1. Toyota’s Electric Vehicle Strategy Still Seems Flawed
While it had chosen a slow transition to electric vehicles (EVs), Toyota’s appointment of Koji Sato to CEO in April seemed like a promising step to accelerate the process. Last week, Toyota revealed its new strategy.1
ARK remains unimpressed. Toyota still seems dedicated to solid-state batteries that will deliver 1,000 km, or ~620 miles of range by 2027, five years later than its original forecast six years ago.2 What, we wonder, will be the cost of solid-state batteries compared to the low-cost battery chemistries to which the industry will have shifted in 2027?
In our view, solid-state batteries will enable new capabilities and gain traction in devices with higher cost components. Drones, aviation, and wearables like augmented reality (AR) headsets, for example, are applications that could reach scale with solid-state batteries before costs and prices decrease and enable other applications. While Toyota announced other manufacturing innovations last week that seem promising, its EV strategy does not seem destined for mass market success.
2. Reddit Faces A Difficult Balancing Act
As management tries to stop large language models (LLMs) from training on Reddit’s valuable data sets for free, thousands of subreddit communities are protesting its new pricing structure. Prior to April, the API was free.
Developers and third-party app creators are railing against the new pricing structure. Apollo, an iOS Reddit client, stated that, at the new price of $0.24 per 1,000 calls, its 7 billion API requests per month would cost a prohibitive $20 million per year.
In response to the new pricing structure, roughly 8,000 subreddits have gone dark. Reddit Protest Tracker, a live tracker on Twitch, provides up-to-date information on the protest. While some subreddits could resume operations soon, others intend to remain private indefinitely, particularly because a leaked internal memo from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman downplayed the protest’s significance.
In our view, the Reddit conflict highlights the balancing act that social platforms now face: how do they monetize valuable data sets while catering to developers, moderators, and users? The conflict is likely to prompt Reddit and other social media platforms to reevaluate and seek more equitable solutions that continue to foster innovation and collaboration in their communities.
3. CRISPR Gene Editing Is Helping Rice Resist Disease
An academic collaboration between the Huazhong Agricultural University and University of California, Davis, has led to the discovery3 of Resistance to Blast-1 (RBL1), a gene mutation in rice which confers resistance to a destructive pathogen called Magnaporthe oryzae (M. oryzae). Colloquially known as rice blast fungus, the pathogen accounts for 10-30% of rice harvest losses and tens of billion dollars in damages each year.4
While researchers understood that mutating RBL1 could confer disease resistance to rice, typically the yield and biomass in plants with mutant RBL1 were lower than their wild counterparts. With the help of high-throughput CRISPR gene-editing, however, the researchers generated nearly sixty variants—all mutated but at different loci in the same RBL1 gene. RBL1Δ12 was the mutant with the optimal resistance and yield traits.
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[1] Toyota. 2023. “Next Generation Battery EV Strategy. Takero Kato, BEV Factory President.” YouTube. https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/39288520.html#kato.
[2] Ramey, J. 2017. “Toyota Promises Long-Range Solid-State Batteries In EVs By Early 2020s.” Autoweek. https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a1826616/toyota-promises-solid-state-longer-range-batteries-evs-early-2020s/.
[3] Sha, G. et al. 2023. “Genome editing of a rice CDP-DAG synthase confers multipathogen resistance.” Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06205-2.
[4] Wilson, R. A. and Talbot, N. J. 2009. “Under pressure: investigating the biology of plant infection by Magnaporthe oryzae.” Nature Reviews Microbiology. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro2032.