Autonomous Driving

Today's Stories

1. 1

   Waymo starts picking up passengers with new Chinese-made Ojai robotaxis

   Waymo began public rides today using its pale-blue Ojai vehicles (self-driving taxis with no human driver) in California and Arizona. These robotaxis are manufactured in China and represent Waymo's latest fleet expansion for autonomous ride services.

   People in these areas can now hail a completely driverless taxi through an app, similar to Uber but without any human driver in the vehicle.

2. 2

   Uber commits $10 billion to deploy robotaxis in 30 cities with Nvidia partnership

   Uber Technologies announced a major partnership with Nvidia to launch self-driving taxi services across nearly 30 cities on 4 continents by 2028. The $10 billion investment will use Nvidia's AI hardware and software to power Uber's autonomous vehicle fleet expansion.

   Uber riders in dozens of major cities worldwide may soon be able to book rides in self-driving cars instead of human-driven vehicles.

3. 3

   Researchers create 7MB self-driving AI that runs on smartphones

   Scientists developed an open-source (freely available) autonomous driving AI system that weighs only 7MB and can operate on phones and small devices. The system learns navigation, lane following, and crash recovery directly from camera and sensor input without requiring massive computer servers.

   This breakthrough could make self-driving technology much cheaper and more accessible, potentially enabling autonomous features in regular cars without expensive specialized computers.

4. 4

   Tesla's former Autopilot architect Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic over OpenAI

   Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher who previously worked at Tesla on Autopilot (self-driving car technology) and OpenAI, chose to join Anthropic (maker of Claude AI) for his return to frontier AI research. Karpathy called the next few years in large language model development especially important.

   This high-profile move signals intensifying competition among AI companies and could influence how autonomous driving AI develops in the coming years.

5. 5

   Ouster launches Rev8 color lidar sensors for autonomous vehicles with Nvidia integration

   Ouster released its Rev8 family of digital lidar sensors (laser-based distance measurement devices) that can capture native color for 3D perception in self-driving cars. The sensors are designed to work with Nvidia's autonomous vehicle platforms and target higher image quality for robotics and automotive applications.

   Self-driving cars using these sensors could better distinguish between objects of different colors, potentially making autonomous driving safer and more reliable.