The Obtain: Methods to join the US’s grids, and OpenAI’s new voice mode

Michael Skelly hasn’t realized to take no for a solution. For a lot of the final 15 years, the power entrepreneur has labored to develop long-haul transmission traces to hold wind energy throughout the Nice Plains, Midwest, and Southwest. However up to now, he has little to indicate for the hassle.

Skelly has lengthy argued that constructing such traces and linking collectively the nation’s grids would speed up the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled energy vegetation to the renewables wanted to chop the air pollution driving local weather change. However his earlier enterprise shut down in 2019, after halting two of its initiatives and promoting off pursuits in three extra.

Skelly contends he was early, not unsuitable, and that the market and policymakers are more and more coming round to his perspective. In spite of everything, the US Division of Power simply blessed his newest firm’s proposed line with tons of of hundreds of thousands in grants. Learn the complete story.

—James Temple

OpenAI launched its superior voice mode to extra folks. Right here’s how one can get it.

OpenAI is broadening entry to Superior Voice Mode, a function of ChatGPT that means that you can communicate extra naturally with the AI mannequin. It means that you can interrupt its responses midsentence, and it might probably sense and interpret your feelings out of your tone of voice and regulate its responses accordingly. 

Customers who’ve been capable of strive it have largely described the mannequin as an impressively quick, dynamic, and lifelike voice assistant—which has made its restricted availability significantly irritating to another OpenAI customers. That is the primary time the corporate has promised to deliver the brand new voice mode to a variety of customers. Right here’s what it’s essential to know.

—James O’Donnell