Driverless Waymo struck a child near school in California

A Google Waymo struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during morning drop-off last week, as self-driving cars by Waymo, Tesla, and others continue their expansion across the country. In a blog post, Waymo said the fully driverless car detected the child as they emerged from behind a parked SUV, braked sharply, and reduced speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before striking the child. The child suffered minor injuries and walked away.

The company reported the incident to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is currently investigating, adding fresh scrutiny to how robotaxis perform in the wild.

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Rani Molla3m

Elon Musk’s SpaceX reportedly in talks to merge with xAI

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly exploring a merger between SpaceX and his artificial intelligence startup xAI, a move that would bundle rockets, satellites, social media, and AI under one company ahead of SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO.

According to Reuters reporting, the deal would swap xAI shares for SpaceX stock, potentially valuing the combined operation north of $1 trillion.

Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX in merger talks with xAI ahead of planned IPO, source says

Jon Keegan22m

Translating Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella

On yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out the company’s strategy for growing its AI infrastructure to meet the intense demand it is seeing, while still keeping costs under control. But sometimes tech CEOs can be a little too jargony, so we helped explain some of his lingo in plain English.

(Photo: Fabrice Coffrini / Getty Images)

Jon Keegan3h

Digging into Microsoft’s cloud backlog

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing unit is seeing huge demand. In yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company’s commercial bookings increased 230% thanks to large commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic and healthy demand for its Azure cloud computing platform.

Hood said that the company’s “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) ballooned to a staggering $625 billion, up 110% from the same period last year. How long will it take for Microsoft to fulfill these booked services? Hood said the weighted average duration was “approximately two and a half years,” but a quarter of that will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months.

Shares of Microsoft tanked today, down over 11%, despite the strong beat on revenue and earnings. The drop puts the stock on track to have its worst single-day drop since March of 2020.

Investors may be concerned that while huge, that extra demand was coming only from OpenAI, an issue that Oracle recently experienced.

But Hood said the non-OpenAI RPO still grew 28% year on year, which reflects “ongoing broad customer demand across the portfolio.”

Meta and Tesla are funding the future with their core businesses — but only one of them is still growing

The two tech giants, on back-to-back earnings calls, made it sound like they’re selling the same AI-powered future. But the picture of the underlying businesses, and how they’re using AI to furnish current sales, couldn’t be more different.

Rani Molla4h

Rani Molla

20h

Tesla to stop making Model S and Model X next quarter to pivot to Optimus production

Tesla is not bringing S3XY back.

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