Google plans to buy electricity from next-generation nuclear reactors. It announced the deal yesterday, which it says is the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase electricity from advanced small modular reactors (SMRs) that are still under development.

Google inked the deal with engineering company Kairos Power, which plans to get its first SMR up and running by 2030. Google agreed to purchase electricity from “multiple” reactors that would be built through 2035.

Google needs a lot more clean energy to meet its climate goals while pursuing its AI ambitions. New nuclear technologies are still unproven at scale, but the hope is that they can provide carbon pollution-free electricity while solving some of the problems that come with traditional nuclear power plants.

Back in 2020, Google set a goal of running on carbon-free energy around the clock by 2030. It also committed to slashing its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. And yet, since 2019, its total greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48 percent, according to its latest environmental report.

“Obviously, the trajectory of AI investments has added to the scale of the task needed,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Nikkei earlier this month. “We are now looking at additional investments, be it solar, and evaluating technologies like small modular nuclear reactors, etc.”

Other big tech companies with climate goals are trying to solve the same problem with nuclear energy. In March, Amazon Web Services announced its purchase of a data center campus powered by a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Microsoft signed an agreement in September to help revive and purchase power from the shuttered Three Mile Island plant.

What sets Google apart with this deal is that it’s turning to next-generation reactors rather than traditional nuclear power plants. SMRs are roughly one-tenth to one-quarter the size in comparison. Their size and modular design are supposed to make them cheaper and easier to build and site than their larger predecessors. And unlike solar and wind energy, which fluctuate with the weather and time of day, nuclear power plants can generate electricity around the clock. Even with new reactor designs, however, there are still environmental and health concerns when it comes to mining and enriching uranium for reactors and storing radioactive waste.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified a design for a small modular reactor for the first time last year. Experts tell The Verge they expect the first SMRs to connect to US power grids in the early 2030s at the earliest, and big tech’s interest in nuclear energy seems to be giving the industry a boost.

Google says its deal with Kairos Power would eventually help bring up to 500MW of carbon-free energy to power grids in the US. Kairos broke ground on its first demonstration reactor in Tennessee in July.

“Having an agreement for multiple deployments is important to accelerate the commercialization of advanced nuclear energy by demonstrating the technical and market viability,” Jeff Olson, Kairos Power vice president of business development and finance, said in a press release.

Android 15 is now rolling out to Pixel devices, bringing them new privacy features, security tools, and improvements for foldables and tablets. The operating system first launched last month through the Android Open Source Project, but at the time, it wasn’t yet available on Pixel phones and tablets — or other major Android devices. Google announced today that it’s finally coming to Pixels alongside a series of Pixel feature drops.

One major new feature in Android 15 is the ability to make a “private space” for apps you might want to keep hidden from other people who get ahold of your phone. (Google gives the examples of social, dating, or banking apps.) Apps you put in the private space won’t show up in your recent apps, notifications, or settings, according to Google. To access the space, you’ll have to provide additional authentication, and you can even “hide the existence of private space from view on your phone,” Google says.

On foldables and tablets, Android 15 will let users pin and unpin the taskbar so they can choose to have somewhat easier access to their apps. And if you have certain apps that you frequently use side by side, you can set up an app pairing and access that pairing from one icon.

Many devices running Android — not just Android 15 — will also be getting Theft Detection Lock, which lets your phone automatically lock itself if it detects (with the help of AI) that it has been stolen. Google is also adding a feature called Remote Lock that lets you lock your phone using another Android phone, your phone number, and a “simple security check.” The company says that “most” devices on Android 10 and newer will get these features, and some people already have them.

If you want to learn more about what’s included in Android 15, we have a post with a full rundown of the biggest features.

Google is also starting to roll out a new Pixel feature drop for October that includes Night Sight for Instagram for taking better low-light photos and more controls for Audio Magic Eraser. In “the next few weeks,” Google is also adding a feature that lets you move media from a Pixel Tablet to a Pixel phone by holding the devices next to each other.

Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association.

It's a common refrain from dentists, but it's false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it's been that way for well over a decade.

The association's guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don't have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: "Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed," the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.

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The Internet Archive has brought its Wayback Machine back online "in a provisional, read-only manner" as it continues to recover from attacks that took the site down last week, founder Brewster Kahle said in a post last night. The archive.org home page points users to the now-functional Wayback Machine but notes that other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.

Kahle said it was "safe to resume" the Wayback Machine's operations, but that it "might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again." The Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature that lets users capture a webpage manually is currently unavailable. The related openlibrary.org book-preservation website was still offline today.

Founded in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive crawls the web to preserve pages that are publicly available and has captured 916 billion web pages so far. It has a staff of 150 people and also provides free access to many videos, audio files, and books (though it was recently forced to delete 500,000 books after losing a copyright case).

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A New York judge recently called out an expert witness for using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot to inaccurately estimate damages in a real estate dispute that partly depended on an accurate assessment of damages to win.

In an order Thursday, judge Jonathan Schopf warned that "due to the nature of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and its inherent reliability issues" that any use of AI should be disclosed before testimony or evidence is admitted in court. Admitting that the court "has no objective understanding as to how Copilot works," Schopf suggested that the legal system could be disrupted if experts started overly relying on chatbots en masse.

His warning came after an expert witness, Charles Ranson, dubiously used Copilot to cross-check calculations in a dispute over a $485,000 rental property in the Bahamas that had been included in a trust for a deceased man's son. The court was being asked to assess if the executrix and trustee—the deceased man's sister—breached her fiduciary duties by delaying the sale of the property while admittedly using it for personal vacations.

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For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.

The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable mathematical reasoning capabilities. "Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning," the researchers hypothesize based on these results. "Instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

Mix it up

In "GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models"—currently available as a pre-print paper—the six Apple researchers start with GSM8K's standardized set of over 8,000 grade-school level mathematical word problems, which is often used as a benchmark for modern LLMs' complex reasoning capabilities. They then take the novel approach of modifying a portion of that testing set to dynamically replace certain names and numbers with new values—so a question about Sophie getting 31 building blocks for her nephew in GSM8K could become a question about Bill getting 19 building blocks for his brother in the new GSM-Symbolic evaluation.

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