T-Mobile is going to help self-driving cars run on a loop with its 5G network. The 5G network will be private, and ensure consistent and reliable connection for moving passenger vehicles.

T-Mobile to offer reliable and private 5G network for self-driving cars

5G networks were supposed to bring a revolution in wireless internet. Carriers promised ultra-high-speed connections with low latency. Although 5G has yet to live up to the lofty expectations, it is going to help autonomous passenger vehicles.

T-Mobile is trying to prove how 5G networks can be helpful in multiple scenarios. The company recently indicated it is offering a new 5G-based service to help emergency workers and citizens stay connected. Now, the carrier announced in a press release that it’s working with Miller Electric Company.

Specifically speaking, T-Mobile is going to support autonomous shuttles with 5G network connectivity. According to the telecom service provider, “T-Mobile will deliver highly secure, reliable two-way communications between the shuttles and the command center.

T-Mobile will also share real-time telemetry data from onboard sensors as well as audio and video feeds to connect employees with passengers. Simply put, T-Mobile is offering a dedicated, private 5G network to a fleet of self-driving cars.

How will a private 5G network work with passenger vehicles?

Miller Electric Company is reportedly bringing fully autonomous shuttles to a three-mile strip in Jacksonville. Self-driving shuttles will connect the EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville to the new waterfront project. The fleet should start operations next year.

The bus-shaped shuttles will rely on T-Mobile’s Advanced Network Solutions (ANS) and connect to a private 5G network. One of the parties involved in the project has stated that existing standards, such as Wi-Fi, aren’t as reliable or scalable as 5G.

A dedicated and private 5G network should remain invisible and inaccessible to the general population. In other words, T-Mobile could be reserving a small slice of the 5G spectrum for self-driving cars. This would ensure congestion-free connectivity for high-bandwidth applications.

In its press release, T-Mobile has urged cities and government departments to explore the possibilities 5G networks can unlock. The company has implied that 5G isn’t limited to smartphones and home broadband. This strongly suggests T-Mobile is trying to expand in other markets using its 5G networks.

The United Nations’ Environmental Program has released a new with yet more dire news about our odds of avoiding climate disaster caused by greenhouse gas emissions. According to this assessment, the current trajectory of international commitments will see the planet’s temperature increasing 2.6 degrees Celsius or more over the course of this century. That amount of temperature change would lead to more catastrophic and life-threatening weather events.

UN members are due to submit their latest Nationally Determined Contributions ahead of the COP30 conference in Brazil next year. The NDCs lay out each country’s plan for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. One part of the NDCs are to reach the goal set by the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and one part targets keeping global temperature increases to within a less ideal 2 degrees Celsius. While the report says it is technically possible to reach the Paris Agreement goal, much larger actions will be required to cut emissions by the necessary amount.

“Increased deployment of solar photovoltaic technologies and wind energy could deliver 27 percent of the total emission reduction potential in 2030 and 38 percent in 2035,” the report gives as an example of what’s still needed. “Action on forests could deliver around 20 percent of the potential in both years.”

“Every fraction of a degree avoided counts in terms of lives saved, economies protected, damages avoided, biodiversity conserved and the ability to rapidly bring down any temperature overshoot,” UN Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen wrote in the report’s forward.

International collaboration, government commitments and financial contributions will also be essential for getting back on track to either the 2-degree or 1.5-degree goals. “G20 nations, particularly the largest-emitting members, would need to do the heavy lifting,” the report reads.

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s probably because the UN has issued the same stark warnings in each of its annual reports on emissions for now. And other reports have echoed their calls, such as damning earlier this year that just 57 companies are responsible for 80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

Cohere today released two new open-weight models in its Aya project to close the language gap in foundation models. 

Aya Expanse 8B and 35B, now available on Hugging Face, expands performance advancements in 23 languages. Cohere said in a blog post the 8B parameter model “makes breakthroughs more accessible to researchers worldwide,” while the 32B parameter model provides state-of-the-art multilingual capabilities. 

The Aya project seeks to expand access to foundation models in more global languages than English. Cohere for AI, the company’s research arm, launched the Aya initiative last year. In February, it released the Aya 101 large language model (LLM), a 13-billion-parameter model covering 101 languages. Cohere for AI also released the Aya dataset to help expand access to other languages for model training. 

Aya Expanse uses much of the same recipe used to build Aya 101. 

“The improvements in Aya Expanse are the result of a sustained focus on expanding how AI serves languages around the world by rethinking the core building blocks of machine learning breakthroughs,” Cohere said. “Our research agenda for the last few years has included a dedicated focus on bridging the language gap, with several breakthroughs that were critical to the current recipe: data arbitrage, preference training for general performance and safety, and finally model merging.”

Aya performs well

Cohere said the two Aya Expanse models consistently outperformed similar-sized AI models from Google, Mistral and Meta. 

Aya Expanse 32B did better in benchmark multilingual tests than Gemma 2 27B, Mistral 8x22B and even the much larger Llama 3.1 70B. The smaller 8B also performed better than Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B and Ministral 8B. 

Cohere developed the Aya models using a data sampling method called data arbitrage as a means to avoid the generation of gibberish that happens when models rely on synthetic data. Many models use synthetic data created from a “teacher” model for training purposes. However, due to the difficulty in finding good teacher models for other languages, especially for low-resource languages. 

It also focused on guiding the models toward “global preferences” and accounting for different cultural and linguistic perspectives. Cohere said it figured out a way to improve performance and safety even while guiding the models’ preferences. 

“We think of it as the ‘final sparkle’ in training an AI model,” the company said. “However, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms prevalent in Western-centric datasets. Problematically, these safety protocols frequently fail to extend to multilingual settings.  Our work is one of the first that extends preference training to a massively multilingual setting, accounting for different cultural and linguistic perspectives.”

Models in different languages

The Aya initiative focuses on ensuring research around LLMs that perform well in languages other than English. 

Many LLMs eventually become available in other languages, especially for widely spoken languages, but there is difficulty in finding data to train models with the different languages. English, after all, tends to be the official language of governments, finance, internet conversations and business, so it’s far easier to find data in English. 

It can also be difficult to accurately benchmark the performance of models in different languages because of the quality of translations. 

Other developers have released their own language datasets to further research into non-English LLMs. OpenAI, for example, made its Multilingual Massive Multitask Language Understanding Dataset on Hugging Face last month. The dataset aims to help better test LLM performance across 14 languages, including Arabic, German, Swahili and Bengali. 

Cohere has been busy these last few weeks. This week, the company added image search capabilities to Embed 3, its enterprise embedding product used in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. It also enhanced fine-tuning for its Command R 08-2024 model this month. 

Electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle startup Joby Aviation has launched a public offering to sell up to $200 million of its shares of common stock, per a regulatory filing.

Joby said it will use the proceeds from the raise — together with its existing cash — to fund its certification and manufacturing efforts, prepare for commercial launch in 2025, and for general working capital. 

The eVTOL firm added that it intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional $30 million shares of its common stock. 

Joby plans to launch air taxis for urban transportation next year in New York City and Los Angeles alongside partners Delta Air Lines and Uber, as well as in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The startup also has a $55 million contract with the Department of Defense.

Before Joby can launch, it will need to complete its type certification process to ensure the design of its aircraft meets required safety and airworthiness standards. 

The public offering comes as the Federal Aviation Administration this week cleared the way for eVTOLs to share U.S. airspace with helicopters and airplanes, and set up guidelines for eVTOL pilot training and operating rules. It also follows a $500 million injection from Joby’s existing investor Toyota earlier this month.

Joby has raised $2.6 billion to date, according to PitchBook data.

Joby did not respond immediately to a request for comment. 

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Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.