The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on Monday, outlining what needs to be done during this rapidly closing window of opportunity to mitigate global warming.

The nearly 3,000-page document, which is part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment of climate-change scenarios, points out that while the world has made some progress in slowing emissions growth, there is an urgent need to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions over the next few years. Here’s a good summary of the overall report.

Big picture: While the assessment called unproven tech, like carbon removal, essential to achieving net zero, it also showed that many of the tools needed to make significant progress are already available.

• Several existing solutions currently have the potential to provide cost savings while reducing emissions.
• That list includes: wind and solar, energy efficiency and demand management tools, lower-emissions transit options, such as public transportation, bikes and e-bikes, and more fuel-efficient cars, trucks, ships, and planes.

Zoom in: One graphic from the report stood out as most important to Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a member of the working group for the IPCC report that was released over the summer.

• “A lot of the time, we talk about climate change like there’s a silver bullet,” Hausfather said.
• “This diagram really illustrates that it’s not a silver bullet. It’s a silver buckshot. There’s no single solution that’s even one-tenth of the entire thing. It’s really a huge variety of technological—and behavioral—changes across a variety of different sectors that’s needed to put us on the path toward net-zero emissions.”

We’d include the chart here...but it’s so big it would break the newsletter. Click here to see the chart and read more about its importance.—GD

“Roger has five tennis balls. He buys two more cans of tennis balls. Each can has three tennis balls. How many tennis balls does he have now?”

For you, this may have triggered stress flashbacks to grade-school math quizzes. But for Google’s brand-new large language model, it’s a key part of training.

This week, Google introduced the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), its new AI tool designed to answer questions, reason through arithmetic questions, and even explain jokes.

• According to Google’s performance report, it may be the most advanced model of its kind on a number of benchmarks, including tasks in reasoning and logical inference.

Quick recap: Large language models (LLMs) are an increasingly popular—and controversial—AI tool used for all things natural language processing (think: summarizing text, participating in dialogue, writing articles, and more).

• Generally speaking, the more parameters a model is trained on, the higher its performance—and the more capable it is of reflecting biases learned from training data.
• These types of models have also become less expensive and faster to train in recent years.

Bottom line: With 540 billion parameters, Pathways isn’t Google’s largest language model—the company’s 1.6-trillion-parameter model, announced last year, owns that spot.

But PaLM is a headliner in other ways, performing better than comparable LLMs (think: GPT-3 and LaMDA) in reasoning tasks, multi-step arithmetic, and multilingual tasks like translation.

Read more about PaLM here.—HF

As was presaged by a narrative-violating drop in February venture funding, Q1 2022 was the first quarter in which global VC funding contracted in well over a year, per Crunchbase data.

• Last quarter, VCs invested $160 billion, down 13% from Q4 2021, in which a record-breaking $184 billion was spent.

Important caveat: Funding cooled off on a quarter-to-quarter basis, but it’s still up 7% year over year from Q1 2021. Also, the last quarter’s total of $160 billion is equal to almost half of the $335 billion VCs invested in the *full year* of 2020. So, take the slowdown with a grain of megaround-sized salt.

Here are three of the biggest emerging tech funding rounds that stood out to us last month:

Yuga Labs: The company that brought really expensive monkey cartoons (read: Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs) into the world raised a $450 million *seed round* in March.

• Yuga Labs was founded in, uh, 2021, and is already valued at $4 billion. Zoom out a bit: Bored Apes are among the most popular in the $17.6 billion NFT world.

Source Global: Usually a startup would not want to be described as “pulling things out of thin air,” but it’s different for Source, which builds “hydropanels” that extract potable water from vapor.

• The company raised $150 million last month to continue building out and selling its tech, which has been installed in 52 countries so far. Its panels cost ~$2,000 each and work by collecting water vapor and using sunlight to help liquify that vapor.

Volocopter: With a $170 million Series E, the German electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft (eVTOL) company officially became a unicorn in March. The company is hoping to be first to market with a commercial air-taxi service, aiming to begin service in 2024.

• It’s not the only eVTOL-maker with that goal.

Click here to view on site.—DM

Stat: Nearly half (49%) of Americans are at least somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of living in a “smart city,” according to an Axios-Momentive poll.

Quote: “Everybody is at a point where they’re hedging their bets.”—Eric Fuller, CEO of US carrier and trucking brokerage Xpress Enterprises, told Reuters about the autonomous trucking race

Read: A review of a new augmented-reality contact lens.

Peeps wanna know: How is your company reporting on its environmental impacts, social relationships, and overall governance? Workiva can streamline this complex process for you. Read all about ESG reporting and how Workiva can help here.*

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Swarovski signed a deal with carbon-removal company Climeworks to make crystals with CO2 pulled from the air.
• Stanford engineers have created a solar panel that generates energy at night.
• Jack Dorsey is reportedly exploring a path to obtain seat on the Tesla board.
• Epic Games struck a metaverse partnership with Lego.

On Wednesday, we included a quick poll on a simple question: Given Hertz’s push into fleet electrification, would you pay more to rent an EV than a gas-powered vehicle?

Your answer: A pretty resounding no. By the numbers: More than half (55%) of respondents said flat-out no, while just ~21% said yes, and the remaining 24% of respondents said maybe. N=3,286 of Emerging Tech Brew readers.

FWIW, in December 2021, Barrons reported that Hertz was getting an estimated $100+ per day for Teslas, a $40 premium over its typical daily average of $60 per car.

• TBD if that trend holds up when the company has many more Teslas in its fleet, or if it will apply to its soon-to-be-added Polestar EVs as well.

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

• Can quantum computing fuel a leap in battery research?
• Report: AI investment more than doubled to $93.5 billion in 2021
• Europe’s top battery maker has $6 billion—and a plan to scale rapidly