🔮 Best of the month – A round-up for September 2024

How AI, climate change & energy intertwine. Plus industry & economic trends to know

Oct 01, 2024

Welcome to our September recap on AI, climate and energy transition, industry and economic trends. This summarises the most critical ideas and developments we wrote about in 15,000+ words during September.

Artificial intelligence

Why humanity needs AI: I dig into the essential role AI could play for the future of our species.
AI scaling continues to push limits. There are no near-term limits on power, chip production or data [EV#492]. BlackRock and Microsoft plan a $30 billion fund for AI infrastructure [EV#492]. And chip startup Groq is partnering with Saudi Aramco to build the world's largest AI inference data centre [EV#492]
Generative AI is being adopted faster than both the internet and personal computers, with nearly a quarter of working-age Americans using it each week [EV#493]
AI companies reach $30 million in annualised revenue more than three times faster than enterprise SaaS firms, according to Stripe data [EV#493]
OpenAI’s new model o1 is resetting expectations of what problems can be solved, potentially changing the calculus of what’s possible for organisations.
More from OpenAI… New high-profile exits stirred speculations about the state of the firm all anew. I shared my take on what’s going on here.
Toby Ord on how to push the limits of AI’s creativity [EV#491]. Also, AI-generated research ideas were rated as significantly more novel compared to those by expert human researchers in a year-long study [EV#491]. PaperQA2, an AI agent tool, can conduct entire scientific literature reviews autonomously to a PhD and Postdoc-level [EV#491]
Does AI boost the performance of the least able employees or have no effect on their skills? The answer is “yes”– to both [EV#490]
Klarna has dropped contracts with Workday and Salesforce, replacing them with AI-based workflows, potentially signaling a shift away from cloud-based SaaS [EV#491]

Climate change and the energy transition

Energy tech is eating the world. Our analysis on how energy went from being a commodity to being a technology.
Solar is smashing all the records. Every one of the six major energy forecasters low-balled their estimates for this year’s solar growth [EV#492]. And the US solar module production capacity has nearly quadrupled since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed two years ago [EV#491]
OpenAI pitched the White House on building massive data centres requiring five gigawatts across various states [EV#493]

Economic and industrial trends

Founder-led Fortune 500 companies vastly outperform peers run by professional managers, with a median cumulative return of 1,129% compared to 57% for other Fortune 500 firms [EV#491]
SpaceX currently controls two-thirds of all active satellites, up six-fold in just three years [EV#491]
Novartis is investing over $200 million in its first isotope-production factory in the US. Isotopes are indispensable to the modern world but they’re in short –global conflicts don’t help [EV#490]
China is leading 57 of 64 critical technologies, according to a report by ASPI [EV#490]
Also in China: Cash-strapped local governments are reportedly resorting to detaining entrepreneurs who were suspected of bribery only to release them for money [EV#493]
Americans used 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023 [EV#491]
Nearly a third of major passenger car plants from Europe’s five largest automakers were underutilised in 2023, producing less than 50% of capacity [EV#491]. Toyota, VW and GM have fallen behind Tesla and their Chinese rivals in developing critical software for their cars [EV#493]
X revenues declined 25% in Q2 and 84% compared to Q2 2022 [EV#492]
Lunar mining is being pursued by startups. The space frontier is increasingly going to be shaped by smaller players [EV#493]
South Korean companies were the top investors in the US last year, investing a record $21.5 billion [EV#492]
Apple will be the first to use chips from TSMC’s Arizona plant [EV#493]