OpenAI spent $1.76 million on authorities lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 within the final three months of the 12 months alone, in line with a brand new disclosure filed on Tuesday—a big leap from 2023, when the corporate spent simply $260,000 on Capitol Hill.
The disclosure is a transparent sign of the corporate’s arrival as a political participant, as its first 12 months of great lobbying ends and Republican management of Washington begins. Whereas OpenAI’s lobbying spending remains to be dwarfed by larger tech gamers, the uptick comes because it and different AI corporations are serving to redraw the form of AI coverage. Learn the total story.
—James O’Donnell
A brand new firm plans to make use of Earth as a chemical reactor
Neglect huge metal tanks—some scientists need to make chemical compounds with the assistance of rocks deep beneath Earth’s floor.
New analysis exhibits that ammonia, a chemical essential for fertilizer, may be produced from rocks at temperatures and pressures which might be widespread within the subsurface. The analysis was revealed yesterday in Joule, and MIT Know-how Evaluate can completely report {that a} new firm, referred to as Addis Vitality, has been based to commercialize the method.
Ammonia is utilized in most fertilizers and is a crucial a part of our trendy meals system. It’s additionally being thought-about to be used as a inexperienced gas in industries like transoceanic transport. The issue is that present processes used to make ammonia require lots of vitality and produce enormous quantities of the greenhouse gases that trigger local weather change. Learn the total story.
—Casey Crownhart