agent had different voices, cadences, and emotions. For instance, in the conversation, the bot said it was tired from work, and at that point it sounded tired.

In the example below, the bot was talking about the person making it comfortable while sounding emotional and almost breaking down.

Another one shows a Block team member playing a game with the voice assistant.

The company said that the model can run locally on a consumer-grade computer such as a MacBook M4 Max or better. However, there is no public access to Dessa at the moment, and Block has put out a call for safety researchers to test the model. This is likely to test out cases where a voice agent could trick people on the other end.

Block is in the business of finance and selling its solutions to small businesses. Square already uses voice AI to handle ordering. But with its own voice model that can run on-device, it can power a lot more business and consumer experiences at a lower cost.