Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks. Existing safety techniques -- including external guardrails, inference-time guidance, and post-training alignment -- each face limitations in balancing safety, utility, and controllability. In this work, we propose UpSafe$^\circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling. Our approach first identifies safety-critical layers and upcycles them into a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, where the router acts as a soft guardrail that selectively activates original MLPs and added safety experts. We further introduce a two-stage SFT strategy to strengthen safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities. To enable flexible control at inference time, we introduce a safety temperature mechanism, allowing dynamic adjustment of the trade-off between safety and utility. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, base model, and model scales demonstrate that UpSafe$^\circ$C achieves robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs, while maintaining competitive performance on general tasks. Moreover, analysis shows that safety temperature provides fine-grained inference-time control that achieves the Pareto-optimal frontier between utility and safety. Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control.

Meta on Tuesday said it had struck an agreement to keep one nuclear reactor of a US utility company in Illinois operating for 20 years. Meta's deal with Constellation Energy is the social networking company's first with a nuclear power plant. Other large tech companies are looking to secure electricity as US power demand rises significantly in part due to the needs of artificial intelligence and datacenters. Google has reached agreements to supply its datacenters with nuclear power via a half-dozen small reactors built by a California utility company. Microsoft's similar contract will restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the most serious nuclear accident and radiation leak in US history.

--With the advancement of energy Internet and energy system integration, the increasing adoption of distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems presents new challenges on smart monitoring and measurement for utility companies, particularly in separating PV generation from net electricity load. This paper proposes a PV disaggregation method that integrates Hierarchical Interpolation (HI) and multi-head self-attention mechanisms. By using HI to extract net load features and multi-head self-attention to capture the complex dependencies between weather factors, the method achieves precise PV generation predictions. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world data, supporting improved monitoring and management of distributed energy systems. With the increasing adoption of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, an expanding number of residential prosumers, who both produce and consume electricity, are generating electricity through their PV installations.

In July, Elon Musk made a bold prediction: that his artificial intelligence startup xAI would release "the most powerful AI in the world," a model called Grok 3, by this December. The bulk of that AI's training, Musk said, would happen at a "massive new training center" in Memphis, which he bragged had been built in 19 days. But many residents of Memphis were taken by surprise, including city council members who said they were given no input about the project or its potential impacts on the city. And in the months since, an outcry has grown among community members and environmental groups, who warn of the plant's potential negative impact on air quality, water access, and grid stability, especially for nearby neighborhoods that have suffered from industrial pollution for decades. These activists also contend that the company is illegally operating gas turbines.

For a long time, digitalization has been at the heart of the transformation of major utility companies, significantly contributing to the reshaping and reinventing of their business processes and business models. This is also because there is a growing urgency to adapt to the new'climate' ecosystem that is environmentally sustainable and economically efficient. As more utility companies continue to face unique challenges, digital transformation initiatives are now a must, considering the demands of changing customer expectations and market needs. Going by this Accenture report, 59% of utility company executives say that the pace of digital transformation for their organization is accelerating. This is likely to further gain momentum as more utilities companies begin to adopt renewable sources of energy.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Duke Energy's AI journey began because the utility company had a business problem to solve, Duke Energy chief information officer Bonnie Titone told VentureBeat's head of AI content strategy Hari Sivaraman at the Transform 2021 virtual conference on Thursday. Duke Energy was facing some significant challenges, such as the growing issue of climate change and the need to transition to clean energy in order to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Duke Energy is considered an essential service, as it supplies 25 million people with electricity daily, and everything the utility company does revolves around a culture of safety and reliability. The variables together was a catalyst for exploring AI technologies, Titone said, because whatever the company chose to do, it had to support the clean energy transition, deliver value to customers, and find a way for employees to work and improve safety.

As AI technologies become more advanced, previously cutting-edge -- but generic -- AI models are becoming commonplace, such as Google Cloud's Vision AI or Amazon Rekognition. While effective in some use cases, these solutions do not suit industry-specific needs right out of the box. Organizations that seek the most accurate results from their AI projects will simply have to turn to industry-specific models. There are a few ways that companies can generate industry-specific results. One would be to adopt a hybrid approach -- taking an open-source generic AI model and training it further to align with the business's specific needs.

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, previously cutting-edge -- but generic -- AI models are becoming commonplace, such as Google Cloud's Vision AI or Amazon Rekognition. While effective in some use cases, these solutions do not suit industry-specific needs right out of the box. Organizations that seek the most accurate results from their AI projects will simply have to turn to industry-specific models. There are a few ways that companies can generate industry-specific results. One would be to adopt a hybrid approach -- taking an open-source generic AI model and training it further to align with the business' specific needs.

His opinion lends credence to the assumption made in this article, namely that renewable energy, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are not only intricately linked, but that'smart' renewable energy must be considered the most sustainable way forward for our energy needs. And it will increasingly continue to do so. Along with allied technologies such as ML, deep learning and advanced neural networks, AI has transformative potential for the global energy sector. An important caveat regarding the fossil fuel-renewable energy dichotomy will also be discussed at article's conclusion. ML is already entrenched in our everyday lives, from smart phone assistants like Apple's Siri or Samsung's Bixby, to voice and image recognition systems. More important even will be ML's ability to assist in tackling some of the world's most pressing physical and logistical problems, including that pertaining to the full potential of renewable energy.

Utilities around the world are reported to invest a total of around 30 billion over the next few years for installation of more than 300 million smart meters, replacing traditional analog meters [1]. By mid-decade, with full country wide deployment, there will be almost 1.3 billion smart meters in place [1]. Collection of fine grained energy usage data by these smart meters provides numerous advantages such as energy savings for customers with use of demand optimization, a billing system of higher accuracy with dynamic pricing programs, bidirectional information exchange ability between end-users for better consumer-operator interaction, and so on. However, all these perks associated with fine grained energy usage data collection threaten the privacy of users. With this technology, customers' personal data such as sleeping cycle, number of occupants, and even type and number of appliances stream into the hands of the utility companies and can be subject to misuse. This research paper addresses privacy violation of consumers' energy usage data collected from smart meters and provides a novel solution for the privacy protection while allowing benefits of energy data analytics. First, we demonstrate the successful application of occupancy detection attacks using a deep neural network method that yields high accuracy results. We then introduce Adversarial Machine Learning Occupancy Detection Avoidance with Blockchain (AMLODA-B) framework as a counter-attack by deploying an algorithm based on the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model into the standardized smart metering infrastructure to prevent leakage of consumers personal information. Our privacy-aware approach protects consumers' privacy without compromising the correctness of billing and preserves operational efficiency without use of authoritative intermediaries.