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Lucid’s electric vehicles will be able to plug into over 15,000 Tesla Superchargers in North America starting in 2025. The automaker is the latest entry in the growing list of companies pledging to support the North American Charging Standard (NACS), also known as the Tesla charging standard. Lucid will give customers access to a NACS adapter for its current vehicles, which are equipped with the Combined Charging System (CCS), in 2025. The company intends to start building NACS ports into its EVs within the same year, as well, so that newer models no longer need to use adapters.

Ford was the first automaker to announce this year that it was going to give its customers access to Superchargers after the White House convinced Tesla to share its charging network with vehicles from other companies. In the months after that, Mercedes, Volvo, Polestar, Honda, Toyota (and Lexus), BMW, Hyundai and Subaru revealed that they will also give their customers access to NACS adapters and will ultimately incorporate the standard into their vehicles over the next two years. 

As TechCrunch notes, Lucid vehicles use a 900-volt charging architecture, which became the basis of a Lucid Air promotion that called it the “fastest charging electric vehicle ever.” At the moment, most Superchargers are rated at around 500 volts, and that means charging times won’t be as fast as the company promises. That said, Tesla has started deploying V4 Superchargers that offer higher voltage charging in the US, and supporting NACS could convince potential customers in the region to purchase Lucid EVs. As company CEO Peter Rawlinson said, “[a]dopting NACS is an important next step to providing [its] customers with expanded access to reliable and convenient charging solutions for their Lucid vehicles.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lucid-evs-will-be-able-to-access-teslas-superchargers-starting-in-2025-055045292.html?src=rss 

There has been another twist in the WeWork saga as the office space rental company has filed for bankruptcy protection. Following reports last week that the company was expected to file for Chapter 11 protection, WeWork’s shares were halted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday. According to The New York Times, it described its bankruptcy filing as a “comprehensive reorganization” of its business. “As part of today’s filing, WeWork is requesting the ability to reject the leases of certain locations, which are largely nonoperational, and all affected members have received advanced notice,” the company told the publication in a statement. 

A number of factors played into WeWork’s fall, including trying to grow too fast in its early days. The company has attempted to cut costs in recent years (including by closing several co-working spaces in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns) while its revenue has grown. 

However, WeWork has been toiling in a real estate market that has felt the pinch of inflation and the rising costs of borrowing money. It has also been contending with another pandemic-accelerated change as millions more people are opting to work remotely instead of going to their company’s offices. In its most recent earnings report in August, WeWork said it had “substantial doubt” about its ability to remain operational.

WeWork first attempted to go public in 2019, though it withdrew plans for an initial public offering after investors expressed concerns over profitability and corporate governance. Its S-1 filing showed losses of over $900 million for the first half of 2019 and indicated that WeWork was on the hook for over $47 billion worth of lease payments — WeWork takes out long-term leases on office space and rents it to workers and companies on a short-term basis.

That fiasco led to Softbank, which at one point led an investment round into WeWork when it had a valuation of $47 billion, taking control of the company. Softbank pushed out co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann with an exit package that was said to be worth $445 million.

The business eventually went public in 2021 after it merged with a special-purpose acquisition company. WeWork shares cost more than $400 two years ago, but by Monday the price had dropped to under $1.

WeWork has made more attempts to steady the ship. In September, the company completed a reverse stock split. It said this was conducted to help it continue to comply with the $1 minimum share closing price required to stay listed on the NYSE.

Later that month, WeWork said it would try to renegotiate the vast majority of its leases. At the time, CEO David Tolley pointed out that the company’s lease liabilities amounted to over two-thirds of its operating income in the second quarter of this year.

On October 31, WeWork said it would withhold some interest payments — even though it had the cash to make them — in an attempt to improve its balance sheet. The company then entered a 30-day grace period before an event of default.

Meanwhile, Neumann has a new real estate venture, this time focused on residential rentals. It emerged last year that he had bought more than 3,000 apartments in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville. Flow, the company that will manage those properties, has reportedly received an investment of $350 million from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wework-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection-030708470.html?src=rss 

Facebook is no stranger to moderating and mitigating misinformation on its platform, having long employed machine learning and artificial intelligence systems to help supplement its human-led moderation efforts. At the start of October, the company extended its machine learning expertise to its advertising efforts with an experimental set of generative AI tools that can perform tasks like generating backgrounds, adjusting image and creating captions for an advertiser’s video content. Reuters reports Monday that Meta will specifically not make those tools available to political marketers ahead of what is expected to be a brutal and divisive national election cycle. 

Meta’s decision to bar the use of generative AI is in line with much of the social media ecosystem, though, as Reuters is quick to point out, the company, “has not yet publicly disclosed the decision in any updates to its advertising standards.” TikTok and Snap both ban political ads on their networks, Google employs a “keyword blacklist” to prevent its generative AI advertising tools from straying into political speech and X (formerly Twitter) is, well, you’ve seen it. 

Meta does allow for a wide latitude of exceptions to this rule. The tool ban only extends to “misleading AI-generated video in all content, including organic non-paid posts, with an exception for parody or satire,” per Reuters. Those exceptions are currently under review by the company’s independent Oversight Board as part of a case in which Meta left up an “altered” video of President Biden because, the company argued, it was not generated by an AI.

Facebook, along with other leading Silicon Valley AI companies, agreed in July to voluntary commitments set out by the White House enacting technical and policy safeguards in the development of their future generative AI systems. Those include expanding adversarial machine learning (aka red-teaming) efforts to root out bad model behavior, sharing trust and safety information both within the industry and with the government, as well as development of a digital watermarking scheme to authenticate official content and make clear that it is not AI-generated. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-reportedly-wont-make-its-ai-advertising-tools-available-to-political-marketers-010659679.html?src=rss