We’re just over a year since it burst onto the scene and OpenAI’s ChatGPT program is somehow even more everywhere than it was in February. Our capability to regulate generative AI and mitigate its myriad real-world harms, on the other hand, continues to lag far behind the technology’s state-of-the-art. That makes 2024 a potentially pivotal year for generative AI in particular and machine learning in genera. ill AI continue to prove itself a fundamental revolution in human-computer communication, on par with the introduction of the mouse in 1963?, Or are we instead heading down yet another overhyped technological dead-end like 3D televisions? Let’s take a look at how OpenAI and its chatbot have impacted consumer electronics in 2023 and where they might lead the industry in the new year.

OpenAI had a great year, all things considered

“Meteoric” doesn’t do justice to OpenAI’s rise this year. The company released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Within five days, the program had passed 1 million users; by January, 100 million people a month were logging on to use it. It took Facebook four and a half years to reach those sorts of engagement numbers. ChatGPT outpaced the launches of both TikTok and Instagram to become the most quickly adopted program in the history of the internet in 2023. Heading into 2024, OpenAI (with billions in financial backing from Microsoft) stands at the forefront of the generative AI industry — whether the company can stay there, while billions more are being poured into its rivals’ R&D coffers, remains to be seen.

The company’s sudden success this year also launched its CEO Sam Altman into the media spotlight, with the 38-year-old former head of Y-Combinator basking in much of the praise formerly heaped upon Elon Musk. For a while, Altman was everywhere, repeatedly making appearances before Congressional committees and attending the Senate’s AI Safety Summits. He also conducted a 16-city world tour to Israel, India, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea, across Europe and to the UAE to help promote ChatGPT to developers and policy makers.

Even his termination at the hands of OpenAI’s board of directors in November ended up being a net positive. Fired on a Friday, Altman’s ouster set off 72 hours of panic in Silicon Valley with multiple OpenAI leaders resigning in solidarity, some 95 percent of rank and file staff threatening to walk without his reinstatement, the installation and removal of two interim CEOs in as many days and, ultimately, an indirect intervention by Microsoft. In the end, Altman is still CEO of OpenAI, now with a more compliant and agreeable board, and the tacit understanding throughout the industry that if you strike him down, Sam Altman will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Keeping pace proved a challenge for OpenAI’s competition

A significant contributor to ChatGPT’s immediate and overwhelming success is that it was the first AI of its kind to market. Image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney were already popular diversions, and the public had long acclimated to more mundane machine learning tasks like language translation, but OpenAI was the first with a generative AI program that conversed naturally with its user. That novelty proved an invaluable advantage as even tech titans like Google and Amazon with their massive R&D budgets were caught unprepared for such demand and were slow to respond with competing products of their own.

Google was the most ignoble example of such imitators this year. Following ChatGPT’s debut, Google dedicated the vast majority of its I/O Developers Conference in March to a raft of brand new generative AI models and platforms, including the debut of the Google Bard chatbot. Bard was Google’s answer to ChatGPT, just not a particularly reliable one to start. Even before its public release, Bard made an embarrassing first impression when in February it confidently recited incorrect information about the James Webb Space Telescope in a Twitter ad.

Throughout the year, Google steadily added features, capabilities and access to Bard, eventually shunting the entire platform in December to its newly released foundational model, Gemini, which had been billed as Google’s “most capable and general model” built to date. Google was, of course, then immediately caught misrepresenting the system’s capabilities during a video demonstration. Even without once again getting caught in an easily disprovable lie, Gemini’s demo did little to quiet critics of Google’s stilted and frantic response to ChatGPT.

As a recent Bloomberg op-ed points out, yes, Gemini beat out ChatGPT in a majority of the industry’s standard performance benchmarks. However, Google used the as-yet unreleased Gemini Ultra model to earn its scores and the model only bested GPT-4 so by exceedingly narrow margins. GPT-4 came out nearly a year ago and Google’s best effort barely topped it in middle school-level algebra tasks. That’s not a great look from a corporation that boasts research budgets which rival the GDP of small nations.

Bing is doing just fine, thanks for asking. Microsoft dropped $10 billion on OpenAI in January as part of an ongoing multi-year partnership so now Bing — and literally everything else in the MS ecosystem — is being augmented with algorithmic intelligence. If there was one company that had a better 2023 than OpenAI, it’s Microsoft, which is reportedly set to receive 75 percent of all OpenAI’s profit until those invested billions are recouped.

Amazon placed its $4 billion generative AI bet on Anthropic’s Claude LLM, and made significant headway in leveraging the technology for use in its sprawling empire in 2023, from its Echo Frames smart glasses to Alexa with Generative AI to NFL Thursday Night Games. The company introduced its Bedrock foundational model platform (which will offer AI-generated text and images as a cloud service), launched a series of free AI Ready developer courses and an accelerator program to fund genAI startups, debuted generative tools for filling backgrounds and product listings and now offers a standalone image generator AI to rival DALL-E.

"Inside Amazon, every one of our teams is working on building generative AI applications that reinvent and enhance their customers' experience," CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s Q2 earnings call in August. "But while we will build a number of these applications ourselves, most will be built by other companies, and we're optimistic that the largest number of these will be built on [Amazon Web Services]. Remember, the core of AI is data. People want to bring generative AI models to the data, not the other way around."

We’re still not ready for the age of AI

Even when it's not being used for obviously nefarious purposes like defrauding the elderly and amplifying political misinformation, generative AI technology has proven immensely disruptive to numerous industries and institutions from logistics and manufacturing to education and healthcare. It has been touted as a replacement for humans in professions ranging from medical imaging, computer programming and accounting to journalism and digital visual arts — in many cases, layoffs have been quick to follow.

This year also saw labor strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, in part, to prevent their works and likenesses from being used to train future AI models. Independent artists, whose intellectual property has been shamelessly scraped by disreputable firms for model training (looking at you, Stability AI), have had far less success in protecting their works — leading some creators to take drastic and damaging countermeasures.

Data privacy has proven a sticking point for AI companies in 2023. A ChatGPT bug found in March had apparently been sharing chat history titles (and potentially payment data). A trio of Samsung employees inadvertently divulged company secrets when they used ChatGPT to summarize the events of a business meeting in April. Microsoft AI researchers accidentally uploaded 38TB of company data to an open access Azure web folder in September, right around the time it was discovered that Google had been unknowingly leaking users’ Bard conversations into its general search results. As recently as November security researchers were finding that even “silly” attacks like telling ChatGPT to repeat the word “poem” ad infinitum would trick the system into revealing personally identifiable information.

The institutional response to these growing issues was tepid to start the year, mostly school districts, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies restricting use of chatbot AIs by their employees (and students). These initial efforts proved largely ineffective, due to the difficulty in actually enforcing them. The federal government's regulatory efforts are expected to have far more teeth.

The Biden White House has made AI regulation a centerpiece of its administration, developing a “blueprint” for its AI Bill of Rights last October, investing millions into new AI R&D centers for the National Science Foundation, wringing development guardrail concessions from leading AI companies and launching an AI Cyber Challenge, among other efforts. The administration’s most ambitious action came in October when the President issued a sweeping executive order establishing broad protections and best practices regarding user privacy, government transparency and public safety in future AI development by federal contractors. The US Senate and House have both been busy as well this year, holding congressional hearings on federal oversight rules for the AI industry, hosting a pair of AI Safety Summits and drafting legislation (which has yet to receive a vote).

Looking ahead to OpenAI’s 2024 and beyond

It’s OpenAI’s lead to lose heading into the new year. CEO Sam Altman holds firmer control over the company than ever, all dissenting voices on the board calling for caution have been silenced and the company is poised to further expand its operations in 2024 as the technology continues its global advance. I expect to see OpenAI’s competitors make a better showing in the new year with Google, Meta and Amazon spending freely on AI research in order to catch up and surpass the GPT platform.

And even though the entire ChatGPT craze got started with individual users, Paul Silverglate, vice chair of Deloitte LLP, sees the largest gains in 2024 coming from enterprise applications. “Expect to see generative AI integrated into enterprise software, giving more knowledge workers the tools they need to work with greater efficiency and make better decisions,” he wrote in a recent release.

A recent study by McKinsey & Company estimates that the current generation of conversational AI systems “have the potential to automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time” thanks to rapid advancements in natural language processing technology with “half of today’s work activities" potentially being automated away from human hands "between 2030 and 2060." That’s a decade sooner than previously estimated.

LG is best known for its OLED range when it comes to TVs, but it's expanding its 2024 QNED-branded LCD lineup as well. For CES 2024, the company has unveiled a 98-inch QNED LCD TV, while updating the previous models including its 8K lineup with a new version of its webOS smart TV system, built-in Chromecast, AI-enhanced video and more. 

This year, LG has four QNED ranges (QNED = quantum dot and nanocell): the 8K miniLED QNED99T, 4K miniLED QNED90T, QNED85T LCD, and the QNED80T range at the bottom. The top QNED99T models will use LG's Alpha 9 processor that can enhance video and audio using AI, while the the QNED90T and QNED85T lineup will feature an updated Alpha 8 processor with improved processing, graphics and AI performance. The QNED80T will use LG's lower-end Alpha 5 Gen 7 chip. 

All models offer LG's webOS 24, with individual profiles that allow for personalized recommendations and voice recognition for each individual user. It also has Chromecast built in, so you'll be able to watch content from Android and iOS devices via AirPlay 2 and Chromecast, respectively. And starting next year, all of LG's QNED TVs will receive 4 years of webOS upgrades. In addition, some of its previous high-end models (namely, the 8K models launched in 2022 and some others yet to be named), will also get webOS updates for free.

The 98-inch model is part of the LG QNED85T lineup, which means it's a mid-range 4K LCD set with local dimming but not miniLED tech. That means it's likely to be priced more reasonably than miniLED TVs, but will lack the precise dimming found on those models. It will have the latest webOS 24 smart TV features, but LG didn't reveal any other specs or the price. LG will also offer 50-, 55-, 65-, 75- and 86-inch models in that range. 

LG will offer two 8K models (QNED99T) in 75- and 86-inch sizes. No specs or prices are available, but the previous models (that are no longer stocked in the US) cost around $4,800 and $6,500 at launch, respectively. You can also expect very high brightness levels up to 3,000 nits, Dolby Vision HDR support, Dolby Atmos and 120Hz or higher refresh rates for gaming. The QNED90T 4K TVs will also use miniLED and come in 65-, 75- and 86-inch sizes. 

The bottom end of the lineup (QNED80T) will appeal to budget minded buyers, but still offer the latest smart TV features, Dolby Vision, etc. It'll be available in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65-, 75- and 86-inch sizes. Expect more details and pricing for the new lineup sometime next year.

It was an amazing year for games. While there were no new consoles,we did get new VR headsets and a wave of new handheld PCs offered even more options for playing games on the go (or at least on the couch). That’s reflected in many of our picks for best games of the year, with several PC-only choices.

The year kicked off with a fantastic remake of space horror Dead Space and the breakout success, Pizza Tower. But there were so many more. Obvious selections? Yes: the latest Zelda epic is there, as is Baldur’s Gate 3. If you’ve got some time between Christmas and New Year, there may be no better way to spend it than with one of these games. I’ve got Cocoon waiting for me.

— Mat Smith

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The Apple Watch import ban is paused — for now

What happens next depends on the ITC's response.

Urgh, tech news whiplash. A federal appeals court in Washington D.C. has allowed Apple to continue importing the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 models. This was just a day after Apple filed its appeal against the International Trade Commission’s decision to ban imports of both models of the Apple Watch due to a patent dispute. But you probably read all about that – multiple times.

Continue reading.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

The AI companies used the newspaper's articles for training.

The backlash on AI companies and their tools continues to grow – these AI models need information from somewhere. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using its news articles to train its artificial intelligence chatbots without an agreement that compensates it for its intellectual property. It alleges more than 66 million records, ranging from breaking news articles to op-eds, published across the NYT websites and other affiliated brands were used to train the AI models. The NYT also says these AI products can generate output that “mimics its expressive style.” This mirrors complaints from comedians and authors like Sarah Silverman and Julian Sancton.

Continue reading.

Swedish Researchers develop ‘electronic soil’ that speeds up plant growth

‘eSoil’ is here.

Thor Balkhed/Linköping University

Researchers from Linköping University in Sweden have developed a ‘bioelectronic soil’. It can apparently speed up the growth of plants in hydroponic spaces, or farms that grow plants in environments made up of mostly water. After integrating the engineered ‘eSoil’ into the framework where seedlings grow, researchers discovered that sending electrical signals through the soil made barley plants grow 50 percent more on average.

This is done through a conductive polymer within the soil and applying a voltage as small as 0.5V on the eSoil to stimulate the roots electrically.

Continue reading.

Russia and the United States have had a strained relationship, at best, in recent years. However, the pair are still working together in one regard: getting crews to the International Space Station (ISS). Roscosmos, Russia's federal space agency, has announced that the two countries will continue partnering on "cross-flights until 2025 inclusive."

Cross-flights involve putting crews from multiple countries onto the same spacecraft. Roscosmos intends always to have at least one of its own representatives in the Russia section of the ISS and at least one NASA representative in the US section. The agency added that the decision was made "to maintain the reliability of the ISS as a whole." The ISS, launched in 1998, is a symbol of US-Russia cooperation after the Cold War and the space race ended.

The news follows NASA's April 2023 announcement that Russia will remain aboard the ISS until 2028. The Director General of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, had previously said Russia would pull out of the ISS "after 2024" to focus on creating its own space station. NASA had been preparing for Russia's departure with plans ranging from pulling astronauts from the ISS to figuring out how to control the ISS if Russia took away its thrusters. The US agency has committed to maintaining the ISS until at least 2030.

A bundle of four Apple AirTags is currently on sale at Amazon for a price that's even lower than what it sold for during the website's Black Friday sale. You can get the four-pack right now for only $79, 20 percent lower than its retail price of $99 and just a few bucks more than its all-time low. It's a great buy if you've been looking to grab a few AirTags to keep track of several belongings, such as bags and suitcases that airlines could accidentally leave at your connecting airport, or your wallet and keys that you could misplace.

AirTags can link up with your iPhone and iPad in one tap, and you can use it to find the items it's tracking through the Find My app. It can help you find lost items by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be tracked by nearby Apple devices also connected to the Find My network. Since some of the top-selling phones in the world are iPhones, you'll have more than a decent chance of finding any lost belongings.

If you think the item you're tracking could be nearby, you can play a sound through the AirTag's built-in speaker so that you could easily locate it. On the latest iPhone models, you can even use the Precision Finding feature to get the direction to and know the distance between you and your AirTag. But if it has truly been lost or misplaced, you can put your AirTag in lost mode so that you can instantly get a notification when it's been detected by devices on the Find My network.

At the moment, a single AirTag will set you back $24 at Amazon, where it's also selling for 17 percent less than its retail price. It's a good deal if you really only need one AirTag, but the bundle price is unbeatable if you think you may need a few. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

The new year is almost here, and not many purchases say fresh start more than an upgrade to your smart home tech. Thankfully, getting one of the latest smart home gadgets won't cost too much right now, thanks to a 40 percent discount on Amazon's new third-generation Echo Show 8. The device is down to $90 from $150 — an all-time low. 

Amazon announced the third-gen Echo Show 8 at an event in September, showing off the device's new edge-to-edge front glass and nice, softer curves. The latest model has quite a few upgrades, but one of the most notable is an Adaptive Content feature. When you're far away from the device — say, sitting across the room — it will display information like the weather and time in a large font. However, the Echo Show 8 will show more personalized content like playlists or news articles when you step closer. Amazon also designed this feature for the second-gen model and other Echo Show devices. 

As for the third-gen Echo Show 8, it has spatial audio and room calibration, which should be especially obvious through bass and clarity. It also handles Alexa requests on-device with a new processor and should give you a 40 percent faster response time. Amazon also gave the device a 13MP camera and microphones that are more effective at minimizing background noise.  

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Xiaomi, a Chinese brand once synonymous with affordable smartphones, is now attempting to make an even bigger splash with its first-ever electric car. Unveiled at a Beijing event earlier today, the Xiaomi SU7 — pronounced "soo-chee" in Chinese — is a sedan based on the company's very own Modena Architecture with HyperEngine electric motors. The line will come in two flavors: the dual-motor all-wheel-drive SU7 Max, and the single-motor rear-wheel-drive SU7.

It'll be a few more months before Xiaomi announces the prices, but it's already claiming that the SU7 Max has a range of up to 800km (497 miles; according to China Light-Duty Vehicle Test Cycle aka CLTC), as well as a 0-100km/h acceleration of just 2.78s, both of which apparently beating Tesla's Model S and Porsche's Taycan Turbo. This is partly thanks to battery maker CATL's generous 101kWh 800V high-voltage platform, which offers a 220km range with just a 5-minute charge, or 390km in 10 minutes, or 510km in 15 minutes.

Xiaomi

Xiaomi hired talents from the auto industry to realize this project. Most notably, CEO Lei Jun claimed that Tianyuan Li, formerly of BMW's iX series and iVision concepts, offered himself to Xiaomi's auto design team. Li was also joined by James Qiu, who had previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Vision EQXX design. They later recruited Chris Bangle, a BMW veteran, to be their design consultant.

The SU7 is about the same size as the BMW 5 series, coming in at 1,440mm tall, 1,963mm wide and 4,997mm long. You get three color options: the signature "aqua blue," gray or olive green. In his event, Lei highlighted the seemingly generous leg room as well as trunk spaces — 517L in the back and 105L in the front.

At the launch event, Lei highlighted details like the "water droplet" head lamps, each of which resembled the Chinese character for "rice" (which is the "mi" in "Xiaomi"), as well as halo rear brake light consisting of 360 LEDs. The exec also pointed out that his team went with the half-hidden door handles, because the more flush handles are apparently harder to use in cold weather.

Xiaomi

Just as Xiaomi teased earlier, the SU7 offers a HyperOS in-car entertainment system, which is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8295 processor and takes just 1.49 seconds to boot. You can access your media, adjust your seats or even control your Xiaomi home appliances via the 16.1-inch 3K central screen, as well as optional Xiaomi Pad tablets which can be mounted on magnetic ports (up to 22.5W output) behind the two front head rests. The UI on the central screen allows for up to three split windows for multitasking, and you can even cast your Xiaomi phone's screen to it for a seamless experience. As for music and video entertainment, it'll be complemented by the 23 internal Dolby Atmos speakers.

Much like Volkswagen, Xiaomi already knows that car owners still prefer to have some physical buttons, so it's kept a few for climate control, as well as two extra buttons — one for toggling the spoiler (Lei said this is largely for showing off), and one for adjusting the body height (to avoid scratching the bottom, if needed). You can also get an optional row of buttons mounted beneath the central display.

Xiaomi

Xiaomi has yet to share prices for the SU7 line, though Lei already hinted that they will be expensive — which is subjective, of course. We shall find out in a few months' time, and hopefully by then we'll know about availability outside China as well, but we wouldn't count on a US launch any time soon, if ever. Meanwhile, you can get the Xiaomi 14, 14 Pro smartphones and the Xiaomi Watch S3 eSIM in their limited edition colors — either aqua blue or olive green — to match the upcoming SU7.

Developing...

Indian authorities allied with Prime Minister Narendra Modi have questioned Apple on the accuracy of its internal threat algorithms and are now investigating the security of its devices, according to The Washington Post. Officials apparently targeted the company after it warned journalists and opposition politicians that state-sponsored hackers may have infiltrated their devices back in October. While Apple is under scrutiny for its security measures in the eyes of the public, the Post says government officials were more upfront with what they wanted behind closed doors. 

They reportedly called up the company's representatives in India to pressure Apple into finding a way to soften the political impact of its hacking warnings. The officials also called in an Apple security expert to conjure alternative explanations for the warnings that they could tell people — most likely one that doesn't point to the government as the possible culprit. 

The journalists and politicians who posted about Apple's warnings on social media had one thing in common: They were all critical of Modi's government. Amnesty International examined the phone of one particular journalist named Anand Mangnale who was investigating long-time Modi ally Gautam Adani and found that an attacker had planted the Pegasus spyware on his Apple device. While Apple didn't explicitly say that the Indian government is to blame for the attacks, Pegasus, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is mostly sold to governments and government agencies. 

The Post's report said India's ruling political party has never confirmed or denied using Pegasus to spy on journalists and political opponents, but this is far from the first time its critics have been infected with the Pegasus spyware. In 2021, an investigation by several publications that brought the Pegasus project to light found the spyware on the phones of people with a history of opposing and criticizing Modi's government. 

JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, is set to launch the first mass-produced electric vehicle (EV) with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density (and is less mature) than lithium-ion, its lower costs, more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption. CarNewsChina reports that the JAC Yiwei EV hatchback deliveries will begin in January.

Yiwei is a new brand in 2023 for JAC. Volkswagen has a 75 percent stake in (and management control of) JAC and owns 50 percent of JAC’s parent company, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Holdings (JAG). The Chinese government owns the other half of JAG, making for one of the auto industry’s stranger pairings.

JAC via CarNewsChina

The Yiwei EV appears to be a rebranded version of the Sehol E10X hatchback (above), announced earlier this year. CarNewsChina describes the Sehol model as having a 252 km (157 miles) range with a 25 kWh capacity, 120 Wh / kg energy density, 3C to 4C charging, and a HiNa NaCR32140 cell. When JAC revealed the Yiwei brand in May, it said it would drop the Sehol label and rebrand all its vehicles to either JAC or Yiwei, leading us to this week’s EV reveal. JAC hasn’t yet said whether the Yiwei-branded model will keep the E10X moniker.

In April, JAC showcased a separate EV called the Yiwei 3 at the Shanghai Auto Show. That model launched in June with an LFP lithium battery, promising the sodium-ion variant would launch later.

JAC via CarNewsChina

The new Yiwei EV reportedly uses cylindrical sodium-ion cells from HiNA Battery. JAC assembles the batteries in the company’s modular UE (Unitized Encapsulation) honeycomb structure, similar to CATL’s CTP (cell-to-pack) and BYD’s Blade. The layout can provide for greater stability and performance.

Researchers from Linköping University in Sweden developed a ‘bioelectronic soil’ that can speed up the growth of plants in hydroponic spaces, or farms that grow plants without soil in environments made up of mostly water and a place for roots to attach. After integrating the engineered ‘eSoil’ into the framework where seedlings grow, researchers discovered that sending electrical signals through the soil made plants grow 50 percent more on average. 

The eSoil is made up of organic substances mixed with a conductive polymer called PEDOT, which can be found in things like sensors and OLED displays. Eleni Stavrinidou, the supervisor of the study, told Engadget that the soil’s conductivity was necessary for stimulating the plant roots. In this particular study, the researchers examined the effect of sending signals to barley seedlings over the span of 15 days before harvesting them for analysis. Applying a voltage as small as 0.5V on the eSoil electrically stimulates the roots, Stavrinidou explained. This, in turn, resulted in a recordable increase in the biomass of the electrically stimulated plants when compared to the non-stimulated seedings.

The stimulation’s effect on the barley seedlings was described as “steady” and “transient.” Stavrinidou told Engadget that nitrogen, one of the main nutrients involved in plant growth, was processed more efficiently through the stimulation. "We found that the stimulated plants could process the nutrients more efficiently however we don't understand how the stimulation is affecting this process,” Stavrindou explained, adding that the reason behind the growth process will be a focus of future studies.

PNAS

While hydroponic techniques are mainly used to grow vegetables, leafy greens and some vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes, the eSoil could offer a solution to create new ways to increase crop yields in commercial settings and especially in places where environmental conditions impact plant growth. The study highlights that this technique could minimize the use of fertilizers in farming.

The opportunity for technological innovation in farming is huge considering the number of US farms has steadily declined since 1982, according to the Department of Agriculture. Last year, the number of US farms reached 2 million, down from 2.2 million in 2007. Not only are farms on the decline, but the US is losing acres of land due to a host of reasons that range from climate change to worsening economic outlook for farmers due to inflation, making farming in controlled environments more popular.

But beyond improving crop yield, the implementation of eSoil to hydroponic farms could make it more energy-conscious. While traditional hydroponic farms use up less water, they require more energy to run. “The eSoil consumes very little power in the microwatt range,” Stavrinidou said. Before this technology can be applied to large-scale agriculture and other types of crops, more studies need to be conducted to observe how electrical stimulation can impact the whole growth cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan and not just in the early stages of seedling maturation. Stavrinidou also said that her team plans on studying how the technique affects the growth of other plant species.