good morning. In today’s newsletter: Extreme heat highlights the need for another kind of climate change investment. AI draws attention to shadow libraries. And Ally Wagner, co-founder of a new women’s soccer team, talks about money in women’s sports. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
A heat wave hit three continents this week, so in Phoenix, just step outside for a few minutes and you’ll see… Rome again northwestern china town Sometimes it was accompanied by heat stroke and more. According to the National Weather Service, about 80 million Americans are expected to see a heat index (the temperature that their bodies feel) of at least 105 degrees this weekend.
Extreme heat has caused severe typhoons in Asia and flash floods in the United States.strains the power grid push up medical costs and toy with tourists holiday. And it will ultimately affect everything and everyone’s business.
El Nino and stagnant jet stream contributed to record high temperatures. But for realists, extreme heat is the new normal.
“Most cities are ill-equipped to handle summers like this,” said Karl Friedrich Schreussner, head of climate science at the policy institute Climate Analytics in Berlin.
“We need to develop an adaptation strategy,” he told DealBook.
The good news: Investors are pouring billions into climate change projects. Scientists say global warming is making extreme heat periods more frequent, longer and more intense, and the situation will continue to get worse unless humans essentially stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.venture Since the post-coronavirus recovery began, investment in climate change technology has boomed (although fell, combined with total venture funding in the first half of the year). And global public and private investment in climate finance for projects ranging from decarbonizing buildings and transport to developing renewable energy initiatives has more than doubled from 2011 to 2021, to an estimated $850 billion. According to the Climate Policy Initiative, a non-profit climate advocacy group. (The Biden administration’s comprehensive climate-related legislation, the European Union’s Green Deal policy, China’s commitment to low-carbon development Announced in the latest five-year plan. )
Vera Tonkonogy, US director of the Bloomberg Foundation and the German government-funded climate policy initiative, said there had been “very significant progress” in developing green technologies and reducing their costs.
Not so good news: addressing the cause of the problem is no longer enough. The effects are showing, and the heat wave continues. A major weather-related killer in most parts of the world. Some cities, homeowners, and businesses are investing in low-cost hacks to make cities, which absorb and re-emit more heat than their natural landscapes, survive the summer. Painting a roof white or another reflective color lowers building temperatures and improves air conditioning efficiency by as much as 15 percent, says Jane Gilbert, Miami-Dade County’s chief thermal manager. Homes and businesses need to be renovated to keep them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and Miami-Dade has secured millions of dollars in federal funding for the project. Planting trees also adds shade, which is important for reducing street temperatures.
Only about 7% of climate finance is focused on addressing adaptation, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. But more investors are showing interest, Tongkonogyi said. Last year, the organization Partnership with Lightsmith Groupis a private equity firm that has invested in a $186 million Climate Fund designed to fund climate resilience projects to help communities adapt to and withstand the extreme weather events that frequently occur this summer.
“People are investing more in climate adaptation because they are seeing the impacts of climate change firsthand,” Tonkonoghi said. — Bernhard Warner
in case you missed
Microsoft is nearing a $69 billion deal with Activision Blizzard. FTC dismissed an internal lawsuit against the takeover UK antitrust regulator is reconsidering its decision to block the deal.Microsoft also signed Ceasefire with Sonyhas agreed to keep Call of Duty on the Japanese company’s PlayStation console for 10 years after the acquisition closes, making it one of the biggest opponents of the deal.
Black Rock U-turn? The investment firm has appointed Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi oil giant Aramco, to its board. The decision was criticized by some as hypocritical given that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink had publicly committed to advocating ESG principles and decarbonisation. But U.S. companies said Nasser understood “the drivers of the global energy industry and the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
Venture capital giant exits. Michael Moritz is leaving venture capital firm Sequoia Capital after a career as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors. A Welsh-American ex-journalist, he helped companies like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and PayPal, and gained a reputation for finding companies that would later become global giants and making huge profits.
‘Babenheimer’ rocks the box office. The film industry is gearing up for what is expected to be one of the best weekends in years. reason? He has two very different movies that many people will be watching in quick succession: Barbie and Oppenheimer. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, an industry lobby group, consumers have purchased more than 200,000 tickets to see the double feature.
AI Brings Attention to Shadow Libraries
Large Language Models (LLM), the artificial intelligence systems that power tools like ChatGPT, are developed using vast text libraries. Because books are long and (hopefully) well-written, they are considered particularly useful training materials. But authors are beginning to object to this use of their work.
this week, Over 9,000 authorsMargaret Atwood, James Patterson and others have called on tech executives to stop training their tools on writers’ work without pay.
This campaign shines a spotlight on the darkest corners of the Internet. So-called shadow libraries such as Library Genesis, Z-Library, and Bibliotik are obscure repositories that store millions of titles, often without permission, and often used as AI training data.
AI companies admit in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI’s GPT-1 Trained with BookCorpus. BookCorpus includes over 7,000 of his unpublished titles collected from the self-publishing platform Smashwords.
To Train GPT-3OpenAI said about 16% of the data it used came from two “Internet-based book corpora” called “Books1” and “Books2”.according to Lawsuit by comedian Sarah Silverman Books2 is most likely a “severely illegal” shadow library, given the opposition of the other two authors to OpenAI.
These sites have been monitored for some time. The Authors Guild, which organized the author’s open letter to tech executives, citation research In 2016 and 2017, it was suggested that text piracy reduced sales of legitimate books by as much as 14 percent.
Efforts to Shut Down These Sites I had a hard time. Last year, the FBI filed charges against the two with the help of the Writers Guild. Accused of running Z-Library Copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, etc.But then some of these sites migrated to the dark web Things like torrent sites are getting harder to track. And since many of these sites operate anonymously outside the United States, actually punishing their operators is a difficult task.
Tech companies are becoming tight-lipped about the data used to train their systems. This week, the meta researchers published the following paper: Paper on Rama 2, the company’s LLM describes using only “new combinations of data from publicly available sources.”and Research paper on GPT-4 In a paper published in March, OpenAI clarified that it did not reveal anything about how it trained its LLMs, citing a “competitive environment” and “security considerations.”
Soccer star and co-founder talking about money in women’s sports
The Women’s World Cup kicked off in New Zealand this week on the back of growing investor interest in women’s sport.When the women’s league draws record congestion, and with larger (if not equal) sponsorships, investors are pouring money into an industry that claims the market is undervalued and underinvested. It’s betting on growth as social media and streaming weaken the idiosyncratic power of the primetime spotlight.
Two-time Olympic gold medalist Ally Wagner helped raise a record $53 million for Bay FC from a foundation led by Sixth Street. A new soccer team will be born in the Bay Area this year. DealBook spoke with the New Zealand native, Fox’s lead analyst for the Women’s World Cup, about the business case behind these investments. Conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
sponsorship fee still not equal. why is that?
There are far more assets and teams to partner with on the men’s side than on the women’s side.
But the other side is that women’s sports have been underrepresented for too long. For many of these brands, it’s a great opportunity to gain greater recognition in their target market, perhaps at a discounted price to what they’re getting on the men’s side.
Two previous efforts to launch a new women’s team in the Bay Area were canceled due to lack of fans. Why is Bay FC, which you co-founded, so successful?
Because while what women’s professional football has done in the Bay Area so far has been incredible, it wasn’t really a business proposition. It wasn’t considered because there was going to be an ROI, which is valuable and worth keeping as a long-term asset. This was seen as a moral cause.
But media rights still lag far behind. Apple recently signed a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Major League Soccer. The contract between the Women’s National Soccer League and CBS, signed in 2020, was worth $4.5 million over three years. How important is equivalence to your ROI?
Media is huge. This is one of the biggest instruments in terms of revenue for various clubs. But what’s interesting about our timing is that the media game itself is changing. Want to be equal from day one? Of course. But what is equality? How long has MLS been around? How much attention do they get for their sport? They went to the other side of the paywall. Was it hard? probably.
I think we can be really creative as the media game changes, and we’re a new league, so I think we can be nimble in that regard.
Alex Ohanian says underinvestment in women’s sports “Legacy of significant business incompetence”’ Is it just sexism, or is it something more nuanced?
Culturally, we all grew up with certain stories. Some are conscious, some are unconscious. I think the biggest hurdle we’ve had to overcome is that many people in the world believe that you should see things before you believe them. Men played sports long before women were competitive, right? And long before it became an investment opportunity. And we were just behind in that evolution.
thank you for reading! see you on monday.
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