As the US EV sector adjusts to a reality without federal tax incentives, industry players are looking for ways to deliver more affordable EVs to the masses.

One trend that’s working in their favor: the falling price of lithium-ion batteries.

The volume-weighted average price for lithium-ion battery packs dropped 8% YoY to $108 per kilowatt-hour, according to BloombergNEF’s annual battery price survey, which tracks pack and cell price trends globally. What drove prices down? A combo of “continued manufacturing overcapacity, heightened competition, and the accelerating shift toward lower-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistries,” according to analysts.

The upshot?

“Low prices are both good and bad news, depending on where you are and where you sit in the industry,” Evelina Stoikou, BNEF’s head of battery technologies and supply chains, told Tech Brew. “It’s definitely good for the consumers, who are able to see lower prices for end applications.”

“On the other side, these low costs create intense competition among the battery manufacturers,” she added. “If they’re not able to keep costs low, they might see hits on their margins.”

Keep reading here.—JG

There’s no shortage of AI models aimed at discovering new drugs these days. Researchers have introduced more than 200 of these foundation models in the last three years, with 40% growth per quarter, according to a new paper published this month in the journal Drug Discovery Today.

Pharmaceutical giant Merck and Nvidia recently rolled out a new entry in this growing body with a small-molecule drug model called KERMT. The model is pretrained on more than 11 million molecules, then fine-tuned for various tasks specific to industrial drug discovery workflows, according to Merck.

Alan Cheng, Merck’s senior director of data science, told us the model could help scientists better predict how a given molecule will behave in the body, potentially catching problems before researchers invest in months of testing.

“Traditionally, scientists spend months running physical and biological tests to understand ADMET properties: absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity,” Cheng said in an email interview. “These steps are essential because a promising compound can fail late in development if it is toxic or has poor exposure at the therapeutic target.”

The KERMT name is a Muppet-themed nod to the underlying GROVER model, a neural network pretrained on millions of small molecules. Merck’s scientists found that multitask-based fine-tuning of the enhanced GROVER-based KERMT improved its predictive performance across both public material and Merck’s internal datasets.

Keep reading on Healthcare Brew.—PK

There are two dominant pressures right now in the business world: the pressure to cut spending, and the pressure to invest in AI technology. Thus, the best strategy to score a purchase approval is to call it an AI project—even if it really isn’t.

That’s per a newly published report by Emburse, an expense-management software developer, which warns of the pitfalls of undisciplined AI spending. It commissioned a survey of 1,500 finance, IT, and business leaders in the US and UK, and found that 65% of organizations have been told to cut costs or reduce vendors. Talker Research conducted the survey and gathered responses from late September to early October.

Business leaders are having more success with getting the green light on software purchases and vendor contracts when they involve AI. But this strategy can be perilous. According to the survey, 55% of respondents said AI capabilities are a key factor in selecting a vendor. Most respondents (58%) said it’s easier to get software purchases approved if they’re related to AI, and an even greater proportion (62%) admitted they’ve labeled a purchase as an AI initiative “to secure budget approval.”

Organizations that put innovation ahead of cost discipline are falling for a “Trojan horse,” according to Emburse.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—AZ

Shop talk: Consumers may be getting savvier about online shopping. Retail Brew has notes on recent data from Trustpilot that indicates shoppers want “genuine human experiences” when mulling a purchase: “In the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” our sister Brew reported, “40% of respondents said they waited for others to post reviews before deciding what to buy.”

In the end, it’s a matter of trust: Retail Brew also compiled figures from a recent Checkr report that indicated people are struggling to figure out what’s real online. “The report found 70% of respondents said they backed out of a purchase because they were afraid of being scammed. And 61% said they’ve abandoned a website, app, or platform entirely because it felt off or seemed flooded with fakes,” Retail Brew’s Jeena Sharma wrote.

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.

More focus, less fluff. CollabWORK filters out the noise and delivers jobs that actually match what Tech Brew readers are looking for. Click here to see the full board of curated roles.

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