Every time you swipe a credit card, most major financial companies will tap machine learning to generate a risk score—a likelihood that the purchase is fraudulent.

But over time, scammers may switch up their tricks or buying habits might change. Suddenly, the machine learning model is operating in a different environment than that on which it was trained. Maybe it’s flagging legitimate transactions or missing actual fraud as a result.

This is a phenomenon called “model drift”—a mismatch that emerges over time between what an AI system was trained to do and how it operates in the real world. And it’s not just a problem for credit card fraud detection, it can affect models of all kinds, including LLMs, according to Helen Gu, founder and CEO at InsightFinder, which works with Visa on avoiding these kinds of outcomes.

“Model drift is hard to detect because it’s not something you can actually clearly describe using one metric, and it’s basically a running metric…you have to compute this metric over a period of time,” Gu said.

It’s one of a few reasons that AI models might seem to degrade over time without constant monitoring and tweaking. As more businesses move from AI prototypes to full-fledged production, fending off these sorts of real-world quality issues may be more top of mind.

“Back in 2023, the focus was more around communicating that there is something called hallucination and why it could happen,” Amit Paka, founder and COO of the AI observability platform Fiddler. “Now [the conversation with clients is] more around, ‘What’s the quality of the hallucination metric that you have?’”

Keep reading here.—PK

In the rugged, remote oilfields of West Texas, autonomous trucks are now working alongside human-operated machinery, hauling loads of frac sand in the oil- and natural gas-rich Permian Basin.

The trucks are owned and operated by Atlas Energy Solutions, a proppant and oilfield logistics provider. The technology comes from AV tech startup Kodiak Robotics. It marks not only Kodiak’s first commercial deployment, but what the startup says is the AV trucking sector’s first customer delivery.

“This is a monumental step for Kodiak. It’s a monumental step for the industry,” Kodiak CEO and founder Don Burnette told Tech Brew. “This is the first time that a customer has owned a driverless vehicle. So it’s really significant not only from a technological achievement perspective, but also from a customer, operational deployment perspective.”

Texas haul ’em: Atlas now has two Kodiak RoboTrucks in its 120-vehicle fleet and is putting the trucks to use on a 42-mile autonomous conveyor system used to deliver sand to customers.

Keep reading here.—JG

Even though Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, a new report indicates that the country and the world will continue to decarbonize. That’s because the decarbonization market is growing—specifically “decarbonization-as-a-service,” or companies being hired by other organizations to reduce their energy emissions and carbon footprint.

According to Valuates Reports and QYR Research, the worldwide decarbonization-as-a-service market is projected to be valued at $20 billion by 2030. In 2023, that market was valued at $170 million. And in the US, the decarbonization-as-a-service market will be valued at more than $4 billion (a huge increase from approximately $54 million in 2023).

But how can the US market grow without as much federal pressure to decarbonize? Jay Ruckelshaus, who co-founded carbon and energy management company Gravity, told Tech Brew that even though federal decarbonization regulations may be overturned by the Trump administration, the market will still continue to grow because many companies must adhere to state and/or international regulations. Additionally, domestic companies that work in states without decarbonization laws might still have to keep their emissions in check to comply with their big clients’ Scope 3 goals.

Plus, many companies aren’t just decarbonizing because they have to—they’re doing so because it saves money. Ruckelshaus said that’s certainly the case for many of the companies that Gravity works with in the Rust Belt.

“Every kilowatt hour has a couple cents attached to it; same with every therm of natural gas,” Ruckelshaus said. “[There’s a] natural alliance between being efficient and smart with your energy spend, and being smarter with your energy emissions.”

Keep reading here.—TC