PITAA

Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time … Read more

Waymo says it will launch a robotaxi service in Singapore in 2028, as the Alphabet-owned company continues to eye overseas markets for expansion. Waymo’s vehicles will begin arriving in Singapore in “the coming months,” the company says, in preparation of mapping and autonomous testing with human safety drivers behind the wheel in 2027. Waymo says … Read more

I tried Tovala’s smart oven for two weeks to see if it could actually make dinner as easy as the company promises. It won’t replace the quality of a good home-cooked meal, and some dishes turned out better than others, but it’s hard to beat the convenience on days when you absolutely don’t want to … Read more

As a result of a multi-year antitrust probe by Germany’s federal competition regulator and others, Apple has agreed to modify the requirements for apps on its platforms that ask for consent to track the user across other apps or websites. Regulators said this system, known as App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, had favored Apple over … Read more

New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publications. Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” … Read more

The United Nations on Thursday announced that it is working with Google to make its vast collection of global statistics easier for AI systems to access and use. Called the UN System Data Commons, the new system is built on Google’s open source Data Commons platform and lets people search for statistics from across UN … Read more

If AI lab PrismML isn’t on your radar yet, it should be — not because it’s raised gobs of money (it hasn’t yet, just a $22.25 million seed round), but because of the technical minds involved and the potentially industry-changing tech it’s developing. PrismML is betting that capable, high-performing, reasoning large language models don’t, in … Read more

Google and Google DeepMind researchers launched the DeepMind Institute on Wednesday to advance the conversation around artificial general intelligence (AGI). The institute lists DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Google executive James Manyika, and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis as directors, with Legg serving as managing editor.  The new institute aims to surface differing views between Google, … Read more

Geothermal startup Mazama Energy raised $135 million in an oversubscribed Series B, the startup said Thursday. The fresh funding will help the company develop horizontal wells in super-hot rocks capable of generating 15 megawatts of electricity per well. Mazama plans to start generating electricity sometime next year and said its first site in Oregon is … Read more