How AI Can Protect Underwater Cables That Carry Your Internet
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Right now, Oracle can cut your company's cloud bill in half if you move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st. See if you qualify at oracle.com slash wsjtech. oracle.com slash wsjtech. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, February 18th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal.

There are a lot of undersea pipelines and cables running through the ocean. They're used to carry fuel and transmit data. But how do we protect this critical infrastructure? We'll hear how one company is using, that's right, artificial intelligence in hopes of getting an accurate picture of what's happening on the ocean floor.

But first, credit card rewards are a big business. We all know that little dance you do at the end of a group dinner to see who's going to use their card to get those points or sending referral codes to everyone you know when you've opened a new card to get that referral bonus. And there are so many card options out there.

One of them is a reward program from fintech company Built Technologies. Customers have already been using the Built card to pay their rent and collect reward points. And Built's CEO, Ankur Jain, says he's aiming for mortgages next.

Jane joined WSJ columnists Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims on the brand new season of Bold Names, our sister podcast that brings on the bold named leaders featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal to ask them about their businesses and business decisions. Tim and Christopher are here with me now. Tim Mims, first of all, congrats on the new season. Well, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Tell us about your first guest this season. Encore Jane seems to have some big goals for the company. Yeah, Encore Jane definitely has big ideas for revolutionizing the way you pay for rent. You might be familiar with his company because it just seems to be all over TikTok with videos including Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton talking about it. How do you get loyalty points for paying your rent?

He's created a way to do that either through his payment system with these landlords or also co-branded credit card with Wells Fargo where people can use it and collect points. We've got some audio. Why don't you take a listen to what he had to say? So we have built a purpose-built payment solution for apartment buildings and rental homes that

We handle everything from ACH payments to even the legacy checks and cash through to debit and credit for these apartment buildings. And for the first time, we reward customers every single time they pay their rent on time. So it sounds like Jade wants to make built like the Amex of rent. One key thing is he's trying to offer rewards points to get people onto the platform. But the value proposition is as much about...

the landlords that he's serving. So he wants to be just a payments provider for all of them. And, you know, he claims to have the biggest reach of anybody in that market.

Jane also says local businesses would be benefiting from this. Explain that a bit for us. Their vision is essentially to create a platform for businesses to target all these people moving into these new apartment complexes. They get reward points in addition to the other kind of loyalty points that they're getting within the system. We got some audio here of him talking about it. If you're a local business,

to reach people at apartment buildings, it's been really clunky, right? They put up a flyer saying, get 10% off when you come to our restaurant down the street. Right, the flyer slid under your door in the middle of the night for free pizza or whatever, yeah. It's really hard to track. It's a lot of ground effort. And so we said, what if we just created a rewards ecosystem where through Build, they can now reach every local resident at all of our apartments and condo buildings from the moment they move in,

with benefits and rewards that we create and fund. Jane is a serial entrepreneur, and he's the child of immigrants. Did he have any thoughts on the politics of immigration in this country right now? It seems like he loves to talk about just entrepreneurship in general. He comes from a family where that was very important. His father came from India and just kind of that immigrant work ethic. And he's frustrated with the current debate within this country.

I think that is very anti-American to be anti-legal immigration. I think most people in this country do support bringing the best and brightest from all over the world legally to here to help create economic value for all of us. So, Tim, Christopher, who else can we expect to hear from this season? We got the boldest of bold names. Reid Hoffman, Palmer Luckey. Reid Hoffman is famous for starting LinkedIn, of course.

and he is very of the moment because he just wrote this book about how AI is going to be amazing, and it could have this incredibly positive impact on our lives. We pushed back on some of that and got some great answers that are exclusive to the journal. Palmer Luckey, he is best known as the inventor of Oculus, sort of the father of modern VR, also famous for getting fired from Meta.

for basically supporting Trump. He's feeling vindicated. He's texting with Elon Musk about their anti-woke views. And he's a giant military contractor that is selling the U.S. military autonomous aircraft and cruise missiles. And he's ready to help American allies defend themselves with our weapons, if not our troops. So stay tuned for that.

The first episode of the new season of Bold Names hosted by our very own Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins is out now. New episodes drop on Fridays. You can catch it at wsj.com slash podcasts or on your favorite podcast player. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. Coming up, how one company is using AI to protect critical undersea infrastructure. That's after the break.

AI requires a lot of compute power, and the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI, a blazing fast enterprise-grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps, and all of your AI workloads. Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.

See if you qualify at oracle.com slash wsjtech. oracle.com slash wsjtech.

Deep underwater, there are massive stretches of pipelines and cables running atop the ocean floor. They form the critical infrastructure that delivers fuel like natural gas or transmit the data that's the backbone of the internet. But the ocean floor is not an easy area to reach, let alone protect. One company, North IO, is tapping into the power of artificial intelligence to make this undersea world a little less murky.

WSJ contributor William Boston has been following this company and he's with me now. William, tell us about this company, North IO. How exactly would it use AI to protect undersea technology? We have to take a step back a bit. A few years ago, the company's founder, Jan Vent, was a student and he was looking at basically geospatial mapping of the oceans.

And his concern at the time was being able to better see what's under the ocean. He was developing a program that would help to sift through the data that's available to basically see and navigate under the ocean to find objects that are there and to be able to distinguish between a pile of rocks and a pile of unexploded bombs.

That developed further to where we are today. Most of the sensory data that we have now is acoustic.

satellites can only penetrate with cameras so far into the ocean because it gets too dark to see. And so most of the information that scientists work with, that the military works with now, is sonar, various types of sonar. It gets very complicated. But what North Iowa is trying to do is to

collect this data much in the way that Google Maps sources data from many different sources for its image of the highways and then fuse it together, what they call data fusion, and present it in a standardized way that ultimately creates what they call a digital twin of the ocean. Little of the ocean has actually been mapped that it's still a mystery what the actual contours of the terrain is.

And then going a step deeper to not just understanding the topography, but actually what's on the ocean floor. And what are some of the challenges the company faces while working on this?

There are a lot of challenges that companies like North IO face trying to create a digital twin and a replica of the sea so that we can see what's happening and see what the founder, Jan Vent, likes to call anomalies, things that change so that we know, oh, well, something's changed.

Is that a threat? And one of the great challenges is, first of all, being able to do this quickly. If we want to prevent something terrible from happening, we have to be able to respond immediately. And as it is now, it takes too long to analyze the data. It could take weeks to analyze the data. So North IO was trying to work on a system where we can do that quickly.

ultimately in real time. So that's going to take a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built, a lot more sensors stationed in the ocean, sending out sonar signals, helping us identify what's underwater.

And then it's precision. It's being able to have AI that's smart enough on autonomous underwater vehicles, on ships, that the AI can look at a box and know whether or not that's just a box that fell off a ship or is that a bomb. The scientists are not there yet. The AI is pretty good, but they still have a long way to go.

Who is North IO working with right now? Well, the German government is financing a project that North IO is working on called Argus, A-R-G-U-S. And that is specifically designed to use AI in order to find a way to identify threats.

North Iowa's main product is something called True Ocean, which is this idea of creating a digital twin of the ocean. And it can be used by scientists to monitor climate change. How is climate change affecting the oceans, temperatures and currents and so on? As well as to help mining companies find magnesium deposits on the ocean floor. Being able to find them raises the potential to mine on the ocean floor.

That was WSJ contributor William Boston. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with Deputy Editor Scott Salloway. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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