AI

Rivian has hired former Waymo executive James Philbin to lead autonomy and AI at the automaker, a new role that signals the company’s interest in automated driving technology. Philbin was director of software engineering for two years at Waymo. Before that, Philbin worked for five years at Am

In 2018, Neil D'Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his 10-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he sa

As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at Ping-Pong as well. For now they emphasize it is “cooperative,” but at the rate these things improve, it will

Swap Robotics, a company that manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots, presented today at technewss Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how it's making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup's focus will be on facilitating robo

I don't love devoting the first several paragraphs of this newsletter to Amazon every week, but no one is making waves — both good and bad — in the robotics space quite like the little mom-and-pop bookseller from Seattle, Washington. This is one of the bad weeks. It's a story about what

Some of the most exciting robotics breakthroughs are happening in the exoskeleton space. Sure, any robotic system worth its salt has the potential to effect change, but this is one of the categories where such changes can be immediately felt — specifically, it's about improving the lives

Microsoft is making a major investment in DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s AI-powered system that generates images from text, by bringing it to first-party apps and services. During its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it’s integrating DALL-E 2 with the newly announced Microsoft

“What a lot of people tell me is 'hardware is hard,'” Eliot Horowitz explains. “I have a really big problem with that statement.” The Viam Robotics CEO and MongoDB co-founder describes purchasing a Universal Robotics' UR5 robot arm and programming it to play chess. “I don'

Autonomous sidewalk delivery robot company Starship Technologies is partnering with food ordering and delivery company Grubhub to provide robotic delivery services on college campuses across the U.S. Today, Starship’s bots deliver through Grubhub at the University of Kentucky, the University

We’ve seen AIs create music, pornography and art. The Estonian startup Yummy started off creating a meal-kit startup, but along the way created an AI that can create and adapt recipes based on your taste and dietary restrictions, complete with AI-generated images of what your dishes might loo

Gather AI, a startup using drones to inventory items in warehouses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Tribeca Venture Partners with participation from Xplorer Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, Expa, Bling Capital, XRC Labs and 99 Tartans. The proceeds bring the co

Not to be outdone by Meta’s Make-A-Video, Google today detailed its work on Imagen Video, an AI system that can generate video clips given a text prompt (e.g. “a teddy bear washing dishes”). While the results aren’t perfect — the looping clips the system generates tend

The White House this morning unveiled what it's colloquially calling an “AI Bill of Rights,” which aims to establish tenets around the ways AI algorithms should be deployed as well as guardrails on their applications. In five bullet points crafted with feedback from the public, companies li

Tesla unveiled its first prototype of its Optimus humanoid robot on Friday — an actual robot this time, by the strictest definition, instead of a flesh- and-blood human clad in a weird suit. The robot performed some basic functions, including walking a little bit and then raising its hands — al