Good morning. In today’s newsletter: Extreme heat highlights the need for another kind of climate investment; AI puts the spotlight on shadow libraries; And Allie Wagner, co-founder of the new women’s soccer team, talks about money in women’s sports. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.,
As heat waves sweep three continents this week, getting outside even for a few minutes in Phoenix, Rome Or a city in northwestern china Sometimes this means risking heatstroke or worse. This weekend, nearly 80 million Americans are expected to experience a heat index — how the body feels temperature — of at least 105 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Extreme heat is fueling violent storms in Asia and flash floods in the United States. it’s taxing the power grid, rising health care costs And tourists are being messed with’ Holidays, And that’s ultimately going to impact everything — and the business of everything.
El Nino And a steady jet stream Record-breaking temperatures contributed. But for practical folks, extreme heat is the new normal.
“Most of our cities are not equipped to deal with this type of summer,” said Karl-Friedrich Schleusner, head of climate science at Climate Analytics, a policy institute in Berlin.
“We have to develop adaptation strategies” – and fast, he told DealBook.
The good news: Investors are spending big on climate projects. Scientists say global warming is helping to make periods of extreme heat more frequent, longer and more intense, and will continue to get worse until humans essentially stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. enterprise Investment in climate tech has accelerated since the post-Covid recovery began (although fell, overall with venture funding, in the first half of the year). and global public and private investment in climate finance, on projects ranging from decarbonizing architecture and transportation to developing renewable energy initiatives, to more than double from 2011 to 2021, to an estimated $850 billion, according to the Climate Policy Initiative, a non-profit climate advocacy group. (It will top $1 trillion with the passage of the Biden administration’s comprehensive climate bill, the European Union’s Green Deal and China’s low-carbon development initiative It was announced in the latest five year plan.)
Bela Tonknogi, US director of the Climate Policy Initiative, whose funders include the Bloomberg Foundation and the German government, said “enormous progress has been made” in developing green technologies and reducing their cost.
The less good news: Addressing the source of the problem is no longer enough, Its effect has come and it’s scorching hot major meteorological killer in most parts of the world. Some cities, homeowners and businesses are investing in low-cost hacks that could help make cities more tolerable in the summer, which absorb and re-emit more heat than natural landscapes. Painting roofs white or another reflective color can make structures cooler, making air-conditioning units up to 15 percent more energy-efficient, said Jen Gilbert, chief heating officer for Miami-Dade County, Florida. Homes and businesses have to be retrofitted to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and Miami-Dade has secured millions in federal funding for that plan. Planting trees also provides important shade to reduce the temperature on city streets.
Only about 7 percent of climate finance is focused on adaptation efforts, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. But more investors are taking an interest, Ms. Tonknoji said. last year, organization Partnered with Lightsmith GroupA private equity firm has created a $186 million Climate Fund to finance climate resilience projects that can help communities adapt to and cope with the extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent this summer.
“The reason people are investing more in climate adaptation is because they are really seeing the effects of climate change,” Ms Tonknogi said. – Bernhard Warner
In Case You Missed It
Microsoft is inching closer to sealing its $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard. FTC withdraw your domestic matter against takeover, and UK antitrust regulator Is reconsidering its decision to stop the deal. Microsoft also signed deal with sonyOne of the biggest opponents of the deal, by agreeing to keep Call of Duty on the Japanese firm’s PlayStation console for a decade after the acquisition closed.
Blackrock U-turn? The investment firm appointed Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi oil giant Aramco, to its board. The decision was criticized by some as hypocritical, given the public commitments made by BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink to advocate for ESG principles and decarbonization. But the US company said Nasser understood “the global energy industry and the drivers of change towards a low-carbon economy”.
A venture capital titan exits. After building a career as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, Michael Moritz is set to leave venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. The Welsh-American former journalist has backed companies including Google, Yahoo, YouTube and PayPal, earning him a reputation for spotting businesses that go on to become global giants and generate handsome profits.
“Barbenheimer” rocked the box office. The film business is expecting one of its best weekends in years. the reason? Two completely different movies that many people plan to watch one after the other: “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” According to the National Association of Theater Owners, an industry lobby group, consumers bought more than 200,000 tickets to see the double-feature.
AI brings the spotlight to shadow libraries
Large language models, or LLMs, are the artificial intelligence systems that power tools such as ChatGPT, developed using vast libraries of text. Books are considered particularly useful training material, as they are longer and (hopefully) well written. But authors are beginning to push back against their work being used in this way.
This week, over 9,000 authorsMargaret Atwood and James Patterson, called on technical executives to stop training their equipment on the writers’ work without compensation.
That campaign has shed light on a mysterious part of the internet: so-called shadow libraries, such as Library Genesis, Z-Library or Bibliotik, which are obscure repositories that store millions of titles, in many cases without permission – and are often used as AI training data.
AI companies have admitted in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI’s GPT-1 Bookcorpus, which includes over 7,000 unpublished titles from the self-publishing platform Smashwords.
To Train GPT-3, OpenAI said that about 16 percent of the data it used came from two “Internet-based book corpora” that it calls “Book 1” and “Book 2.” according to a Sued by comedian Sarah Silverman And according to two other authors against OpenAI, Books 2 is possibly a “grossly illegal” shadow library.
These sites have been under scrutiny for some time. The Authors Guild, which organized an open letter from writers to technical executives, Cited Studies In 2016 and 2017, text piracy resulted in a 14 percent drop in legitimate book sales.
try to block these sites have staggered. Last year, the FBI charged two people with the help of the Authors Guild charge to run z-library With copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering. But later, some of these sites were moved to the dark web and torrent sites, making them difficult to locate. And because many of these sites are run outside the United States and anonymously, actually punishing the operators is a difficult task.
Tech companies are getting more strict about the data they use to train their systems. This week, meta researchers published a Paper on Llama 2, the company’s LL.M., which describes using only a “new mix of data from publicly available sources.” one in Research paper on GPT-4 Published in March, OpenAI explicitly noted that it wasn’t saying anything about how to train the LL.M., citing “the competitive landscape” and “security considerations.”
A soccer star and co-founder at Money in Women’s Sports
The Women’s World Cup kicks off in New Zealand this week amid growing investor interest in women’s sports. as soon as the women’s league is drawn record crowdAnd larger (if not the same) sponsorships, investors pouring money into an industry they say is under-marketed and under-invested in — betting on growth as social media and streaming make the prime time spotlight less potent.
Two-time Olympic gold medalist Eli Wagner helped raise a record $53 million for Bay FC from a Sixth Street-led fund, A new Bay Area soccer team this year. DealBook spoke to her from New Zealand, where she is the lead analyst for the Women’s World Cup at Fox, about the business case behind these investments. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
sponsorship dollars Still not equal. Why so?
There are a lot more assets and a lot more teams you can partner with on the men’s side than the women’s.
But the other part of it is that the women’s game has been considered an undervalued asset for far too long. This is a huge opportunity for many of these brands to now get a discount for their target markets at less than what they get on the men’s side.
Two prior attempts to launch new women’s teams in the Bay Area fizzled out when fans did not turn up. Why will Bay FC, which you co-founded, be successful?
Because, although what the last few iterations of professional women’s soccer in the Bay Area did was incredible, it wasn’t really a commercial proposition. It was not viewed as something that was going to have an ROI and was something valuable and worth keeping as a long-term asset. This was seen as a moral cause.
And yet, media rights still lag far behind. Apple recently signed a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Major League Soccer. The National Women’s Soccer League deal with CBS, which was signed in 2020, was worth $4.5 million over three years. How important is parity to ROI?
Media is huge. This is one of the biggest levers you can pull in terms of revenue for the various clubs. What’s interesting about our times, however, is that the media game itself is changing. Would you like to level up from day one? Sure. But what is equal? How many years has MLS been in existence? How much do they watch their game? They went behind a paywall. Has it been challenging? Perhaps.
As the media game changes, I think we can be really creative, and because we’re a new league, we can be nimble in that regard.
Alex Ohanian calls for less investment in women’s sports “The Legacy of Gross Professional Incompetence, Is it just sexism, or something more subtle?
Culturally, we all grew up with certain narratives – some of them conscious, some unconscious. I think the biggest hurdle we have to overcome is that many people in the world believe in seeing things before believing them. Men were playing sports when women weren’t at a competitive level, right? And long ago it became an investment opportunity. And so we were just behind in that development.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you on Monday.
We need your feedback. Please email ideas and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
