Month: January 2024

Enlarge / Anode and cathode "inks" are applied to carbon-fiber paper. (credit: GM/Honda)

BROWNSTOWN, Mich.—Today, a joint venture between General Motors and Honda Motor Company, named Fuel Cell System Manufacturing LLC (FCSM LLC), officially started producing its one and only product—a fuel cell system—on a commercial scale. FCSM officially began in January of 2017 with an initial investment between GM and Honda of $85,000,000. Now, the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) facility in Brownstown, Michigan, houses 80 employees and enough robots, clean rooms, and all sorts of high-tech equipment to make Ironman blush.

FCSM managing to build fuel cells quickly, reliably, and cost effectively is what's new here, not the fuel cells themselves. And, according to Tetsuo Suzuki, vice president of FCSM LLC, that proved the biggest challenge. "Our fuel cell system consists of more than 300 individual cells [307 in total], each cell is composed of very expensive materials. If there is a defect in even one cell, the entire stack would be unusable," Suzuki said. "Therefore, we designed all of our mass production processes with a zero-defect mindset." Adding, "We introduced quality control into every process."

This is the assembly line. (credit: GM/Honda)

How to build a fuel cell

More specifically, each cell consists of several parts, starting with two different liquids that FCSM calls "inks." One ink forms an anode, the other, a cathode. FCSM then pours each liquid onto a carbon-fiber paper, which it then heats to dry. It then precisely cuts these two different papers into shape and bonds them together to form what it calls a unitized electrode assembly, or UEA; the cathode on one side, the anode on the other. Both of the anode and cathode sheets are black, but the cathode sheet is gloss, and the anode sheet is matte.

Enlarge (credit: Charis Morgan; Getty Images)

Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI’s reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules.

But when WIRED requested those records last month, OpenAI said its policy had changed, and the company provided only a narrow financial statement that omitted the majority of its operations.

"We provide financial statements when requested,” company spokesperson Niko Felix says. “OpenAI aligns our practices with industry standards, and since 2022 that includes not publicly distributing additional internal documents.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Threats from malicious cyber activity are likely to increase as nation-states, financially motivated criminals, and novices increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence into their routines, the UK’s top intelligence agency said.

The assessment, from the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, predicted ransomware will be the biggest threat to get a boost from AI over the next two years. AI will lower barriers to entry, a change that will bring a surge of new entrants into the criminal enterprise. More experienced threat actors—such as nation-states, the commercial firms that serve them, and financially motivated crime groups—will likely also benefit, as AI allows them to identify vulnerabilities and bypass security defenses more efficiently.

“The emergent use of AI in cyber attacks is evolutionary not revolutionary, meaning that it enhances existing threats like ransomware but does not transform the risk landscape in the near term,” Lindly Cameron, CEO of the GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, said. Cameron and other UK intelligence officials said that their country must ramp up defenses to counter the growing threat.