In northeast England, halfway between Norfolk and Yorkshire, an AI-powered robot spends its days looking at strawberries. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

A human farmer can gauge a strawberry’s ripeness level by sight and weight, but the process involves putting each strawberry on a scale, which can be destructive and time-consuming. The robot can do the same job for up to 4 million strawberries a day by performing a simple scan of the fruit, undisturbed.

Behind the bot...FruitCast, the agricultural AI startup behind the robots, taught its bots how to do their jobs with data from V7 Labs, a London-based startup that helps AI companies automate the training-data process for models.

• Training can be one of the most labor-intensive parts of getting an AI system off the ground, since it often calls for not only time and resources, but also vetted and relevant data.

Since its 2018 debut, V7 has used its computer vision platform to train AI models to identify everything from lame cows to grapevine bunches, depending on the client’s needs. In 2020, V7 raised a $10 million total seed round, and so far, its clients include more than 300 AI companies, as well as academic institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard.

How it works

To create that training data, V7’s model starts off with a “continual learning” approach. That could begin with subject-matter experts in, say, horticulture, drawing boxes around images of fruit and classifying it by ripeness level (e.g., a “level-3 strawberry”). They then either accept or correct each of the model’s attempts to do the same.

After about 100 human-guided examples, a model is able to make relatively confident classifications, so it transitions into what its CEO Alberto Rizzoli calls a “co-pilot approach”—for any given choice, the AI provides its confidence score and the human makes corrections.

• The company finds human experts via a network of business process outsourcing companies, agencies, and consultants, which Rizzoli said can find a group of labelers on most topics within 48 hours.

Big picture: “The robots are kind of stupid until you put the intelligence on them,” Raymond Tunstill, CTO of FruitCast, which was spun off from the University of Lincoln’s food-tech institute, told Emerging Tech Brew.

Keep reading.—HF

At the start of this year, the prognosis for semiconductor production was…not great.

We had shortages of semiconductors, made worse by shortages of the machines necessary to make semiconductors, all exacerbated to an almost comical degree by a shortage of semiconductor-making talent. Lead times for chip orders hit a new record high of just under 26 weeks. Surely, things must have improved since then.

Right? Very wrong. In February, lead times ticked up even further to just over 26 weeks, per Susquehanna Research Group data cited by Bloomberg. And that data mostly reflects a period of time before Russia invaded Ukraine—and it entirely misses recent Covid-driven disruptions in China.

• Ukraine is the world’s main producer of neon, which is used by the laser-etching machines that turn slabs of silicon into chips. Following Russia’s invasion in late February, its two neon giants—which together account for around half of the world’s semiconductor-grade neon—halted production. There aren’t reliable estimates for how much neon the semiconductor industry has stocked up, but TSMC says it has “safety stocks” that will get it through the near term. Smaller chipmakers may not fare so well.
• China makes a lot of things, including semiconductors. And one of the major places in China that makes things is Shenzhen—a manufacturing hub with more than 17 million residents that was shut down in recent days due to surging Covid-19 cases. The Wall Street Journal reported that 40+ Taiwan-based semiconductor and electronics producers temporarily closed facilities in Shenzhen and nearby city Dongguan on Monday.

Looking ahead…A few weeks ago, President Biden urged Congress to pass a reconciled version of the semiconductor subsidy acts that have passed the House and Senate in different forms.

The bill in its most recent form, called the America COMPETES Act, could authorize $52 billion in subsidies for US chipmaking plants. That would be a transformational sum, but building semiconductor plants takes time—and even then, the semiconductor supply chain will remain exposed to events like pandemics and war.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

The mad dash toward the metaverse isn’t only about Big Tech, video games, and boatloads of advertising dollars. Startups such as Virbela and Gather are focusing specifically on creating virtual, metaverse-based offices for flesh-and-blood workers.

VR’s proponents believe the technology has the potential to overcome many of the challenges faced by distributed companies.

But, but, but…While beaming workers into virtual rooms could foster better collaboration than screen-sharing on Microsoft Teams, some privacy experts warn that there is currently little in the way of regulation when it comes to the metaverse, particularly regarding the collection of biometric data.

• As Kavya Pearlman, founder of the nonprofit Extended Reality Safety Initiative (XRSI), told the Washington Post, VR tech could enable employers to monitor eye-tracking and facial movements to analyze whether workers are “paying enough attention” to virtual presentations, and hiring managers could conceivably mine VR data in an attempt to assess a job applicant’s “cognitive load” during an interview.

Zoom out: Nevertheless, one recent survey suggests that a significant percentage of workers are willing to meet in the metaverse. The survey, from Lenovo and YouGov, queried “7,500 working adults across the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Singapore, China, and Japan,” and found that 44% of respondents are willing to work in the metaverse, and “believe that it can deliver benefits like productivity to the workplace.”

Click here to read the full story from HR Brew.—SB

Stat: Energy-related CO2 emissions hit an all-time high of 36.3 gigatonnes in 2021, after dipping in 2020, per the IEA. The main culprit: the increased burning of coal.

Quote: “NASA measured their mirrors with this Shack-Hartmann system, and they knew where to smooth and how to treat the mirror to make it more perfect, and we do the same thing.”—Christopher E. Starr, director of refractive and laser vision corrective surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, discussing the James Webb telescope’s influence on Lasik eye surgery

Read: How Rivian’s planned Georgia plant became a lightning rod.

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Batteries are a core part of the global push to decarbonize. How knowledgeable are you about how they get made?

Click here to take our quiz and find out.

When President Biden won the 2020 election, there was some credible speculation that the US could move to enact a sweeping, nationwide privacy law, à la the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But Congress has been, uh, busy, with other things since then, and tech companies have reportedly grown tired of waiting.

• The tech industry is now lobbying different states to pass “weak” privacy bills, Axios reports. In particular, it’s pushing for laws that are less stringent than California’s GDPR-modeled bill that went into effect just over two years ago.
• Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, and Maryland are among the states mulling privacy bills right now. Beyond California, Colorado and Virginia are the only other states that already have privacy regs in place.

Big picture: While the industry groups and lawmakers pushing for these bills claim they are sufficiently protective, independent analysts disagree.

• “What we’re seeing is this race to the bottom where industry is having a major influence on these bills,” Consumer Reports senior policy analyst Maureen Mahoney told Axios.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Seatrec’s self-replenishing batteries could make ocean research cheaper
• Without the James Webb telescope, Lasik could be stuck in stone age
• ‘It’s all coming at the worst time:’ How sky-high nickel price could hamper EV efforts