Solid-state batteries can use a wide range of chemistries. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars before going public and is focused on that technology. The company has a deal with Volkswagen.
Li-metal batteries have seen manufacturing challenges as well as concerns about degradation. In December, Quantumscape said it had delivered samples to automotive partners for testing, a significant milestone on the road to getting solid-state batteries into cars. Solid Power is building and testing their batteries. Their batteries won't make it into vehicles on the road in three years.
There are other new technologies to watch out for. Today's lithium-ion chemistries are very different from the ones used in the past. The design of these batteries is similar to that of lithium-ion batteries, but instead of relying on lithium, they usesodium as the main chemical ingredient. According to a report, Chinese battery giant CATL plans to start mass-production of them in the year 2023.
Even though sodium-ion batteries don't improve performance, they can cut costs because they use cheaper materials. It's not clear whether these batteries will be able to meet needs for EV range and charging time, which is why companies like US-based Natron are targeting less demanding applications.
The market for batteries for stationary grid storage is small compared to the EV battery market. Since major renewable power sources like wind and solar are variable, and batteries can help store energy for when it's needed, demand for electricity storage is increasing.
Even though they are used for it today, lithium-ion batteries aren't ideal for stationary storage. The primary goal for stationary storage is to cut costs, while batteries for EV are getting smaller, lighter, and faster. Different chemistries will likely win out because size and weight don't really matter for grid storage.
Two players could see progress in the coming year because iron is a rising star. The iron-air battery developed by Form Energy uses a water-based electrolyte to store energy. A $760 million manufacturing facility is planned to be built in West Virginia. A different type of iron battery is being built by another company, and it has begun manufacturing in Wilsonville, Oregon.
Researchers are tweaking the technology to get more performance out of the batteries.
The Federal Trade Commission watches how companies collect and use data. Weight Watchers was forced to destroy its data by the FTC because it collected data on children without permission. In December, the company agreed to a $520 million settlement, avoiding a similar fate. The chair of the agency has said that they intend to protect Americans from data security practices that are not in line with the law.
Authorities in China have recently banned the creation of deepfakes. Europeans want to add warning signs to let people know that they are interacting with artificial intelligence.
Technology companies could be affected by these regulations. Tech lobbyists are not afraid of reminding them that regulators have to strike a delicate balance between protecting consumers and not disrupting innovation.
The challenge will be to keep the rules precise enough to be effective, but not so specific that they become obsolete as the field of artificial intelligence develops rapidly. If new laws are implemented correctly, the next year could see an era of artificial intelligence with more respect for privacy and fairness.
The person isMelissa Heikkil.
Their muscles are flexed.
An open-source revolution has begun to match, and sometimes surpass, what the richest labs are doing in the field of artificial intelligence.
BLOOM was the first community-built, multilingual large language model. Stable Diffusion, an open-sourced text-to-image artificial intelligence model, was the most innovative model we saw.
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