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Neustark, a spin-off from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university, has inaugurated its first commercial-scale carbon capture plant in the EU, located at a construction waste recycling facility on the outskirts of Berlin. The plant, built in partnership with building and recycling company Heim, has the capacity to permanently store over 1,000 tons of CO₂ per year by injecting the gas into granules of demolition concrete. The CO₂, which is captured at nearby biogas plants and would otherwise have entered the atmosphere, binds with the concrete through a process called mineralisation. This chemical reaction turns the CO₂ into limestone, binding it to…
Amsterdam-based startup Orquesta today announced an oversubscribed €800,000 pre-seed funding round. The company has developed a platform through which companies can integrate various Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into their business operations. Generative AI and LLMs have been developing at breakneck speed over the past year — a velocity seemingly matched by investor appetite for all things GenAI. Indeed, just last week, Europe’s homegrown contribution in the form of Mistral 7B was made available free of charge to the public. Adding to the plethora of offerings, the technology itself will keep on developing rapidly (to where and to what end…
Europe’s startup contribution to the generative AI bonanza, Mistral, has released its first model. Mistral 7B is free to download and be used anywhere — including locally. French AI developer Mistral says its Large Language Model is optimal for low latency, text summarisation, classification, text completion, and code completion. The startup has opted to release Mistral 7B under the Apache 2.0 licence, which has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution. “Working with open models is the best way for both vendors and users to build a sustainable business around AI solutions,” the company commented in a blog post…
The European Space Agency (ESA) is enabling tech companies to take part in its Terrae Novae exploration programme, calling for proposals for small missions to the Moon. Sending the first European astronaut to explore the Moon’s surface stands at the core of the Terrae Novae 2030+ strategy. It further aims to boost Europe’s presence in low-Earth orbit and participate in the first human mission to Mars. Small lunar missions form a recent addition to the strategy, “focusing on closing technology gaps and expanding our scientific knowledge of both the Moon and Mars,” said Xavier Barbier, ESA engineer, leading the call…
The UK, Switzerland, and Sweden are poised to cash in from the AI gold rush, but most of Europe will be a poor nephew to Uncle Sam. So say the expert analysts at Capital Economics, a financial research firm based in London. In a new study, the company assessed which countries are best placed to benefit from the AI boom — and which ones will be left behind. Using 40-sub-indicators, the researchers analysed their capacities for AI innovation, diffusion of the AI effectively, and adaptability to the impacts. The three categories were then combined to calculate a global ranking. Unsurprisingly,…