We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash. Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus. The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite.  Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful.  Some locals say they like the order and eternal verdancy of the eucalyptus, which often stand in stark contrast to the Cerrado’s native savanna landscape.PABLO ALBARENGA Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see. The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere.  But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.  At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.  Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the stars of the Southern Cross emerging and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees. A big promise My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress? Apple CEO Tim Cook stares down Octavia Spencer as “Mother Nature” in their ad spot touting the company’s claims for carbon neutrality.APPLE VIA YOUTUBE Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes. Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch.  The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new.  Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.) But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO2, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million.  So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones.  To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice. UNSPLASH APPLE Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, a claim based in part on the use of carbon credits. The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank.  Busch connected me with Mark Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape.  When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.” So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential.  “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” Mark Wishnie says, promoting BTG’s plans to intermingle new farms alongside native preserves.COURTESY OF BTG But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.   The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions.  Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box.  Complex calculations In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria.  A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.) The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term.  But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later.  During President Donald Trump’s first term, he and French president Emmanuel Macron planted an oak on the South Lawn of the White House.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long.  “The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy.  Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux.  Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles.  To Pedro Brancalion, a lot of tree-planting efforts are riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. He experiments with new ways to grow eucalyptus interspersed with native species.PABLO ALBARENGA Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built.  The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to

Google says Gemini has 350 million monthly active users. Jaque Silva/NurPhoto 2025-04-24T18:31:30Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Google's AI chatbot Gemini has seen massive user growth. It's still trailing behind rivals like ChatGPT and Meta AI, data Google displayed in court showed. Google revealed the data during the remedies phase of the company's search antitrust case. Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini has seen a massive spike in its user numbers, but its usage levels are still way behind rivals like ChatGPT and Meta AI, data revealed in court this week showed.As of late March, Gemini logged 350 million monthly active users and 35 million daily active users, according to a slide displayed by Google attorneys on Wednesday during day three of a court hearing to determine how to remedy the tech empire's illegal online search monopoly.The user data was shown by Google in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom during testimony by Sissie Hsiao, who until earlier this month served as the head of Gemini and led the effort to create the chatbot. The Department of Justice called Hsiao as one of its witnesses in the antitrust case.Google showed the data as a way to highlight the competitive nature of the generative AI space. Gemini launched in 2023 and though its daily usage has nearly quadrupled from the 9 million daily active users it recorded in October of last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta AI were still leading the pack, the slide showed.The Google slide estimated ChatGPT's monthly active users at 600 million and Meta AI's at 800 million. Google displayed this slide during the remedies phase of the company's search antitrust case. Google In a January earnings call, Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg — who testified last week in his company's own antitrust trial — said that Meta AI's usage "continues to scale" with more than 700 million monthly active users."I expect this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant," Zuckerberg said.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this month during a TED interview that ChatGPT had 500 million weekly active users and added that the chatbot was "growing very rapidly.""You told me that like doubled in just a few weeks," head of TED Chris Anderson told Altman. "I said that privately, but I guess…" Altman replied, before trailing off."It's growing very fast," he added.While on the witness stand in Google's antitrust case, Hsiao testified about the fast-changing pace of the generative AI world.The so-called remedies phase of the court battle between Google and the DOJ kicked off on Monday and it could result in a massive shake up of the $1.8 trillion tech behemoth.US District Judge Amit Mehta will ultimately determine Google's fate after he ruled in August, following a 10-week trial, that Google violated US antitrust law in maintaining a monopoly with its online search business.If the DOJ gets its way, Google could be forced to sell off its prized Chrome web browser, end its exclusive deals with Apple and others to make Google the default search engine on web browsers and smartphones, and share search data with competitors.Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist said in his opening statement on Monday that the court must prevent Google from using its search monopoly to dominate the AI market.Google lawyer John Schmidtlein argued ChatGPT is doing just fine.The court hearing is slated to run three weeks. The judge is expected to issue his remedies ruling by the end of the summer.Google has vowed to appeal Mehta's ruling that declared the tech giant a monopolist. Recommended video

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company. RelatedUnder this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel-prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea). Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission. “Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.” And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it. I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit. This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless. OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.How OpenAI became OpenAIWhen OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work towards the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity. Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI. They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.” Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market. “A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity. “We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure. OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation. “Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefitting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court. “Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefitting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.” Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefitting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019. “Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity. But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth. What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price. It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015. But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.Update, April 24, 2:50 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a disclosure about Vox Media’s relationship to OpenAI.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

The Nintendo Switch 2 upgrades for Zelda, Mario Party, Kirby and more have been priced for the UK, and it's more than you may have expected — unless you're a Zelda fanTech11:37, 24 Apr 2025Updated 11:37, 24 Apr 2025Switch 2 upgrades are pricier than expected(Image: AFP via Getty Images)The Nintendo Switch 2 might have one of the best launch lineups around when you consider enhanced Switch 2 games, but if you were looking to upgraded ports as a cheaper way to avoid paying £75 for Mario Kart World, you might be sad to hear about the fees involved.While we already knew buying the Switch 2 versions of games would set you back around £67, we'd been waiting to hear more about upgrade pricing — and we finally have the figures.‌Perhaps the biggest surprise is that there's no "one size fits all" price, with some games costing more than twice the amount of others to upgrade. Here's the full list, and how much each will set you back.Article continues belowIt'll cost you under a tenner to upgrade Breath of the Wild for Switch 2(Image: Nintendo)As spotted by VGC, Nintendo's UK store now offers pricing for the Upgrade Packs for Nintendo Switch 2 games.The good news is, if you're looking forward to playing Link's latest adventures with The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, you can upgrade each for £7.99.‌Doing so gets you the best version of each, with HDR support, the Zelda Notes companion app functionality, and perhaps most importantly, better performance at a higher resolution.If you're subscribed to the Nintendo Switch Online and Expansion Pack membership, you'll get both upgrades at no extra cost.This adorable pink blob is getting pricey(Image: Nintendo)‌Sadly, not all updates are that affordable. Super Mario Party Jamboree and Kirby and the Forgotten Land are both getting Switch 2 updates, but they'll set you back £16.99 each in the UK.That's more than double the price of the Zelda upgrades, although there is at least some method to the madness.‌Super Mario Party Jamboree will add new minigames that use the Switch 2's mouse controls and microphone, while also adding support for the new camera peripheral.On the other hand, Kirby and the Forgotten Land has new story content with the Star Crossed World expansion. Still, it remains to be seen if players will be itching to spend nearly £20 to upgrade their 2022 platformer for the new console.Other games getting 'Upgrade Pack' options are Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokemon Legends Z-A, but no pricing has been revealed for those titles as yet.Article continues belowThankfully, some games are getting free updates for the new hardware. Players can expect to be able to enjoy improved performance of some description from Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario 3D World and Bowser's Fury, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe and more.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌

New Lego Fortnite sets feature Klombo and Mecha Team Leader GameCentral Published April 24, 2025 6:43pm Updated April 24, 2025 6:43pm Lego Fortnite is getting nostalgic for Chapter 1 (Lego) The most expensive Lego Fortnite set yet has been revealed but it and three others all come with QR codes to unlock in-game skins. Video games are suddenly big business again when it comes to Hollywood but they’re also increasingly more mainstream in other areas, including the world’s most popular toy brand: Lego. A new Pokémon line was recently announced for next year, to go alongside Super Mario, Zelda, and Animal Crossing sets, but Nintendo is not the only publisher that Lego has teamed up with. Everyone from Sony to Sega to Atari has had sets made of their various games but it’s only recently that Fortnite has been added to the list. That’s surprising given there’s a whole Lego-themed game mode now, but with these four new sets they’re making up for lost time. The previous four sets were an impressively varied and imaginative bunch, with a pleasingly cheap (for Lego) Battle Bus set with a ton of minifigures. That was the obvious thing to do but there’s also a giant statue of Peely Bone, a Supply Llama, and a wallet friendly Durrr Burger model. The cheapest of the new sets (Lego) Peely & Sparkplug’s Camp – £17.99 The new wave is equally varied and starts with two relatively straightforward playsets. This is the cheapest and is based on the Lego Odyssey survival mode from the game. You get minifigures of Peely and Sparkplug, plus a skeleton, a supply llama, and a brick-built wolf. There’s also a campfire and a workbench, plus the ability to scan the QR code on the building instructions to get a Sparkplug outfit you can use in the game. You probably wouldn’t want to eat here (Lego) Durrr Burger Restaurant – £54.99 This playset is a bit bigger and includes a detailed interior, with a drinks machine and a cash register, plus a seating area and a sign featuring the drive-thru menu. There’s four minifigures this time, with Beach Bomber, Beef Boss, Grimey, and a skeleton. The QR code unlocks a Beef Boss outfit in the game. The whole thing is 27cm tall, including the Durrr Burger mascot on the roof, so it’s bigger than it looks. That’s a really cool bit of Lego design (Lego) Klombo – £89.99 Fortnite or not, this six-legged monster is a cool bit of a Lego design. He’s got moveable limbs, an opening mouth, and rotating tail, plus you can feed him Klomberries from a buildable Komberry bush. More Trending You also get two minifigures, of Island Adventure Peely and Oro, who can sit on Klombo’s back if you want them to (or feed them into his mouth, if you’d prefer). The QR code is for an Island Adventure Peely costume in the game. Mecha Team Leader – £209.99 The biggest and most expensive Fortnite set is also just a really neat bit of Lego. It’s a 45cm tall model of the giant robot that saved Battle Royale Chapter 1 Island in the game, which looks like a Care Bears version of Voltron. As the price implies, this one is aimed more at adults than kids, as it’s got an 18+ age rating for the difficulty of building it. It’s made up of 2,503 Lego pieces and is fully poseable, including with the sword accessory. You’ve also got a separate minifigure that can act as the driver in the chest cockpit. This set has multiple QR codes to make use of, for Mecha Team Leader and Mecha Team Shadow outfits. The Peely & Sparkplug’s Camp, Durrr Burger Restaurant, and Klombo sets will be available from June 1. The Mecha Team Leader set won’t be out until August 1, but you can pre-order it now from the Lego website. Kids will love this too, they just can’t afford it (Lego) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy

By AJ Dellinger Published April 24, 2025 | Comments (0) | A sign reads "Enforcement Zone Ahead" on a street in New York City where congestion pricing is enforced. © Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Sean Duffy, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, would like to kill New York City’s congestion pricing. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t think he has much of a case. We know that thanks to an apparent error on the part of the DOJ’s legal team, which uploaded and then removed an internal memo offering its opinion that the effort to kill the tolls is “unlikely” to win over the court. The 11-page document—uploaded Wednesday night to the docket for the ongoing lawsuit between New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Duffy’s DOT before being taken down—was originally sent on April 11 to DOT’s senior trial attorney Erin Hendrixson, advising her and her team to change their approach or risk losing their case. The DOT is defending Duffy’s decision to declare the project illegal. Yet the DOJ warned Duffy’s actions to dismantle the project “was contrary to law, pretextual, procedurally arbitrary and capricious, and violated due process”—none of which seems all that good if you’re tasked with defending the validity of the actions in court. As such, the DOJ’s attorneys concluded “It is very unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will uphold the Secretary’s decision on the legal grounds.” Given that the current position seems to be a loser, the Justice Department attorneys recommended DOT change tact and argue the toll doesn’t align with the agency’s goals and was canceled “as a matter of changed agency priorities”—a position that is more legally defensible under regulations set by the Office of Management and Budget. According to Bloomberg, that argument fell flat in DOT offices. Normally, all of that would happen behind the scenes, and the parties would grit their teeth and move forward with a unified front. But then the DOJ went ahead and uploaded the document by accident—a fact it confirmed Thursday morning in a letter filed with the court that acknowledged it had inadvertently uploaded a privileged document to the public docket and asked the court to permanently seal the document. “Although the contents of the document have been made public in news reporting, the document was filed in error and should not be considered part of the court docket,” they wrote. The court has instead opted to temporarily seal it, though it seems a little silly given how widely available the document is at this point. The DOJ copping to accidentally uploading the document is a bit surprising. Luckily, the DOT’s behavior is much more on brand. In a statement to Courthouse News, a spokesperson for the agency rhetorically asked “Are SDNY lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” That same unnamed spokesperson called the mistake “legal malpractice,” and said, “It’s sad to see a premier legal organization continue to fall into such disgrace.” At least someone is on the ball in this mess! Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Lucas Ropek Published April 23, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 21, 2025 By Matt Novak Published April 18, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 16, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published April 11, 2025 Joseph Winters, Grist Published April 10, 2025

La Roca Student Housing / A6ASave this picture!© Agnes Clotis Architects: A6A Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Agnes ClotisMore SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. We built the last piece of an overall project located in the Bordeaux sector of Brazza. After the silo parking and the « sports cathedral », the new student residence accentuates the dynamism and mix of uses of this new district. The proportions of the plot allowed us to go beyond the classic layout of batteries of rooms on either side of a corridor without natural light. On the contrary, the heart of the project here is an open-air patio around which circulation wraps. These passageways open onto the gaps between each building, framing the new urban landscape and promoting natural ventilation throughout. The rooms are therefore open and through, both towards the street and towards the planted and shaded patio. It constitutes a real island of freshness for the benefit of students.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The construction is sober and is manifested by its raw materiality. To save money and highlight the constructed material as a reflection of the hand of man, we have limited the finishing materials. This choice pushed the companions to take care of each of their interventions: the concrete floors are left raw, the walls are coated with lime by a simple projection, and the electrical networks are left exposed without a false ceiling. Very few common areas need to be heated or cooled, since they are in the open air, which greatly reduces the energy consumption of the building and facilitates its maintenance. The facades are characterized by the multiplication of a single window. We accentuated their depth to create a shaded area which protects the rooms from direct sunlight and makes the thin and slender built volumes even more abstract.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The roughness of the coating on the upper floors contrasts with the smooth and generously glazed surfaces of the ground floor. Here, the reception and work spaces are very open to the street. They are connected to each other by a deep access porch which opens onto the patio. The natural light is subdued and soft, encouraging the use of the stairs and wide landings. They could become places for neighbors to meet and share, supporting varied and inventive uses.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this office MaterialsGlassConcreteMaterials and TagsPublished on April 24, 2025Cite: "La Roca Student Housing / A6A" 24 Apr 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1028723/la-roca-a6a&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

Here’s a tip on how to make your camera movement feel more natural in Blender. More tips in the full video: https://youtu.be/gLNl8Lidzk0 #b3d #blender3d #3d #filmmaking #camera #cinematography

Full Video - https://youtu.be/6VBEplsg9AY In this Unreal Engine 5 tutorial, we'll be exploring the power of Rays Material MAGIC on Skeletal Mesh. Learn how to create stunning, realistic effects on your skeletal mesh assets using this advanced material technique. From setting up the material to tweaking the settings for maximum impact, we'll cover it all. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced UE5 developer, this video is perfect for anyone looking to take their project to the next level. So, let's dive in and uncover the magic of Rays Material on Skeletal Mesh in Unreal Engine 5! FAB - https://www.fab.com/sellers/CGHOW Whatsapp - https://bit.ly/3LYvxjK Patreon- https://www.patreon.com/Ashif Twitter - https://twitter.com/cghow_ 👉👉 If you Liked it - http://bit.ly/2UZmiZ4 Channel Ashif - http://bit.ly/3aYaniw Visit - https://cghow.com/ Gumroad - https://cghow.gumroad.com/ #cghow #UE5 #UE4Niagara #gamefx #ue5niagara #ue4vfx #niagara #unrealengine #realtimevfx

NASA's .50 caliber gas guns can fire at nearly 23,000 feet per second. Credit: Sierra Space / Trevor Thompson Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Sierra Space continues to put its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) habitat designs through the wringer. After multiple stress tests that filled the inflatable space station modules with water until they burst like balloons, the private startup has transitioned to shooting their latest prototypes with hypervelocity light gas guns. And like the previous trials, the intense tests served an important purpose—in this case, making sure the shields coating LIFE habitat modules will withstand any hazardous micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) impacts. The possibility of a large meteorite strike is a terrifying scenario with dramatic and deadly consequences, but a space station is far more likely to encounter run-ins with much smaller bits of space rock. Because of this, any current and future orbital structures must be designed to endure the occasional pummeling from tiny meteorites and space junk traveling at incredibly fast speeds. Sierra Space’s LIFE habitat modules are constructed with a unique softgoods material called Vectran made from chemically-woven synthetic liquid crystalline polymers. Although light and flexible when not in use, Vectran modules can inflate to form a rigid structure stronger than conventional steel. But those structures must also be resilient to MMOD strikes, and that requires designing an additional composite shield layer. For NASA and any would-be contractors like Sierra Space, this means a trip to its Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory (RHTL) at the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. RHTL operators have overseen around 600 test firings every year since the lab opened in 1993, and currently rely on four two-stage light gas guns placed in a vacuum-sealed chamber to simulate MMOD conditions in space. To achieve such cosmic speeds, NASA’s guns combine an initial stage relying on gunpowder that is subsequently boosted by a second stage of highly compressed hydrogen gas. One of Sierra Space’s shield options after being shot by NASA’s .50 caliber gas gun. Credit: Sierra Space Sierra Space’s recent tests involved a pair of .50 caliber guns built to replicate orbital debris impacts by firing projectiles at a speed of nearly 23,000 feet per second (fps). For reference, the fastest bullet on Earth—a .222 Remington round—travels at 3,167 fps. “Historically, whipple shields or stuffed whipple shields have been used,” said Sierra Space mechanical engineer Zack Masciopinto, referring to the metallic structures used on the International Space Station.  Masciopinto and colleagues are instead exploring flexible multi-shock shields. These use layers of ballistic fabrics to function as “sacrificial walls” that absorb the shock of projectiles while breaking them down into fragments. “By the time it gets to our rear wall, no damage is going to occur,” he explained. A view down the barrel of one of NASA’s two-stage gas guns. Credit: Sierra Space Sierra Space’s experiment involved two phases to determine the best ballistic fabric options. In the first phase, operators fired at various softgoods materials with .50 caliber guns kept at a fixed set of parameters to simulate MMOD events. After determining the most promising options, researchers then adjusted the guns to calculate an equation focused on a shield stack’s efficacy and performance. A total of 40 shots were fired at the materials to confirm the optimal configuration. Finally, the team subjected the final selection to another 19 shots in order to gather as much data as possible for future refinements. “After many tests… we were able to come away with something that performs really well and is super efficient,” said Masciopinto. Moving forward, Sierra Space will spend the next year-and-a-half finalizing its entire softgoods module system to submit for NASA certification. If all goes according to plan, future low-Earth orbit space stations could feature their inflatable LIFE habitats shielded from any pesky cosmic debris.