Latest news with #TravisKalanick
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Los Angeles Times
Uber partnering with Lucid, Nuro to launch robotaxis in 2026
Uber Technologies Inc. is teaming up with electric vehicle maker Lucid Group Inc. and self-driving tech startup Nuro to launch a robotaxi fleet. Uber announced Thursday it or its third-party partners will purchase and operate Lucid Gravity SUVs outfitted with Nuro Driver technology on its ride-sharing network. The company aims to launch the first vehicle later in 2026 in an unidentified major US city, with plans to deploy at least 20,000 of the robotaxis over six years. The ride-sharing company also announced it's making separate multi-hundred-million dollar investments in both Lucid and Nuro. That funding will include $300 million for Lucid that will be used in part to upgrade to its assembly line to integrate Nuro hardware into the Gravity vehicles, according to the EV company. Separately, Lucid also said it plans a 1-for-10 reverse stock split, subject to shareholder approval. The Lucid-Nuro deal adds to more than a dozen partnerships that Uber has announced with autonomous vehicle tech developers and carmakers, including Waymo and Volkswagen Group of America, as it aims to be the go-to commercial app for robotaxis. Earlier this week, Uber announced a partnership with Chinese AV maker Baidu to deploy robotaxis in several non-US markets. Currently autonomous rides are available through the Uber app in Phoenix, Austin, Atlanta and Abu Dhabi. The substantial investments by Uber further underscore its strategy shift away from developing autonomous technology in-house, as it did under co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, in favor of partnering with and investing in firms that specialize in AV. Uber has monetized some of its equity stakes in firms such as autonomous freight company Aurora Innovation Inc. to fund future investments in the driverless ecosystem, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said. Competition is intensifying in the still-nascent robotaxi market, with EV giant Tesla Inc. rolling out its long-promised service in Austin last month and CEO Elon Musk pledging to expand to other cities. Uber first partnered with Nuro in 2022 on food delivery robots. The following year Nuro pivoted from building and scaling custom AVs to focusing on developing autonomous software. The Uber partnership also adds a notable customer for Lucid, one of the few pure play EV makers in the US, as it works to popularize Gravity, its second vehicle model. The company has been working to amp up production and deliveries, and has estimated it will produce 20,000 vehicles in 2025, more than double the year before. Prototype robotaxis developed by Lucid and Nuro are already in operation on Nuro's Las Vegas closed-circuit testing grounds. Lucid interim CEO Marc Winterhoff said Uber chose its SUV because the company can integrate the necessary hardware at its factory. Nuro's software will be added once Uber receives the vehicles. Winterhoff had said in a call with investors in May that the company was in advanced discussions with partners about using Gravity for autonomous vehicle purposes. 'This is a stepping stone on our journey to expand our tech leadership from electric vehicles and licensing into partnerships in other areas,' Winterhoff told Bloomberg this week. 'A lot can happen in six years. I really see this as the first starting point.' Lucid also has been working on advanced driver systems and announced earlier this year that it had partnered with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Winterhoff said the company still plans to work on its own autonomous and driver assistance technology. This week Lucid separately announced it's adding hands-free drive and lane change assist to its software suite. Carlson and Lung write for Bloomberg.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
The Former CEO of Uber Kind of Sounds Like He's Losing It When He's Talking About AI
It sounds like the co-founder and former CEO of Uber has had a big gulp of the AI Kool-aid — and then some. On a recent episode of the All-In podcast, Travis Kalanick, who resigned from the ride-hailing company in disgrace in 2017, spoke rapturously about his experience using chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok. That's when he revealed his sincere conviction that he, a mere college dropout, was on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in physics just by probing the AI models. "I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics," Kalanick said, as spotlighted by Gizmodo. "And we're approaching what's known," he enthused. "And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that." Kalanick appeared to have a special affinity for Elon Musk's Grok, which was embroiled in controversy earlier this month after making posts calling itself "MechaHitler," praising the Nazi leader, and making a series of outrageously racist and antisemitic statements. At no point did the former Uber boss even mention these fresh stains on Grok's record — he was too busy pontificating over the idea of actual scientists getting their hands on the AI. "I pinged Elon on at some point. I'm just like, dude, if I'm doing this and I'm super amateur hour physics enthusiast," Kalanick said, per Giz, "what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?" He did not leave us hanging in suspense. "Grok 4 could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening!" Kalanick said. "New breakthroughs!" Kalanick appears to be parroting the spirit of the claims made by Grok's creator, Musk. Upon the release of Grok 4 last week — the "smartest AI in the world" — Musk promised that Grok would not only discover "new technologies" within the next few years, but "new physics." Incredibly, this was only a minor escalation in his original promise that Grok will be a "maximum truth-seeking" AI that will unlock the "true nature of the universe." So far, neither Grok nor any other large language model has proved capable of unearthing the secrets of spacetime, or what's behind a black hole's singularity, or anything else particularly novel. Even the most advanced LLMs are marred by frequent episodes of inventing facts out of thin air, something the industry likes to euphemistically call "hallucinations." In Grok's case, it remains remarkably prone to declaring itself an incarnation of Adolf Hitler, being racist, or seemingly believing it's Elon Musk himself. To his credit, Kalanick does inject some mild criticism for LLMs into his spiel, saying they're too "wedded to what is known" and — in an apparent contradiction — need to be double-checked. But he framed this as an issue that could be overcome with tenacious prompting, instead of reckoning with what some believe are the technology's fundamental shortcomings. In a remark that sums up his credulous zeal, Kalanick laid out the one simple trick the AI industry should do to supercharge science, which is: being good at science. "If you have an LLM or foundational model of some kind that is the best in the world at the scientific method? Game the eff over," Kalanick said. "You just light up more GPUs and you just got like a thousand more PhD students working for you." Easy, right? More on AI: The Pentagon Is Pumping $200 Million Into Elon Musk's AI That Just Had a Nazi Meltdown Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Uber's latest robotaxi partner is China's Baidu
Uber has struck another deal with a robotaxi provider, and this time it's with Chinese tech giant Baidu. The two companies announced Tuesday that they have agreed to a 'multi-year strategic partnership to deploy thousands of Baidu's Apollo Go autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the Uber platform' in multiple markets outside the U.S. and mainland China. Those deployments will start in Asia and the Middle East later this year, the companies said. Uber has been on a tear of AV partnerships lately as it looks to protect its ride-hailing business by embracing the rise of robotaxis. In the last few months alone, Uber has agreed to put AVs from Waymo, Volkswagen, May Mobility, and Pony AI on its platform in different cities around the world. In some cases, Uber is taking direct stakes in these companies. In May, Uber announced an expanded partnership with China's WeRide that included a $100 million investment. Uber is reportedly also considering helping its founder Travis Kalanick finance a takeover of Pony AI. As fast as these partnerships have been coming, they are still in the very early stages. In this instance, riders initially won't be able to request a Baidu AV in Uber's app. Instead, the companies say the rider 'may be presented with the option' to have their trip fulfilled by a fully driverless Apollo Go AV. This is similar to how some of Uber's other partnerships already work.
Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Gizmodo
Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Is Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries
Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok have exploded in popularity as AI becomes mainstream. These tools don't have the ability to make new scientific discoveries on their own, but billionaires are convinced that AI is on the cusp of doing just that. And the latest episode of the All-In podcast helps explain why these guys think AI is extremely close to revolutionizing scientific knowledge. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI's Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews. 'I'll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics,' Kalanick explained. 'And we're approaching what's known. And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.' The guys on the podcast only briefly addressed Grok's failures without getting into specifics about the MechaHitler debacle, and none of that stopped Kalanick from talking like Grok was this revolutionary tool that was so close to making scientific discoveries in revolutionary ways. 'I pinged Elon on at some point. I'm just like, dude, if I'm doing this and I'm super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?' Kalanick said. Kalanick suggested that what made this even more incredible was that he was using an earlier version of Grok before Grok 4 was released on Wednesday. 'And this is pre-Grok 4. Now with Grok 4, like, there's a lot of mistakes I was seeing Grok make that then I would correct, and we would talk about it. Grok 4 could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening, new breakthroughs,' Kalanick said. Calacanis asked Kalanick the obvious question of whether Grok was actually on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Because anyone who actually understands large language models knows that it can't achieve new ways of thinking. It's just putting together words in the most statistically likely way, forming connections that may sound like a well-thought-out argument but are actually not a form of true 'intelligence' as humans would define it. 'Is your perception that the LLMs are actually starting to get to the reasoning level, that they'll come up with a novel concept theory and have that breakthrough? Or that we're kind of reading into it and it's just trying random stuff at the margins?' Calacanis asked. Kalanick said that he hasn't used Grok 4 because he was having technical difficulties accessing it, suggesting that perhaps a later version of Grok might be capable of such a thing. But he admitted the AI couldn't yet come up with new discoveries. 'No, it cannot come up with the new idea. These things are so wedded to what is known. And they're so like, even when I come up with a new idea, I have to really, it's like pulling a donkey. You see, you're pulling it because it doesn't want to break conventional wisdom. It's like really adhering to conventional wisdom. You're pulling it out and then eventually goes, oh, shit, you got something,' Kalanick said. Kalanick emphasized that 'you have to double and triple check to make sure that you really got something,' making clear he understood that AI chatbots just make things up much of the time. But he still seemed convinced that the thing holding back Grok was 'conventional wisdom' rather than the natural limitations of the tech. Palihapitiya went a step further than Kalanick, insisting that synthetic data could train new AI models. 'When these models are fully divorced from having to learn on the known world and instead can just learn synthetically, then everything gets flipped upside down to what is the best hypothesis you have or what is the best question? You could just give it some problem and it would just figure it out,' Palihapitiya. Musk revealed a similar line of thinking recently when he suggested 'general artificial intelligence' was close because he had asked Grok 'about materials science that are not in any books or on the Internet.' The idea, of course, is that Musk had hit the limits of known science rather than the limit of his scientific understanding. The billionaire really seems convinced that Grok was working on something new. That was how I felt when asking Grok 4 questions about materials science that are not in any books or on the Internet — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2025These guys are hyping up the idea of general artificial intelligence (AGI), which doesn't even have an exact definition. But it's far from the only term getting tossed around right now. AI folks also drop words like 'superintelligence' without defining what that means, but it sure keeps the investors intrigued. These AI chatbots are pulling off a magic trick. They can often seem like they're 'thinking' or applying rational thought to a given answer, but they work by spitting out the next word that's most likely to be next in a sentence, not by actually applying critical reasoning. There's a reason that people who understand AI the best are the least excited about using it. Apple has gotten a lot of shit for not committing to AI in a more forceful way, something the All-In guys talked about, but the company understands perhaps better than most that there are limitations to this tech. In fact, Apple released a paper last month that shows how Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) struggle, facing 'a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.' Apple's paper won't dampen the hype, of course. Just about every other major tech company is pushing hard into AI agents and investing billions of dollars into data centers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that his company was building enormous new data centers to work on superintelligence. 'Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,' Zuck wrote. 'I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!'
CNBC
6 days ago
- Automotive
- CNBC
Pony AI CEO on US operations, Hong Kong IPO plans
James Peng, CEO of autonomous driving company Pony AI, talks about Uber founder Travis Kalanick's reported interest in acquiring the company's US operations. He also talks about the company being shorted by Grizzly Research, who accused Pony AI of being linked to the Chinese military.
