2025-10-08 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The Trump administration may cut funding for two major direct-air capture plants
The US Department of Energy appears poised to terminate funding for a pair of large carbon-sucking factories that were originally set to receive more than $1 billion in government grants, according to a department-issued list of projects obtained by MIT Technology Review and circulating among federal agencies.
One of the projects is the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, a facility that Occidental Petroleum’s 1PointFive subsidiary planned to develop in Kleberg County, Texas. The other is Project Cypress in Louisiana, a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom. Read the full story.
—James Temple
AI toys are all the rage in China—and now they’re appearing on shelves in the US too
Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children’s playthings with chatbots and voice assistants.
It’s a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts that the sector will surpass ¥100 billion ($14 billion) by 2030, growing faster than almost any other branch of consumer AI. But Chinese AI toy companies have their sights set beyond the nation’s borders. Read the full story.
—Caiwei Chen
2025 climate tech companies to watch: Pairwise and its climate-adapted crops
Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to grow crops across many parts of the world. Startup Pairwise is using CRISPR gene editing to develop plants that can better withstand adverse conditions.
The company uses cutting-edge gene editing to produce crops that can withstand increasingly harsh climate conditions, helping to feed a growing population even as the world warms. Last year, it delivered its first food to the US market: a less-bitter–tasting mustard green. It’s now working to produce crops with climate-resilient traits, through partnerships with two of the world’s largest plant biotech companies. Read the full story.
—James Temple
Pairwise is one of our 10 climate tech companies to watch—our annual list of some of the most promising climate tech firms on the planet. Check out the rest of the list here.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How to measure the returns on R&D spending
Given the draconian cuts to US federal funding for science, it’s worth asking some hard-nosed money questions: How much should we be spending on R&D? How much value do we get out of such investments, anyway?
To answer that, in several recent papers, economists have approached this issue in clever new ways. And, though they ask slightly different questions, their conclusions share a bottom line: R&D is, in fact, one of the better long-term investments that the government can make.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How OpenAI and Nvidia are fueling the AI bubble
Experts fear their circular deals could be artificially inflating the market. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI will pay for AMD’s chips using, err, AMD’s own stock. (TechCrunch)
+ The Bank of England is concerned about AI inflating tech stocks. (FT $)
+ What comes next, that’s the big question. (NBC News)
2 Around 15% of the world’s working population is using AI
And countries in Europe are among the most enthusiastic adopters. (FT $)
+ The EU is keen to get even more of its citizens using it, too. (WSJ $)
+ Meanwhile, America’s public opinion towards AI is souring. (WP $)
3 Three quantum mechanics scientists have won the Nobel Prize for Physics
Two of whom were instrumental in building Google’s working quantum machines. (Bloomberg $)
+ Their work shone a light on behaviors of the subatomic realm. (NYT $)
+ Quantum particles behave in notoriously strange ways. (New Scientist $)
4 The CDC has finally signed off on covid vaccine recommendations
Despite the delay, access looks largely similar to last years’. (Ars Technica)
+ The Supreme Court isn’t sold on medical expertise these days. (Vox)
5 What makes TikTok so ‘sticky’
Even its hardcore users can be persuaded to keep scrolling for hours. (WP $)
6 ICE bought fake cell towers to spy on nearby phones
It’s used cell-site simulators in the past to track down alleged criminals. (TechCrunch)
+ Meet the volunteers tracking ICE officers in LA. (New Yorker $)
7 Watermark removers for Sora 2 videos are already readily available
No permission? No problem. (404 Media)
+ What about copyright for AI-generated art? (The Information $)
+ And what comes next for AI copyright lawsuits? (MIT Technology Review)
8 How diamonds can help to cool down chips
They’re remarkably good at transferring heat. (NYT $)
9 Amazon Pharmacy is launching electronic prescription kiosks
For drugs including antibiotics, asthma inhalers and treatments for high blood pressure. (Reuters)
10 Should you limit your smartphone use to two hours a day?
Japan thinks so. (The Guardian)
+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“OpenAI is building the future of AI on infrastructure it doesn’t own, power it doesn’t control, and capital it doesn’t have.”
—Andrey Sidorenko, head of research at data firm Mostly AI, critiques what he calls the consolidation of the AI ecosystem in a post on LinkedIn.
One more thing
How AI can help make cities work better
In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to.
This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and technology at MIT. Shortly after joining MIT in 2012, Williams created the Civic Data Design Lab to bridge that divide. Over the years, she and her colleagues have made urban planning data more vivid and accessible through human stories and striking graphics. Read the full story.
—Ben Schneider
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Life lessons from the one and only Ozzy Osbourne—what’s not to like?
+ Did you know that most countries have their own camouflage? Check the patterns out here.
+ These hamsters getting an MRI scan is the cutest thing you’ll see today.
+ Pumpkin chili sounds like a fantastic way to warm up.
2025-10-08 02:29:20
The US Department of Energy appears poised to terminate funding for a pair of large carbon-sucking factories that were originally set to receive more than $1 billion in government grants, according to a department-issued list of projects obtained by MIT Technology Review and circulating among federal agencies.
One of the projects is the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, a facility that Occidental Petroleum’s 1PointFive subsidiary planned to develop in Kleberg County, Texas. The other is Project Cypress in Louisiana, a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom.
The list features a “latest status” column, which includes the word “terminate” next to the roughly $50 million award amounts for each project. Those line up with the initial tranche of Department of Energy funding for each development. According to the original announcement in 2023, the projects could have received $500 million or more in total grants as they proceeded.
It’s not clear if the termination of the initial grants would mean the full funding would also be canceled.
“It could mean nothing,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “It could mean there’s a renegotiation of the awards. Or it could mean they’re entirely cut. But the uncertainty certainly doesn’t help projects.”
A DOE spokesman stressed that no final decision has been made.
“It is incorrect to suggest those two projects have been terminated and we are unable to verify any lists provided by anonymous sources,” Ben Dietderich, the department’s press secretary, said in an email, adding: “The Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration.”
Last week, the DOE announced it would terminate about $7.5 billion in grants for more than 200 projects, stating that they “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
Battelle and 1PointFive didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.
“Market rumors have surfaced, and Climeworks is prepared for all scenarios,” Christoph Gebald, one of the company’s co-CEOs, said in a statement. He added later: “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
“We aren’t aware of a decision from DOE and continue to productively engage with the administration in a project review,” Heirloom said in a statement.
The rising dangers of climate change have driven the development of the direct-air-capture industry in recent years.
Climate models have found that it may be necessary to suck down billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury, on top of dramatic emissions cuts, to prevent the planet from warming more than 2 °C over preindustrial levels.
Direct air capture is considered one of the most reliable ways of drawing the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, but it also remains one of the most expensive and energy-intensive methods.
Under former president Joe Biden, the US began providing increasingly generous grants, subsidies, and other forms of support to help scale up the nascent sector.
The grants now in question were allocated under the DOE’s Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, which was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The goal was to set up several major carbon removal clusters across the US, each capable of sucking down and sequestering at least a million tons of the greenhouse gas per year.
“Today’s news that a decision to cancel lawfully designated funding for the [direct-air-capture projects] could come soon risks handing a win to competitors abroad and undermines the commitments made to businesses, communities, and leaders in Louisiana and South Texas,” said Giana Amador of the Carbon Removal Alliance and Ben Rubin of the Carbon Business Council in a joint statement.
This story was updated to include additional quotes, a response from the Department of Energy, and added context on the development of the carbon removal sector.
2025-10-08 00:51:02
Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children’s playthings with chatbots and voice assistants.
It’s a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts that the sector will surpass ¥100 billion ($14 billion) by 2030, growing faster than almost any other branch of consumer AI. According to the Chinese corporation registration database Qichamao, there are over 1,500 AI toy companies operating in China as of October 2025.
One of the latest entrants to the market is a toy called BubblePal, a device the size of a Ping-Pong ball that clips onto a child’s favorite stuffed animal and makes it “talk.” The gadget comes with a smartphone app that lets parents switch between 39 characters, from Disney’s Elsa to the Chinese cartoon classic Nezha. It costs $149, and 200,000 units have been sold since it launched last summer. It’s made by the Chinese company Haivivi and runs on DeepSeek’s large language models.
Other companies are approaching the market differently. FoloToy, another Chinese startup, allows parents to customize a bear, bunny, or cactus toy by training it to speak with their own voice and speech pattern. FoloToy reported selling more than 20,000 of its AI-equipped plush toys in the first quarter of 2025, nearly equaling its total sales for 2024, and it projects sales of 300,000 units this year.
But Chinese AI toy companies have their sights set beyond the nation’s borders. BubblePal was launched in the US in December 2024 and is now also available in Canada and the UK. And FoloToy is now sold in more than 10 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Germany, and Thailand. Rui Ma, a China tech analyst at AlphaWatch.AI, says that AI devices for children make particular sense in China, where there is already a well-established market for kid-focused educational electronics—a market that does not exist to the same extent globally. FoloToy’s CEO, Kong Miaomiao, told the Chinese outlet Baijing Chuhai that outside China, his firm is still just “reaching early adopters who are curious about AI.”
China’s AI toy boom builds on decades of consumer electronics designed specifically for children. As early as the 1990s, companies such as BBK popularized devices like electronic dictionaries and “study machines,” marketed to parents as educational aids. These toy-electronics hybrids read aloud, tell interactive stories, and simulate the role of a playmate.
The competition is heating up, however—US companies have also started to develop and sell AI toys. The musician Grimes helped to create Grok, a plush toy that chats with kids and adapts to their personality. Toy giant Mattel is working with OpenAI to bring conversational AI to brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels, with the first products expected to be announced later this year.
However, reviews from parents who’ve bought AI toys in China are mixed. Although many appreciate the fact they are screen-free and come with strict parental controls, some parents say their AI capabilities can be glitchy, leading children to tire of them easily.
Penny Huang, based in Beijing, bought a BubblePal for her five-year-old daughter, who is cared for mostly by grandparents. Huang hoped that the toy could make her less lonely and reduce her constant requests to play with adults’ smartphones. But the novelty wore off quickly.
“The responses are too long and wordy. My daughter quickly loses patience,” says Huang, “It [the role-play] doesn’t feel immersive—just a voice that sometimes sounds out of place.”
Another parent who uses BubblePal, Hongyi Li, found the voice recognition lagging: “Children’s speech is fragmented and unclear. The toy frequently interrupts my kid or misunderstands what she says. It also still requires pressing a button to interact, which can be hard for toddlers.”
Huang recently listed her BubblePal for sale on Xianyu, a secondhand marketplace. “This is just like one of the many toys that my daughter plays for five minutes then gets tired of,” she says. “She wants to play with my phone more than anything else.”
2025-10-07 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
This company is planning a lithium empire from the shores of the Great Salt Lake
On a bright afternoon in August, the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake looks like something out of a science fiction film set in a scorching alien world.
This otherworldly scene is the test site for a company called Lilac Solutions, which is developing a technology it says will shake up the United States’ efforts to pry control over the global supply of lithium, the so-called “white gold” needed for electric vehicles and batteries, away from China.
The startup is in a race to commercialize a new, less environmentally-damaging way to extract lithium from rocks. If everything pans out, it could significantly increase domestic supply at a crucial moment for the nation’s lithium extraction industry. Read the full story.
—Alexander C. Kaufman
The three big unanswered questions about Sora
Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a “cameo” of yourself—a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice—and insert other peoples’ cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set).
In the days since, it soared to the top spot on Apple’s US App Store. But its explosive growth raises a bunch of questions: can its popularity last? Can OpenAI afford it? And how soon until we start seeing lawsuits over its use of copyrighted content? Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter about the latest in AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
—James O’Donnell
2025 climate tech companies to watch: HiNa Battery Technology and its effort to commercialize salt cells
Over the next few decades the world will need a lot more batteries to power electric cars and keep grids stable. Today most battery cells are made with lithium, so the mineral is expected to be in hyper demand. But a new technology has come on the scene, potentially disrupting the global battery industry.
For decades, research of sodium-ion cell technology was abandoned due to the huge commercial success of lithium-ion cells. Now, HiNa Battery Technology is working to bring sodium back to the limelight—and to the mass market. Read the full story.
—You Xiaoying
HiNa Battery Technology is one of our 10 climate tech companies to watch—our annual list of some of the most promising climate tech firms on the planet. Check out the rest of the list here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has signed a major chip deal
It will collaborate with AMD in a challenge to Nvidia’s dominance. (WSJ $)
+ The multi-billion dollar deal will play out over five years. (FT $)
+ Just two weeks ago, OpenAI agreed a deal with Nvidia. (CNN)
+ The data center boom in the desert. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Google lost a US Supreme Court bid
The justices denied Google’s bid to pause changes to its app store. (Bloomberg $)
+ It’s part of the lawsuit Epic Games brought against the tech giant. (Reuters)
+ The dispute remains unsolved, so it may be handed back to the justices. (NYT $)
3 You can now use some apps directly within ChatGPT
It’s all part of OpenAI’s ambitions to make it a one-stop-shop for all your needs. (The Verge)
+ Sam Altman wants it to become your primary digital portal. (The Information $)
4 Deloitte used AI to generate a report for the Australian government
Unfortunately, it was littered with hallucinated mistakes. (Ars Technica)
5 The Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to three immunity researchers
The trio discovered an immune cell that helps stop the immune system attacking itself. (New Scientist $)
6 Russians are using AI to create video memorials of their war dead
A burgeoning industry has sprung up, and practitioners will generate clips for $30. (WP $)
+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. (MIT Technology Review)
7 The dream of greener air travel is starting to die 
Hydrogen-powered planes are years away. So what now? (FT $)
+ How new technologies could clean up air travel. (MIT Technology Review)
8 How job hunters are trying to trick AI résumé-checkers
Inserting sneaky hidden prompts is becoming commonplace. (NYT $)
9 The creator of the Friend AI pendant doesn’t care if you hate it
The backlash to its provocative ads is all part of the plan, apparently. (The Atlantic $)
10 Taylor Swift’s fans really don’t like AI
They’ve accused the singer’s new videos, which appear to be AI-generated, of looking cheap and sloppy. (NY Mag $)
+ AI text is out, moving pictures are in. (Economist $)
Quote of the day
“When AI videos are just as good as normal videos, I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact the millions of creators currently making content for a living… scary times.”
—YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, reflects on AI videos infiltrating the internet, TechCrunch reports.
One more thing
The case against humans in space
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our home world and expand our civilization to extraterrestrial vistas.
This belief has been mainstream for decades, but its rise has been positively meteoric in this new gilded age of astropreneurs.
But as visions of giant orbital stations and Martian cities dance in our heads, a case against human space colonization has found its footing in a number of recent books, from doubts about the practical feasibility of off-Earth communities, to realism about the harsh environment of space and the enormous tax it would exact on the human body. Read the full story.
—Becky Ferreira
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)+ Wow: scientists have successfully reconstructed a million-year old skull 
+ Take a trip back in time with this fun compilation of music from the very first Sims game.
+ RIP ‘stomp clap hey’—music’s most misunderstood and simultaneously annoying genre.
+ How to live a good life in a tough world.
2025-10-07 17:00:00
BOX ELDER COUNTY, Utah – On a bright afternoon in August, the shore on the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake looks like something out of a science fiction film set in a scorching alien world. The desert sun is blinding as it reflects off the white salt that gathers and crunches underfoot like snow at the water’s edge. In a part of the lake too shallow for boats, bacteria have turned the water a Pepto-Bismol pink. The landscape all around is ringed with jagged red mountains and brown brush. The only obvious sign of people is the salt-encrusted hose running from the water’s edge to a makeshift encampment of shipping containers and trucks a few hundred feet away.
This otherworldly scene is the test site for a company called Lilac Solutions, which is developing a technology it says will shake up the United States’ efforts to pry control over the global supply of lithium, the so-called “white gold” needed for electric vehicles and batteries, away from China. Before tearing down its demonstration facility to make way for its first commercial plant, due online next year, the company invited me to be the first journalist to tour its outpost in this remote area, a roughly two-hour drive from Salt Lake City.
The startup is in a race to commercialize a new way to extract lithium from rocks, called direct lithium extraction (DLE). This approach is designed to reduce the environmental damage caused by the two most common traditional methods of mining lithium: hard-rock mining and brining.
Australia, the world’s top producer of lithium, uses the first approach, scraping rocks laden with lithium out of the earth so they can be chemically processed into industrial-grade versions of the metal. Chile, the second-largest lithium source, uses the second: It floods areas of its sun-soaked Atacama Desert with water. This results in ponds rich in dissolved lithium, which are then allowed to dry off, leaving behind lithium salts that can be harvested and processed elsewhere.
The range of methods known as DLE use lithium brine too, but instead of water-intensive evaporation, they all involve advanced chemical or physical filtering processes that selectively separate out lithium ions. While DLE has yet to take off, its reduced need for water and land has made it a prime focus for companies and governments looking to ramp up production to meet the growing demand for lithium as electric vehicles take off and even bigger batteries are increasingly used to back up power grids. China, which processes more than two-thirds of the world’s mined lithium, is developing its own DLE to increase domestic production of the raw material. New approaches are still being researched, but nearly a dozen companies are actively looking to commercialize DLE technology now, and some industrial giants already offer basic off-the-shelf hardware.
In August, Lilac completed its most advanced test yet of its technology, which the company says doesn’t just require far less water than traditional lithium extraction—it uses a fraction of what other DLE approaches demand.
The company uses proprietary beads to draw lithium ions from water and says its process can extract lithium using a tenth as much water as the alumina sorbent technology that dominates the DLE industry. Lilac also highlights its all-American supply chain. Technology originally developed by Koch Industries, for example, uses some Chinese-made components. Lilac’s beads are manufactured at the company’s plant in Nevada.
Lilac says the beads are particularly well suited to extracting lithium where concentrations are low. That doesn’t mean they could be deployed just anywhere—there won’t be lithium extraction on the Hudson River anytime soon. But Lilac’s tech could offer significant advantages over what’s currently on the market. And forgoing plans to become a major producer itself could enable the company to seize a decent slice of global production by appealing to lithium miners companies looking for the best equipment, says Milo McBride, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who authored a recent report on DLE.
If everything pans out, the pilot plant Lilac builds next to prove its technology at commercial scale could significantly increase domestic supply at a moment when the nation’s largest proposed lithium project, the controversial hard-rock Thacker Pass mine in Nevada, has faced fresh uncertainty. At the beginning of October, the Trump administration renegotiated a federal loan worth more than $2 billion to secure a 5% ownership stake for the US government.
Despite bipartisan government support, the prospect of opening a deep gash in an unspoiled stretch of Nevada landscape has drawn fierce opposition from conservationists and lawsuits from ranchers and Native American tribes who say the Thacker Pass project would destroy the underground freshwater reservoirs on which they depend. Water shortages in the parched West have also made it difficult to plan on using additional evaporation ponds, the other traditional way of extracting lithium.
Lilac is not the only company in the US pushing for DLE. In California’s Salton Sea, developers such as EnergySource Minerals are looking to build a geothermal power plant to power a DLE facility pulling lithium from the inland desert lake. And energy giants such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum are racing to develop an area in southwestern Arkansas called the Smackover region, where researchers with the US Geological Survey have found as much as 19 million metric tons of untapped lithium in salty underground water. In between, both geographically and strategically, is Lilac: It’s looking to develop new technology like the California companies but sell its hardware to the energy giants in Arkansas.
The Great Salt Lake isn’t an obvious place to develop a lithium mine. The Salton Sea boasts lithium concentrations of just under 200 parts per million. Argentina, where Lilac has another test facility, has resources of above 700 parts per million.
Here on the Great Salt Lake? “It’s 70 parts per million,” Raef Sully, Lilac’s Australia-born chief executive, tells me. “So if you had a football stadium with 45,000 seats, this would be three people.”
For Lilac, this is actually a feature of the location. “It’s a very, very good demonstration of the capability of our technology,” Sully says. Showing that Lilac’s hardware can extract lithium at high purity levels from a brine with low concentration, he says, proves its versatility. That wasn’t the reason Lilac selected the site, though. “Utah is a mining friendly state,” says Elizabeth Pond, the vice president of communications. And though the lake water has low concentrations of lithium, extracting the brine simply calls for running a hose into the water, whereas other locations would require digging a well at great cost.
When I accompanied Sully to the test site during my tour, our route following unpaved county roads lined with fields of wild sunflowers. The facility itself is little more than an assortment of converted shipping containers and two mobile trailers, one to serve as the main office and the other as a field laboratory to test samples. It’s off the grid, relying on diesel generators that the company says will be replaced with propane units once this location is converted to a permanent facility but could eventually be swapped for geothermal technology tapping into a hot rock resource located nearby. (Solar panels, Sully clarifies, couldn’t supply the 24-7 power supply the facility will need.) But it depends on its connection to the Great Salt Lake via that lengthy hose.
Pumped uphill, the lake water passes through a series of filters to remove solids until it ends up in a vessel filled with the company’s specially designed ceramic beads, made from a patented material that attracts lithium ions from the water. Once saturated, the beads are put through an acid wash to remove the lithium. The remaining brine is then repeatedly tested and, once deemed safe to release back into the lake, pumped back down to the shore through an outgoing tube in the hose. The lithium solution, meanwhile, is stockpiled in tanks on site before shipping off to a processing plant to be turned into battery-grade lithium carbonate, which is a white powder.
“As a technology provider in the long term, if we’re going to have decades of lithium demand, they want to position their technology as something that can tap a bunch of markets,” McBride says. “To have a technology that can potentially economically recover different types of resources in different types of environments is an enticing proposition.”
This testing ground won’t stay this way for long. During my visit, Lilac’s crew was starting to pack up the location after completing its demonstration testing. The results the company shared exclusively with me suggest a smashing success, particularly for such low-grade brine with numerous impurities: Lilac’s equipment recovered 87% of the available lithium, on average, with a purity rate of 99.97%.
The next step will be to clear the area to make way for construction of Lilac’s first permanent commercial facility at the same site. To meet the stipulations of Utah state permits for the new plant, the company had to cease all operations at the demonstration project. If everything goes according to plan, Lilac’s first US facility will begin commercial production in the second half of 2027. The company has lined up about two-thirds of its funding for the project. That could make the plant the first new commercial source of lithium in the US to come online in years, and the first DLE facility ever.
Once it’s fully online, the project should produce 5,000 tons per year—doubling annual US production of lithium. But a full-scale plant using Lilac’s technology would produce between three and five times that amount.
There are some potential snags. Utah regulators this year started cracking down on mineral companies pumping water from the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking amid worsening droughts. (Lilac says it’s largely immune to the restrictions since it returns the water to the lake.) While the relatively low concentrations of lithium in the water make for a good test case, full-scale commercial production would likely prove far more economical in a place with more of the metal.
“The Great Salt Lake is probably the worst possible place to be doing this, because there are real challenges around pulling water from the lake,” says Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, a mining engineer who previously served as the deputy director of battery minerals at the Department of Energy. “But if it’s just being used as a trial for the technology, that makes sense.”
What makes Lilac stand out among its peers is that it has no plans to design and manufacture its own DLE equipment and produce actual lithium. Lilac wants instead to sell its technology to others. The pilot plant is just intended to test and debut its hardware. Sully tells me it’s being built under a separate limited-liability corporation to make a potential sale easier if it’s successful.
It’s an unusual play in the lithium industry. Once most companies see success with their technology, “they go crazy and think they can vertically integrate and at the same time be a miner and an energy producer,” Kwasi Ampofo, the head of minerals and metals at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF, tells me.
“Lilac is trying to be a technology vendor,” he says. “I wonder why a lot more people aren’t choosing that route.”
If things work out the right way, Sully says, Lilac could become the vendor of choice to projects like the oil-backed sites in the Smackover and beyond.
“We think our technology is the next generation,” he says. “And if we end up working with an Exxon or a Chevron or a Rio Tinto, we want to be the DLE technology provider in their lithium project.”
2025-10-07 17:00:00
Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a “cameo” of yourself—a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice—and insert other peoples’ cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set).
To some people who believed earnestly in OpenAI’s promise to build AI that benefits all of humanity, the app is a punchline. A former OpenAI researcher who left to build an AI-for-science startup referred to Sora as an “infinite AI tiktok slop machine.”
That hasn’t stopped it from soaring to the top spot on Apple’s US App Store. After I downloaded the app, I quickly learned what types of videos are, at least currently, performing well: bodycam-style footage of police pulling over pets or various trademarked characters, including SpongeBob and Scooby Doo; deepfake memes of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about Xbox; and endless variations of Jesus Christ navigating our modern world.
Just as quickly, I had a bunch of questions about what’s coming next for Sora. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
OpenAI is betting that a sizable number of people will want to spend time on an app in which you can suspend your concerns about whether what you’re looking at is fake and indulge in a stream of raw AI. One reviewer put it this way: “It’s comforting because you know that everything you’re scrolling through isn’t real, where other platforms you sometimes have to guess if it’s real or fake. Here, there is no guessing, it’s all AI, all the time.”
This may sound like hell to some. But judging by Sora’s popularity, lots of people want it.
So what’s drawing these people in? There are two explanations. One is that Sora is a flash-in-the-pan gimmick, with people lining up to gawk at what cutting-edge AI can create now (in my experience, this is interesting for about five minutes). The second, which OpenAI is betting on, is that we’re witnessing a genuine shift in what type of content can draw eyeballs, and that users will stay with Sora because it allows a level of fantastical creativity not possible in any other app.
There are a few decisions down the pike that may shape how many people stick around: how OpenAI decides to implement ads, what limits it sets for copyrighted content (see below), and what algorithms it cooks up to decide who sees what.
OpenAI is not profitable, but that’s not particularly strange given how Silicon Valley operates. What is peculiar, though, is that the company is investing in a platform for generating video, which is the most energy-intensive (and therefore expensive) form of AI we have. The energy it takes dwarfs the amount required to create images or answer text questions via ChatGPT.
This isn’t news to OpenAI, which has joined a half-trillion-dollar project to build data centers and new power plants. But Sora—which currently allows you to generate AI videos, for free, without limits—raises the stakes: How much will it cost the company?
OpenAI is making moves toward monetizing things (you can now buy products directly through ChatGPT, for example). On October 3, its CEO, Sam Altman, wrote in a blog post that “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation,” but he didn’t get into specifics. One can imagine personalized ads and more in-app purchases.
Still, it’s concerning to imagine the mountain of emissions might result if Sora becomes popular. Altman has accurately described the emissions burden of one query to ChatGPT as impossibly small. What he has not quantified is what that figure is for a 10-second video generated by Sora. It’s only a matter of time until AI and climate researchers start demanding it.
Sora is awash in copyrighted and trademarked characters. It allows you to easily deepfake deceased celebrities. Its videos use copyrighted music.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has sent letters to copyright holders notifying them that they’ll have to opt out of the Sora platform if they don’t want their material included, which is not how these things usually work. The law on how AI companies should handle copyrighted material is far from settled, and it’d be reasonable to expect lawsuits challenging this.
In last week’s blog post, Altman wrote that OpenAI is “hearing from a lot of rightsholders” who want more control over how their characters are used in Sora. He says that the company plans to give those parties more “granular control” over their characters. Still, “there may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t,” he wrote.
But another issue is the ease with which you can use the cameos of real people. People can restrict who can use their cameo, but what limits will there be for what these cameos can be made to do in Sora videos?
This is apparently already an issue OpenAI is being forced to respond to. The head of Sora, Bill Peebles, posted on October 5 that users can now restrict how their cameo can be used—preventing it from appearing in political videos or saying certain words, for example. How well will this work? Is it only a matter of time until someone’s cameo is used for something nefarious, explicit, illegal, or at least creepy, sparking a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI is responsible?
Overall, we haven’t seen what full-scale Sora looks like yet (OpenAI is still doling out access to the app via invite codes). When we do, I think it will serve as a grim test: Can AI create videos so fine-tuned for endless engagement that they’ll outcompete “real” videos for our attention? In the end, Sora isn’t just testing OpenAI’s technology—it’s testing us, and how much of our reality we’re willing to trade for an infinite scroll of simulation.
