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The Biden-Harris administration has proposed stricter pollution standards across the auto industry as part of their goal to increase EV production and slow climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new guidelines would mean that, by 2032, 67 percent of new light-duty vehicles, such as sedans and light trucks, and 46 percent of new medium-duty vehicles sold will be EVs. The proposed changes could also lead to almost 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions to be avoided through 2055 — about double the US's 2022 emissions. 

Details on the proposed emissions standards aren’t fully clear, but are set to include targets for EV sales and new rules that punish automakers who exceed CO2 standards within the next five to ten years. "Specifically, EPA is proposing stronger CO2 standards for MY 2027 HD vehicles that go beyond the current standards that apply under the HD Phase 2 Greenhouse Gas program," the agency said in a statement. "EPA is also is proposing an additional set of CO2 standards for HD vehicles that would begin to apply in MY 2028, with progressively lower standards each model year through 2032." 

This year has already seen continued progress for EV manufacturing and sales. Tesla reported increased first quarter sales that were 36 percent higher than the same period in 2022, and four percent higher than the last quarter. Volkswagen pledged $193 billion dollars towards EV technology, including batteries and raw materials, over the next five years.

EV purchases are clearly heading in the direction the Biden administration hopes: EV sales accounted for 5.6 percent in 2022, compared to 1.8 percent in 2020. In California, EVs made up almost 19 percent of yearly new car sales. That upswing is set to continue in 2023 with 225,000 EVs sold in the first quarter — about seven percent of all new vehicles. The same period saw used EV purchases increase by almost a third, thanks potentially to their prices decreasing.

At the same time, cost is still a huge barrier for making EVs mainstream. Last year, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, providing EV buyers subsidies up to $7,500 for SUVs, trucks, and vans under $80,000 and cars under $55,000. Even used EV purchases could get up to $4,000. Recent updated guidance from the US Treasury Department, however, limited how many EVs would qualify for a subsidy. 

Another issue is making sure people have somewhere to charge all these EVs while they're on the go. Currently, there are 130,000 public charging stations across the United States, with President Biden aiming to tackle demand by building another 500,000 by 2030. Part of this plan entails teaming with local officials to build them in widely accessible spaces, with regional governments needing to apply for funds by May 30th. If all goes well, no one would live farther than 50 miles from a charger. 

ChatGPT, Bard and Bing AI: You can’t escape the AI models and chatbot evolution and headlines. Now, the US government is trying to get a handle on things. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking for public comments on possible regulations to hold AI creators accountable. The measures will ideally help the Biden administration ensure these models work as promised "without causing harm," the NTIA says. Hopefully, they’ll also speak to experts, too, and not just rely on the anonymous internet public.

ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have already been tied to sensitive data leaks and copyright violations and have prompted fears of automated disinformation and malware campaigns – and that’s in addition to basic concerns about accuracy and bias.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Google Bard's new 'experiment updates' page tells you what's new

It's a move in the right direction for AI transparency.

Google

To be more open about Bard's development, Google has created a new experiment updates page where anyone can find information on recent updates to Bard, including new features and bug fixes.

So far, the updates include a "what" and a "why." For the updates page itself, Google says it was created so "people will have an easy place to see the latest Bard updates for them to test and provide feedback." The information is still pretty short and vague, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

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The Polestar 4 will be the company's fastest production car

It'll debut at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 18th.

Polestar

Polestar has confirmed its latest – and fastest production – EV, the Polestar 4, will debut at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 18. The new generation joins the Polestar 3 and an updated Polestar 2, with the new model's design expected to fall somewhere between the two. The Polestar 4 is slightly smaller than the Polestar 3 and a bit higher off the ground than the Polestar 2 and is expected to have a battery that should run for about 373 miles. Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar CEO, emphasized it is not a modified version of its first SUV: "Instead, we reconsidered the entire design to create a new breed of SUV coupé."

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The best VPNs for 2023

Don’t fall for the hyped-up, overly marketed options.

VPNs are having a moment. And they are important. But deciding the best option for browsing means digging through claims of attributes that aren’t always accurate. It makes it harder to figure out which one to subscribe to, or if you really need to use one at all. We tested nine top VPN services available now to help you choose the best one for your needs.

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Former Twitter execs sue company over unpaid legal fees

They allege Twitter owes them more than $1 million in unreimbursed legal fees.

Twitter faces yet another lawsuit over unpaid bills. In a complaint filed with the Delaware Chancery Court, former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal and former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde allege Twitter owes them more than $1 million in unreimbursed legal fees.

Elon Musk fired all three execs after taking control of the company last fall. The former executives allege Twitter spent months ignoring letters they sent asking it to honor a reimbursement agreement they had in place before their termination. According to the complaint, Twitter finally acknowledged the letters last month but did little else.

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OpenAI is turning to the public to find bugs in ChatGPT, announcing a "Bug Bounty Program" to reward people who report any security flaws, vulnerabilities or other issues within the AI system. 

The bounty is open to anyone from actual researchers to general people who just like exploring technology. Rewards come in the form of cash prizes with "low-severity findings" starting at $200 and "exceptional discoveries" going all the way up to $20,000. Bugcrowd, a bug bounty platform, is handling submissions and payouts.

Google and Apple are among the tech companies that have previously implemented bug bounty programs. In 2019, Google paid out $6.5 million to people who reported issues, giving as much as $201,337 in one reward. Apple went even further to offer up to $2 million for anyone that finds "issues that bypass the specific protections of Lockdown Mode." 

ChatGPT has struggled with bugs — last month the entire system went offline after users reported seeing names of conversations they weren't a part of. Then, a few days later, a Twitter user posted that they had found more than 80 secret plugins while hacking ChatGPT.

Not all issues reported to OpenAI will warrant a cash prize, including jailbreaking or getting the model to say or pretend to do anything negative. The company's bug bounty announcement tries hard to show it cares about privacy and security, but also adds, "While we work hard to prevent risks, we can't predict every way people will use or misuse our technology in the real world." Time will tell if this initiative will do anything to prevent it. 

Strava has announced a partnership with Spotify to integrate listening controls directly onto its app. Before, anyone recording on the fitness tracker had to switch to the Spotify app — arguably not too big a hassle, but time consuming nonetheless. 

Once a Strava user confirms they want to stream Spotify on the app, a little widget for it will appear in the bottom left of the recording screen. Clicking it brings a popup over the map to provide options to pause or switch whatever's being listened to. 

Spotify

Strava claims to have 100 million users worldwide, but, with Spotify's 500 million listeners (and many fitness tracker competitors on the market) the integration is a clear sign Strava wants to keep and grow its audience. Mateo Ortega, Strava's Vice President of Connected Partnerships emphasizes as much: "This new feature further solidifies Strava's position at the center of connected fitness and continues to demonstrate the power of the global community of active people on Strava."

Strava is also taking control of creating Spotify's "Workout" playlist from April 20th. What "Strava-curated sounds" look like is something we'll have to wait and see. 

In the meantime, while both apps offer paid options, you can get away with trying out Spotify on Strava using the free versions of each.

Sony's semiconductor division has announced that it's making a "strategic investment" in Raspberry Pi as a way to bring its AI tech to a wider market. The idea is to give Raspberry Pi users around the world a development platform for its Aitrios edge computing (on-chip) AI platform used for image sensing functions like facial recognition. 

"We are very pleased to be partnering with Raspberry Pi Ltd. to bring our Aitrios platform — which supports the development of unique and diverse solutions utilizing our edge AI devices — to the Raspberry Pi user and developer community, and provide a unique development experience," said Sony Semiconductor Solutions president and CEO Terushi Shimizu.

The Raspberry Pi 4 and other devices from the company give users PC-like power in a small form factor. Originally designed as an educational platform to teach robotics, coding and more, it has become popular as a way for coders to prototype IoT (Internet of Things) and other devices.  

The addition of Sony's Aitrios could make it even more useful. Unlike cloud AI, it runs directly on chips (edge computing) to reduce latency, and Sony has pitched the system for uses like surveillance, security and more. Examples cited on a dedicated website include inventory monitoring and retention, customer counting, license plate recognition and "detailed employee analysis." Sony says it preserves privacy by analyzing data strictly on-chip and only sending metadata to the cloud. 

Sony is already involved with Raspberry Pi as a "longstanding and valued strategic partner," the company said. It recently provided imaging chips with autofocus capability and helped Raspberry Pi get its UK manufacturing plant up to speed in the early days of the company.

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Back in 2021, the New York Police Department (NYPD) cancelled a planned deployment of the Spot robot dog [aka "Digidog"] following a public backlash. Now, New York City's current law and order mayor Eric Adams has brought the robot dog back for use in "hazardous situations," The New York Times has reported. "Digidog is out of the pound," Adams said at a press conference yesterday in Times Square.

The NYPD will acquire two of the robots for $750,000 and only use them in hostage and other critical situations. "I believe that technology is here; we cannot be afraid of it,” Adams said. “A few loud people were opposed to it, and we took a step back [but] that is not how I operate. I operate on looking at what’s best for the city."

Spot/Digidog is built by Hyundai's Boston Dynamics, and is designed to be used in dangerous situations like security and inspections. It was also tested for use in combat by the French army, primarily for reconnaissance.

During its previous tour of duty with the NYPD, police used Spot to gather information about a gunmen barricaded inside a building. On another occasion it was deployed during a home invasion, also to give officers eyes inside the house. After critics brought up potential concerns over surveillance and privacy, however, then-mayor Bill de Blasio elected to cancel a $94,000 lease on Spot. "It’s creepy, alienating and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers," a city spokesperson said at the time. 

Along with Digidog, the NYPD announced testing of two other types of security and surveillance tech. The Guardian HX from StarChase shoots GPS tracking tags onto vehicles from a handheld or car-mounted launcher, allowing officers to find them without the needed for a chase. The other is the Knightscope's K5 ASR, a "fully autonomous outdoor security robot" that the NYPD wants to use for collecting intelligence.

"This is the beginning of a series of rollouts we are going to do to show how public safety has transformed itself," Adams said at the press conference. However, the move was condemned by Albert Fox Cahn from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing," he told the NYT in a statement. "New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff from 'Robocop.'"

More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk recently bought 100,000 GPUs for use at one of the company’s two remaining data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is “committed” to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it didn’t plan to use them for AI work.

The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI that the company would train on its own massive trove of data. It’s unclear how Twitter would utilize the technology. Insider suggests a generative AI could augment the platform’s search functionality or assist the company in rebuilding its advertising business. In any case, the report colors Musk’s recent decision to sign an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development.

Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization he co-founded in 2015. “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” Musk said in one of his recent Twitter missives against the lab’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Limited Partnership.

However, a recent report from Semafor suggests his feud with OpenAI is more personal. In 2018, Musk reportedly told Sam Altman, one his fellow co-founders at OpenAI, the lab was falling too far behind Google. Musk then suggested that he should be the one to run the firm, a proposal Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected.

The power struggle led to Musk’s departure from OpenAI, though publicly both parties maintain Musk left due to a conflict of interest involving Tesla. At the time, OpenAI said the billionaire would continue to fund its research. However, according to Semafor, Musk’s payments stopped after his departure – despite a promise to provide the firm with roughly $1 billion. The sudden shortfall left OpenAI scrambling to raise cash. In 2019, the organization announced it was creating a for-profit subsidiary to secure the capital it needed to fund its work. That same year, the firm announced a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November and the chatbot began to dominate headlines, Musk was reportedly “furious.” One month later, he cut OpenAI’s access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data. And now it would appear he wants to compete against his old organization head-on.

The Playdate's Catalog games store has received its first update since its launch last month, and it's a small but eclectic five-title mix that even includes a productivity app. The official headliner, Core Fault, is a survival game that has you piloting a mining droid as it collects resources and dodges unhappy aliens. However, the real star might be Crankulator. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like — it's a calculator that uses the handheld's crank to enter values. It can even use a synthetic voice to relay calculations like a modern-day Speak & Math.

Other additions include the physics-driven flight game Gravity Express, the mahjong adaptation Sparrow Solitaire and the spooky puzzle solver Life's Too Short. The prices range from just $1 for Life's Too Short through to $10 for Gravity Express and Sparrow Solitaire. As with the initial game batch, these are effectively impulse buys.

The Catalog selection is still tiny at 21 titles. For comparison, the first "season" included with the Playdate provides 24 games. However, this first expansion might give an idea of what to expect — namely, a modest but steady stream of quirky experiences built around the console's black-and-white display and unusual controls. They likely won't replace epics like the latest Legend of Zelda game, but they're not meant that way. These are quick fixes you can play while you're waiting for the bus or taking a work break.

Artifact, the news aggregation app from the creators of Instagram, now has some social features following its latest update. Users can now create profiles and comment on any article in the app.

Taking a cue from Reddit, Artifact will let you upvote and downvote other users' comments, which will factor into commenters' reputation scores and help to moderate discussions. The app is also using artificial intelligence for moderation.

Artifact says the reputation score "represents the earned trust from the community and will help you weigh people’s opinions and help us filter out bad behavior." The goal, according to a blog post, is to foster a positive community in which everyone feels encouraged to take part. The app will let you know when your comments get upvotes or downvotes. You'll also be notified when your contacts comment on things they read.

Artifact

You'll need a profile, which is optional, to comment on articles. Profiles can include your photo and bio (adding both will apparently boost your reputation). You'll need to provide a verified phone number to create one. A phone number is also needed if you want to move to a different device and retain your Artifact history and preferences.

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unveiled Artifact back in January. It uses AI to curate news and present you with things it reckons you'll want to read. "We have a strong and growing community and sometimes the most important voices are never interviewed or quoted," Systrom wrote in an Artifact comment. "These discussions give everyone a chance to participate and have a voice."

In a bit of a coincidence, Artifact is gaining true social components on the same day that Substack is rolling out its Twitter-esque Notes feature. In a sense, the two relative upstarts are trying to take on established social media platforms at their own game.