Cooling pipes at a Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google)

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt.

The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3 million tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday.

Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict.”

Enlarge / EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said the bloc was looking into practices that could in effect lead to a company controlling a greater share of the AI market. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

Brussels is preparing for an antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into OpenAI, after the European Union decided not to proceed with a merger review into the most powerful alliance in the artificial intelligence industry.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, began to explore a review under merger control rules in January, but on Friday announced that it would not proceed due to a lack of evidence that Microsoft controls OpenAI.

However, the commission said it was now exploring the possibility of a traditional antitrust investigation into whether the tie-up between the world’s most valuable listed company and the best-funded AI start-up was harming competition in the fast-growing market.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty)

YouTube is in talks with record labels to license their songs for artificial intelligence tools that clone popular artists’ music, hoping to win over a skeptical industry with upfront payments.

The Google-owned video site needs labels’ content to legally train AI song generators, as it prepares to launch new tools this year, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The company has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels—Sony, Warner, and Universal—to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software, according to several people briefed on the talks.

Enlarge (credit: Arkadiusz Warguła via Getty)

Artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate politicians and celebrities are far more prevalent than efforts to use AI to assist cyber attacks, according to the first research by Google’s DeepMind division into the most common malicious uses of the cutting-edge technology.

The study said the creation of realistic but fake images, video, and audio of people was almost twice as common as the next highest misuse of generative AI tools: the falsifying of information using text-based tools, such as chatbots, to generate misinformation to post online.

The most common goal of actors misusing generative AI was to shape or influence public opinion, the analysis, conducted with the search group’s research and development unit Jigsaw, found. That accounted for 27 percent of uses, feeding into fears over how deepfakes might influence elections globally this year.

Enlarge (credit: koiguo via Getty)

Clint and Rachel Wells had reasons to consider buying an electric vehicle when it came to replacing one of their cars. But they had even more reasons to stick with petrol.

The couple live in Normal, Illinois, which has enjoyed an economic boost from the electric vehicle assembly plant opened there by upstart electric-car maker Rivian. EVs are a step forward from “using dead dinosaurs” to power cars, Clint Wells says, and he wants to support that.

But the couple decided to “get what was affordable”—in their case, a petrol-engined Honda Accord costing $19,000 after trade-in.

Enlarge / TDK says its new ceramic materials for batteries will improve the performance of small consumer electronics devices such as smartwatches and wireless headphones (credit: AsiaVision via Getty)

Japan’s TDK is claiming a breakthrough in materials used in its small solid-state batteries, with the Apple supplier predicting significant performance increases for devices from wireless headphones to smartwatches.

The new material provides an energy density—the amount that can be squeezed into a given space—of 1,000 watt-hours per liter, which is about 100 times greater than TDK’s current battery in mass production. Since TDK introduced it in 2020, competitors have moved forward, developing small solid-state batteries that offer 50 Wh/l, while rechargeable coin batteries using traditional liquid electrolytes offer about 400 Wh/l, according to the group.

“We believe that our newly developed material for solid-state batteries can make a significant contribution to the energy transformation of society. We will continue the development towards early commercialisation,” said TDK’s chief executive Noboru Saito.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group.

The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation.

The charges would be the first brought against a tech company under the Digital Markets Act, landmark legislation designed to force powerful “online gatekeepers” to open up their businesses to competition in the EU.