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Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Could robotics and timber tackle Britain's housing challenges?
By Suban Abdulla LONDON (Reuters) -Gigantic robot arms controlled by artificial intelligence glide around a vast factory in Oxfordshire, England, making building frames from timber, one of the world's oldest construction materials. With the British government committed to building 300,000 new homes a year, some housebuilders say that the combination of technology and green materials could help them to overcome challenges from skills shortages to environmental targets. Shop Top Mortgage Rates Personalized rates in minutes Your Path to Homeownership A quicker path to financial freedom England lags many similar economies in terms of the share of housing accounted for by timber-framed homes. Britain as a whole, meanwhile, is among the slowest adopters of robotics, especially in construction, according to the National Robotarium research institute at Heriot-Watt University. "We're seeing more major housebuilders and small and medium-sized builders embracing timber as a way to ... overcome the skills and carbon challenge," said Alex Goodfellow, CEO of Donaldson Timber Systems (DTS). His business makes timber-frame structures for homes and commercial buildings, including walls, floors and roofs, then sends them to housebuilders for assembly. Its automated production makes for less labour-intensive housebuilding and provides a faster, cheaper and more sustainable alternative to bricks, stone or concrete blocks, the company says. A study by construction surveyors and consultancy Rider Levett Bucknall showed that building with timber is 2.8% cheaper than with masonry. FASTER CONSTRUCTION The DTS factory in Witney, near Oxford in southeast England, makes timber panelling for about 100 homes a week with designs entered digitally using artificial intelligence, reducing the need for paper drawings. DTS says its robotics and lasers enable it to produce pre-assembled sections builders can put together quickly on site. The technology reduces the time needed to build a home by about 10 weeks compared with traditional materials, Goodfellow says. Yet barriers remain to any significant increase in timber homes in England. Amit Patel at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said the material is not commonly used in England because of difficulties in securing warranties for timber buildings owing to durability concerns. Barratt Homes tried to revive timber usage in the 1980s, but sales were undermined by potential rot and fire vulnerabilities. Andrew Orriss of the Structural Timber Association says that such concerns have been addressed by current building regulation and the STA's fire safety guide. He says that the off-site timber construction sector could help to deliver about a third of the government's target of 300,000 new homes per year - a level not achieved in England since the 1970s. Official government figures show that almost 200,000 new homes were built in England in 2023/24 and the Structural Timber Association said that approximately 40,500 of those were timber-frame homes. Builders including Vistry and Taylor Wimpey have opened or plan to open their own timber-frame manufacturing factory while Bellway plans to use timber in a third of its housing projects by 2030. Reduced environmental impact is another benefit touted by companies. GREENER AND LEANER? Simon Park, head of sustainability at Bellway, said timber absorbs and stores more carbon than it emits and that Bellway's analysis shows breeze blocks - made from concrete and known as cinder blocks in the U.S. - are the biggest carbon emitters among common building materials. Countering that, however, is the origin of the raw materials. About 80% of timber used in the UK is imported, mainly from European countries, while roughly 20% of its brick supply is imported. Concerns also remain over mortgage availability for timber homes, which is likely to improve if the government signals a move towards timber construction, said Riz Malik, mortgage broker at independent financial adviser R3 Wealth. An ageing workforce, meanwhile, highlights the need for more robotics. About a fifth of construction workers in the UK are over 50, according to the Home Builders Federation, with 25% of those set to retire in the coming decade. The government pledged 40 million pounds ($54 million) in June for robotics adoption hubs across various sectors, but Maurice van Sante, senior economist for construction at bank ING, says Britain's construction industry is far behind other countries in robotics use. ING estimates that there were 1.5 robots for every 10,000 construction workers in Europe in 2023, against 0.6 in the U.S. and 0.5 in the UK. As well as filling labour shortages directly, robotics opens up other employment opportunities, says DTS manufacturing director Frank O'Reilly, adding that the company has attracted more interest from tech-savvy younger workers since the factory's introduction of automation and robotics. "It (the technology) encourages young people to consider this as a career," he said. ($1 = 0.7433 pounds) Errore nel recupero dei dati Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati
Fast Company
27 minutes ago
- Fast Company
What is the reverse-acquihire?
It's not uncommon for large companies to acquire startups primarily for their talent rather than their product. Acquihires, as they are called, allow big companies to gain talented employees, while bypassing traditional methods of hiring. However, as the AI talent wars have heated up, major companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have been engaging in reverse-acquihires at AI startups. That is, they are swooping in to hire star talent and license technology, discarding the rest by the wayside. The tech giants gain talent while sidestepping the need for government approval and antitrust scrutiny that would happen if they bought the company outright. The remaining employees are left to flounder in the husk of their former company. By Bloomberg's count there have been six since last March, and as the AI talent wars continue, we're likely to see more. 6. Google DeepMind and Windsurf In July 2025, Google's DeepMind division hired Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and cofounder Douglas Chen, along with other key members of their R&D team. The $2.4 billion deal also included Windsurf technology. Google did not take a stake or any controlling interest in the startup. The deal came after Windsurf was nearly sold to OpenAI in what was set to be a $3 billion deal. The Windsurf employees whom Google did not hire went from expecting to be part of OpenAI to being left behind at a company with no leaders. In a surprise twist Windsurf was quickly acquired by AI coding startup, Cognition. Still, the story doesn't have a happy ending. Shortly afterwards, Cognition laid off 30 members of Windsurf's team and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 TechCrunch reported. 5. Meta and Scale AI This June, Meta finalized a deal with data labeling company Scale AI. Meta acquired a group of its top engineers, including founder Alexandr Wang, and took a 49% stake in the company, for a $15 billion price tag. 'As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,' a Meta spokesperson said. A month later, Scale laid off 14% of its workforce. Interim CEO Jason Droege said the company plans to focus on its government and enterprise businesses going forward. 4. Google and In August 2024, Google also struck a deal with chatbot startup hiring its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, as part of a $2.7 billion deal. 'We're excited to announce that we've entered into an agreement with Google that will allow us to accelerate our progress,' said in a statement at the time. The statement also explained that the startup would grant a nonexclusive license to the tech giant for its LLM technology. In the wake of the reverse-acquihire, has shifted to a cheaper business model. Instead of training LLMs, it simply develops AI characters. Interim CEO Dominic Perella told Bloomberg: 'We were left much better positioned than some folks,' pointing out that for a reverse-acquihire is doing well. 3. Amazon and Covariant In August 2024, Amazon hired robotics company Covariant's three founders (Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel, and Rocky Duan) as well as about a quarter of the staff. They also received a nonexclusive license to Covariant's robotic foundation models. According to a whistleblower, Amazon paid $380 million, which is much higher than $119.5 million, which is when deals need to be reported to the FTC. The Washington Post reported that according to the whistleblower's filing, Covariant's current CEO, Ted Stinson, said if Amazon had bought the company outright, the deal would have been killed by antitrust authorities. According to the whistleblower, the deal restricts which licenses Covariant can sell without paying a fee to Amazon, hobbling its ability to grow. The whistleblower's filing said Covariant was only expected to last for a year after the deal went through. 2. Amazon and Adept Similarly, in June 2024, Amazon hired CEO David Luan and most of the AI startup Adept's 100-person team in a deal that also included licensing the startup's technology. At the time, Adept, which had raised $400 million, was developing AI agents to do software tasks, and the deal came before it had launched a product. Post-deal a blog post from Adept seemed to suggest that the company was now low in fund and needed to shift to a cheaper business model. 'Continuing with Adept's initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would've required spending significant attention on fundraising…' the post stated. 'Adept will now focus entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI, which will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure.' In December 2024, Amazon announced it was launching a new lab led by David Luan that would build AI agents that can 'handle complex workflows.' Only around 20 employees remained at Adept after the Amazon deal. Bloomberg noted only four people currently list Adept as their employer on LinkedIn. 1. Microsoft and Inflection Microsoft kicked off the reverse acquihire trend last March when it agreed to pay chatbot startup Inflection about $653 million in a deal that effectively gutted the startup. The move included hiring founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonya and most of Inflection's staff. Around $620 million was for nonexclusive licensing rights to Inflection's AI models, and a $33 million payment for Inflection to waive any legal claims related to the hiring of its staff. Inflection had raised $1.3 billion in June 2023. However, Bloomberg noted CEO Suleyman was worried about the company's ability to raise enough funds to stay viable given the size of its competition. The deal triggered a FTC investigation to determine whether it was designed to avoid antitrust review while allowing Microsoft control over Inflection. Inflection is still in operation, but has changed course to focus from building new AI models to working on AI in the enterprise space. Sean White, a former Mozilla executive, became the new CEO. White told Bloomberg that Inflection is still in rebuilding mode: 'The ship, over time, was slowly replaced, board by board, piece by piece, right? But it was still always the same ship,' he said.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ethereum ETF Flows in August Blow Past Post-Merge Token Issuance
Spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds are generating outsized inflows in the U.S. as the asset's price surges toward all-time highs, offsetting years of ETH issuance. So far this month, spot Ethereum ETFs have attracted $2.3 billion—the equivalent of 500,000 ETH—while the network has issued 450,000 ETH since the so-called merge occurred in September 2022, according to crypto data providers CoinGlass and Ultrasound Money. The "merge" was a major network upgrade that ended Ethereum's energy-intensive mining requirements. Invest in Gold American Hartford Gold: #1 Precious Metals Dealer in the Nation Priority Gold: Up to $15k in Free Silver + Zero Account Fees on Qualifying Purchase Thor Metals Group: Best Overall Gold IRA The seven-day trading stretch has also coincided with the products' best day on record, with investors allocating $1 billion across nine spot Ethereum ETFs on Monday. Although Ethereum treasury companies like BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming have recently stepped into the spotlight as a new source of demand for Ethereum, accumulating billions of dollars' worth of ETH at a rapid pace, they have played more of a complementary role in recent months, according to analysts at investment bank Standard Chartered. While penciling in a year-end price target of $7,500 for Ethereum, the analysts noted that Ethereum treasury firms have bought 2.3 million ETH, or 1.9% of the asset's circulating supply, since June, while ETFs have attained 3.8% of ETH's circulating supply over the same period. 'Based on publicly announced plans by the treasury companies, we think their ETH buying is likely to continue, and we see potential for Ethereum treasury companies to increase their holdings to 10% of all circulating ETH,' the analysts added. Ethereum Could Soar to $25,000 by 2028: Standard Chartered Ethereum changed hands around $4,740 on Tuesday while showing a 5% increase over the past day, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Despite hitting $4,000 in December, the asset has yet to eclipse its pandemic-era high near $4,900 in 2021—though this is the closest it's been since late that year. At the time, Ethereum's consensus model mirrored Bitcoin's, where computers constantly crunched complex calculations to keep the network secure and reward miners with newly issued ETH. That changed in 2022, when staking became a core part of how Ethereum keeps itself secure. Network participants are rewarded with ETH for participating in the process of validating transactions through staking. Ethereum's supply is not fixed at 21 million like Bitcoin's, but increases are theoretically capped at 1.5% per year, if all Ethereum were ever staked. In practice, Ethereum's supply has increased only 0.13% since the merge in September 2022. On average, around 683,000 Ethereum—worth $1.8 billion, based on current prices—is burned each year, or removed from circulation, as a result transaction fees for users on the network, who are either moving cryptocurrencies or engaging with autonomous, smart contract-powered apps. With the recent passage of stablecoin legislation, some analysts are expecting a dramatic surge of dollar-pegged tokens on Ethereum, as Wall Street firms introduce their own products. 'Stablecoins account for 40% of all blockchain fees today, and Ethereum is home to just over half of all stablecoins,' Standard Chartered analysts wrote. 'We project that the stablecoin sector will grow [...], which would have a significant direct impact on fees.' Myriad users believe that Ethereum will not only hit an all-time high in 2025, but continue on to hit $5,000 for the first time, currently giving it a nearly 87% chance of happening. (Disclosure: Myriad Markets is a product of DASTAN, Decrypt's parent company.)
