Are we spending years using cybersecurity to keep the enemy out of our critical infrastructure, they just wreck the submarine cables. Quite by accident, there was a Russian captain on the Chinese ship, which had absolutely nothing to do with anything anyway. Those cables attacked the ship.
Most of us spend money at Amazon during this nonsensical Cyber Monday, Freaky Friday, Soupy Sunday or whatever these commercial holidays are all called. The creator of Claude just raised money there and, with Google Gemini, is basically the only remaining direct competitor to OpenAI. Tens of billions are going into this type of LLM, when the world would benefit more if such sums were invested in carbon removal technology.
Brownlee neatly emphasizes that he can only review what is available in the iPhone so far of all the AI tools announced by Apple; only to burn them down mercilessly. A nice moment in his review is when Brownlee summarizes Apple Intelligence by referencing an absurdist moment from a recent Apple video: a man sees a woman on the street with a dog, and instead of asking her what kind of dog it is, he takes a picture of the dog and asks his iPhone. "You can do that," Brownlee smiles. "But do you have to want to?" And that's his summary of the current state of Apple Intelligence.
In recent years, the number of downloads of the Coinbase app has been a good gauge, or grazier, of interest in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. But now something unusual is happening: because of advice videos on TikTok, more people are downloading the much more complex Phantom app, which also allows the purchase of memecoins, which is not possible with Coinbase. Does this appear to be the starting gun to a bull run on cryptocurrencies other than just Bitcoin and the other major tokens?
Few will have failed to notice that last week a banana and a piece of tape sold for over six million dollars. That, too, is indicative of the current bull run in crypto: buyer, after all, was Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who rarely sees a mirror he doesn't like.
Banana-gate is indicative of the amount of money circulating in the crypto market and the increased self-confidence in the sector, where egos had been badly dented last year by the falling prices and prison sentences of former wonderboys like Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and Changpeng "CZ" Zhao (Binance). CZ is making a tentative comeback, although he prefers not to be interviewed by journalists, but by Nikita Sachdev, owner of Luna PR.
Last week two developments came together that will shape the global technology picture in the coming years. First, OpenAI launched new products with which it is attacking Google and Microsoft head-on. The AI market is exploding for both consumer and business use, with the adverse consequence of correspondingly increasing energy consumption and carbon emissions.
Perhaps precisely because of these rising carbon emissions, developments in "Climate Tech," the umbrella term for all technology that combats climate change, also seem to be accelerating. Bill Gates even calls 2024 the year when climate tech has finally broken through.
OpenAI now direct competitor of Google
OpenAI last week launched "ChatGPT with Search," a feature that allows users to retrieve real-time, up-to-date information directly in their conversations. This search functionality, integrated into the existing ChatGPT interface, is currently available to paying users and will soon be available to everyone.
Rather than a separate product as in a separate app or separate Web page, the search feature in, for example, the Chrome browser allows ChatGPT to automatically consult Web resources when relevant to the question being asked. Users can also manually activate search themselves to find specific information.
ChatGPT's search feature offers additional interactive features, such as displaying maps with place markers for recommended locations and displaying current stock prices and news articles. With each search, users can open a sidebar with clickable resources to access the original articles or data.
OpenAI states that collaboration with Microsoft Bing and media partners such as the Associated Press and Reuters ensures that the information provided is accurate and reliable. These collaborations also mitigate legal issues surrounding "data scrapping," as OpenAI gains authorized access to data through these partners.
New: ad-free current information
This new search offering helps OpenAI with a new focus on reliable up-to-date information, which is especially important in sensitive topics such as elections, where reliable information is essential. In doing so, ChatGPT avoids the use of ads or sponsored links, a big difference from Google Search, which, on the contrary, generates most of its revenue through ads.
Instead, OpenAI is focusing on providing an independent user experience that will have to be funded from subscriptions. While it will continue to be possible for free users to take advantage of the search feature, we can expect limits on the number of free searches.
So Bill Gates enthusiastically headlined in the annual report of his investment company BreakThrough Energy: 'The State of the Transition. Climate tech has arrived.' According to Gates, 2024 will retrospectively prove to be a pivotal moment in the fight against climate change, reminding him of the period around 2000 when large-scale decisions were made to combat infant mortality.
At the time, millions of children in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa were dying annually from preventable diseases, despite the fact that vaccines and drugs often already existed. However, these drugs were difficult for poor countries to access, although they were stockpiled in richer countries. Through the use of a global health network, which produced and made available vaccines and drugs, child mortality fell by 50 percent within 20 years. This progress was possible by scaling up existing innovations and developing new methods, for example, in the fight against HIV and malaria.
Meanwhile, more and more technologies are being developed that are effective in reducing greenhouse gases. The next big challenge, however, according to Gates, lies in implementation: scaling up these technologies within the economy. Although large companies have mastered this scale well, until now they have often been reluctant to invest in clean technologies. They saw them primarily as ways to reduce their carbon footprint and contribute to the environment, without seeing them as a source of value to their own operations. In short, focusing on sustainability did not lead to higher profits.
According to Gates, however, this has begun to change since 2024 and there has been a major shift in the perspective of investors and companies. Large global investors-such as foundations, sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure investors-are finally starting to invest seriously in climate technology. Top business executives are also increasingly understanding that climate tech offers more than just environmental gains; it can strengthen their companies and use their capital more efficiently. Let's hope Gates is right.
200 grams of yellow powder as effective as a tree
Half a pound of this yellow powder removes as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a tree does in a year. Source photo: Zihui Zhou, UC Berkeley.
Gates said global fight against man-made climate change. California alone will need to capture or remove about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide annually - roughly equivalent to pollution from 250 gas-fired power plants - to meet its ambitious climate goals, including achieving carbon neutrality by 2045.
It seems as if innovative techniques for this removal of carbon dioxide are now becoming known on a weekly basis. For example, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, have developed a new covalent organic framework (COF) that significantly improves the direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide.
This material, a deep yellow powder, efficiently absorbs CO₂ from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, a common problem with existing DAC technologies. The COF functions like a sponge, trapping CO₂ until it is saturated.
It can then be regenerated by heating, releasing the CO₂ for storage or reuse, and then reused for further collection cycles. Remarkably, 200 grams of this material can remove about 20 kilograms of CO₂ per year, comparable to the absorption capacity of a mature tree!
Technological tools can reduce CO₂ emissions and even remove existing emissions from the atmosphere. Source: image created with Midjourney.
This kind of innovative technology is many times more effective than planting trees, which appears sympathetic and is more understandable to the layman. The big question is whether the growth in investment in climate tech predicted by Gates will come in time to combat accelerated climate change, as recently predicted by the UN.
Investing in AI or climate tech?
A strange paradox thus arises: how does investing in climate tech compare with investing in AI? It is obvious that the financial results of investing in climate tech will take at least five to 10 years. Only companies whose CEOs look ahead longer than their own annual bonus will structurally try to become carbon neutral or even carbon negative, such as Microsoft.
The average increase this year of these companies propelled upward by AI is a whopping 119%. Even the accountant-less Super Micro is down only 9%. Source: Google Finance
lucrative. See my completely arbitrary and subjectively compiled AI Spotlight 9, which is not financial advice, but attempts to paint a measurable picture of a visible trend.
The average share price increase this year of these companies propelled upward by AI is a whopping 119%. Interestingly, software company Palantir is experiencing higher share price appreciation than chipmakers such as AMD, Arm and Broadcom. But note that market leader Nvidia is not included in this list because Nvidia is already included in the overall tech-grade gauge Spotlight 9. By comparison, Nvidia shares are already up 181% this year, versus Palantir 153%.
In the short term, only memecoins are more lucrative than AI stocks. It is to be hoped for the world that Bill Gates is right and that there are enough investors who look a little beyond short-term returns. I myself will be at the particularly interesting Business & Philanthropy Forum in Singapore over the next few days, where the very idea of combining for-profit investing with the pursuit of a better world is being attempted. Hopefully I will be able to share some positive news next week.
