General Motors has announced that it will stop funding the development of the Cruise self-driving taxi.
The company says it will now “refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles”.
GM also pointed to the increasingly competitive robotaxi market as a reason for the move.
In October, Tesla boss Elon Musk unveiled the electric car giant’s long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.
Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.
On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.
It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.
A well-known test for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer to being solved. But the tests’s creators say this points to flaws in the test’s design, rather than a bonafide research breakthrough.
In 2019, Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark, short for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence.” Designed to evaluate whether an AI system can efficiently acquire new skills outside the data it was trained on, ARC-AGI, Francois claims, remains the only AI test to measure progress towards general intelligence (although others have been proposed.)
Until this year, the best-performing AI could only solve just under a third of the tasks in ARC-AGI. Chollet blamed the industry’s focus on large language models (LLMs), which he believes aren’t capable of actual “reasoning.”
Amazon says that it’s establishing a new R&D lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building “foundational” capabilities for AI agents.
The Amazon AGI SF Lab, which will be led by David Luan, the co-founder of AI startup Adept, will seek to build agents that can “take actions in the digital and physical worlds,” and “handle complex workflows” using computers, web browsers, and code interpreters.
“Our work will build on that of Amazon’s broader AGI team,” reads a post jointly written by Luan and Pieter Abbeel, a robotics research lead who joined Amazon by way of the company’s “license and hire” deal with Covariant. An Amazon spokesperson tells TechCrunch that Abbeel will be working “closely” with Luan and the AGI SF Lab going forward.
OpenAI has added a new Sora video generator to ChatGPT that can create videos from text, animate images, and convert existing videos to new styles.
OpenAI made Sora broadly available to the general public on Monday after a video announcement showing off what the AI could do.
Per OpenAI’s demo video, Sora starts with a text prompt, an image, or a video, which it then uses to generate videos in resolutions from 480p up to 1080p. It currently produces anywhere from 5 seconds to 20 seconds of video.
Sora can also generate different options for the same prompt. So if a user isn’t sure what they want their AI video to look like, they can ask Sora to generate one, two, or four variations of the same prompt to get more options.
Nestled in the heart of St. Louis, Missouri, Maypop is a coffee and garden shop known for its cozy charm and abundant greenery. People from all walks of life gather here to reconnect with nature and each other.
Julia Valleroy, Maypop’s administrative coordinator, was once one of those customers seeking a garden escape and a good cup of coffee. Now part of the team, Valleroy says Maypop’s dual business model still provides that warmth and magic for her and many others.
“You really don’t see [anything like Maypop] around here in the Midwest at all,” she says. “How many places can you go where you can get coffee and also buy some flowers for your front porch or a tropical houseplant that you’ve been dreaming of having?”
Bitcoin has just hit $100,000.
Buoyed by Donald Trump’s reelection and the promise of a pro-cryptocurrency administration, crypto investors are going all in on the digital currency. With the price of Bitcoin rising high, cryptocurrency is seemingly seeping back into the public consciousness after the crypto crashes of 2022.
And, it appears the memecoin fad is having a resurgence right now too. On the same day Bitcoin hit its new six-figure record high, the viral “Hawk Tuah” girl Hailey Welch launched her own cryptocurrency token $HAWK.
OpenAI has entered into its first major defense partnership, a deal that could see the AI giant making its way into the Pentagon.
The joint venture was recently announced by billion-dollar Anduril Industries, a defense startup owned by Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Lucky that sells sentry towers, communications jammers, military drones, and autonomous submarines. The “strategic partnership” will incorporate OpenAI’s AI models into Anduril systems to “rapidly synthesize time-sensitive data, reduce the burden on human operators, and improve situational awareness.” Anduril already supplies anti-drone tech to the U.S. government. It was recently chosen to develop and test unmanned fighter jets and awarded a $100 million contract with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office.
China, once GM’s largest and most important market, has become its biggest problem.
General Motors told shareholders on Wednesday that it would record two non-cash charges totaling more than $5 billion on its joint venture in China, one related to the restructuring of the operation and another reflecting its reduced value.
GM expects the charge for restructuring costs to be $2.6 to $2.9 billion and the charge for reduced joint-venture value to be $2.7 billion.
The automaker’s shares were down 2.7% before the bell.
GM partners with SAIC Motors in China to build Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac vehicles.
Coca-Cola is scaling back its packaging sustainability goals, igniting outrage from environmental activists.
The beverage company, which has long been criticized for being one of the world’s top producer of plastic pollutants, changed its “voluntary environmental goals” this week. It now aims to use 35% to 40% recycled material in its packaging by 2035 — a drastic reduction from its previous goal of 50% by 2030.
Coca-Cola explained in a press release that its “evolution is informed by learnings gathered through decades of work in sustainability, periodic assessment of progress and identified challenges.”
