National Presto: Q1 Earnings Snapshot
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — National Presto Industries Inc. (NPK) on Wednesday reported earnings of $7.6 million in its first quarter.
On a per-share basis, the Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based company said it had net income of $1.07.
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Hamilton Spectator
29 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Nova Scotia's offshore wind transmission line could cost $10 billion: premier
HALIFAX - It could cost between $5 billion and $10 billion to build a transmission line that would connect Nova Scotia's proposed offshore wind farms with the rest of the country, Premier Tim Houston says. The rough estimate follows his announcement last week that Nova Scotia wants to license enough offshore turbines over the next 10 years to produce 40 gigawatts of electricity — eight times more than what was originally planned. 'It's a concept,' Houston said after a cabinet meeting Thursday, referring to the Wind West project. 'It's a very powerful concept .... My objective, initially, was to capture the imagination of Nova Scotians.' For context on the size of Houston's ambitions, Nova Scotia, with just over one million people, requires 2.4 GW at peak demand. The Brussels-based Global Wind Energy Council issued a 2025 report saying China's offshore wind turbines were producing just under 42 GW as of last year. The council says the global offshore wind energy industry added 11 GW in 2023 and 8 GW in 2024. Houston went on to say the project would require 'hundreds' of wind turbines to be built in water about 100 metres deep, about 25 kilometres offshore. A renewable energy expert, however, said it will take far more turbines to generate 40 GW of reliable electricity, assuming that a peak capacity of 66 GW would be required. Sven Scholtysik, a research director at Net Zero Atlantic, said that based on the current industry standard of using 15 megawatt turbines, Wind West would require construction of more than 4,000 offshore turbines. Despite that big number, Scholtysik said there would be ample room for them amid the 19,500 square kilometres within the five 'wind energy areas' selected in January by an independent committee appointed by the federal and Nova Scotia governments. When asked how long it would take to build such an ambitious project, Scholtysik said it would be difficult to come up with an accurate timeline. 'When we look at how long it takes to build an offshore wind park, that 10-year number is about right,' said Scholtysik, who's research focuses on electricity, clean fuels and modelling. 'But that ambition to install 66 GW is likely going to require multiple projects, not one single project.' Tina Northrup, a lawyer with the East Coast Environmental Law Association, said Houston's 10-year time frame does not seem feasible, given the need for consultations and environmental studies. 'It would be unrealistic to have that much offshore wind infrastructure out into the water in a short period of time,' she said. 'We understand this to be a vision that might be realized decades into the future. It wouldn't be an all-at-once kind of thing.' As for Houston, he has said he floated the idea on June 2 to get the attention of Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has asked provincial and territorial leaders to submit bids for infrastructure projects to help Canada withstand the trade turmoil caused by U.S. President Donald Trump. 'I think Nova Scotians are pretty inspired by what's possible,' Houston said. 'This would change Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada and provide green, renewable energy that the world is looking for.' The Progressive Conservative premier has said he wants Ottawa to help cover the costs of Wind West, saying the excess electricity could supply 27 per cent of Canada's total demand. If his plan is successful, Nova Scotia would become an 'energy superpower' that no longer requires federal equalization payments, he said. 'We could get off of that transfer system over the next 20 years if we pursued the opportunities that are available to us.' Houston went on to say Nova Scotia's offshore is blessed with strong, remarkably steady winds. Scholtysik, whose research group gets most of its funding from provincial and federal governments, confirmed that the wind energy industry is well aware that Nova Scotia's offshore winds are among the strongest and most consistent in the world. A study from the wind energy research firm Aegir Insights, based in Denmark, found that Nova Scotia's offshore has a 'world-class wind resource,' with almost all areas recording consistent wind speeds between 9 and 11 metres per second. 'The consistent availability of good wind resources across the entire offshore territory means that wind speed will likely not be a restricting factor when it comes to siting offshore wind farms,' the 2020 study says. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 13, 2025 Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Los Angeles Times
32 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for ‘superintelligence' team
Meta is making a $14.3 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The deal announced Thursday reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will 'substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship.' Meta will hold a 49% stake in the startup. Wang, though leaving for Meta with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale's board of directors. Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company's chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon. Zuckerberg's increasing focus on the abstract idea of 'superintelligence' — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company's name and investing billions into advancing virtual reality and related technology. It won't be the first time since ChatGPT's 2022 debut sparked an AI arms race that a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division. Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as 'one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' When he returned to France's annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team's plan has 'always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it.' 'It's just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this,' he said. LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.' O'Brien writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Drivers seek digital payment options
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. Drivers would prefer to pay road tolls with digital tools like PayPal (55%), Apple Pay (50%), Venmo (33%), Google Pay (32%) and Cash App (30%), according to results of fintech firm PayNearMe's survey released Tuesday. While 48% of cash-paying drivers use cash for budgeting reasons, 17% of cash-payers don't have bank accounts, and 12% aren't credit or debit cardholders, according to the February survey of 1,548 U.S. drivers. The results of the survey also showed that 45% of respondents said they are open to Scan-to-Pay QR codes, a press release from the company said. The new survey from PayNearMe, the Santa Clara, California-based payments processor, offers some insight into the payment challenges drivers face when passing through toll roads. About three in ten drivers (28%) said they couldn't pay tolls with their desired payment method. Meanwhile, 30% of drivers who missed payments said a digital wallet option wasn't available to them, the survey noted. 'Digital wallets are essential to how consumers manage their money,' Anne Hay, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of PayNearMe, said in a statement. 'Our research found that 51% of consumers store funds directly in payment apps, effectively using them as alternative bank accounts.' For about a fifth of the consumers surveyed, a toll request turned into a violation during the past year and about half said it could have been avoided with easier payment options. The company estimated that toll systems lose out on $2.24 billion annually, and suggested that figure could be reduced by increasing payment options. 'When agencies don't accept digital wallets, they are missing payments drivers are ready to make,' Hay said. 'Consumers are storing money in these apps. Agencies need to meet them there.' PayNearMe has been enhancing its own payment capabilities. Last October, the company expanded its partnership with PayPal Holdings, allowing PayNearMe to grow its banking collaborations and offer more reliable services. As PayNearMe highlights the lack of digital wallet options, usage of the payment technology is expected to grow in the coming years. Use of digital payment options, including digital wallets, account-to-account payments and buy now, pay later providers, is expected to exceed $33.5 trillion by 2030, according to Worldpay's 10th global payments report. Recommended Reading PayPal leans on Venmo for growth Sign in to access your portfolio
