tech

Google’s Waymo has started letting passengers take the freeway

Waymo’s approach to robotaxi expansion has been slow and steady — a practice that has meant the Google-owned autonomous ride-hailing service that launched to the public in 2020 is only just now taking riders on freeways.

On Wednesday, Waymo announced that “a growing number of public riders” in the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, and Los Angeles can take the highway and are no longer confined to local routes. The company said it will soon expand freeway capabilities to Austin and Atlanta. It also noted that its service in San Jose is now available, meaning Waymos can traverse the entire San Francisco Peninsula.

Waymo’s main competitor, Tesla, so far operates an autonomous service in Austin as well as a more traditional ride-hailing service across the Bay Area, where a driver uses Full Self-Driving (Supervised). On the company’s last earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla would expand its robotaxi service to 8 to 10 markets this year.

More Tech

Orange iPhones are the new black

The latest iPhone Pro doesn’t come in black, the preferred iPhone color, so people are picking... Cosmic Orange.

Streetstyle Vienna

CLAUDE COMPUTING

Anthropic gets into the data center business, pledging $50 billion

Buoyed by brisk business sales, Anthropic is investing in its first custom-built data centers, with sites in New York and Texas, partnering with Fluidstack.

Dario Amodei - INBOUND 2025 Powered By HubSpot

tech

Google rolls out Private AI Compute matching Apple’s AI privacy scheme

One of the barriers to people embracing AI in their daily lives is trust — making sure that the company that built the AI isn’t going to just spill your most sensitive info to advertisers and data brokers.

Google is announcing a new feature called Private AI Compute that takes a page from Apple to help assure users that Google will keep your AI data private.

In June 2024, Apple announced its Private Cloud Compute scheme, which ensures only the user can access data sent to the cloud to enable AI features.

While Apple’s AI tools have yet to fully materialize, Google’s new offering looks a lot like Apple’s. AI models on its phones process data in a secure environment, and when more computing is needed in the cloud, that security is extended to the cloud to be processed by Google’s custom TPU chips.

A press release said: “This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.”

Google is introducing its own version of Apple’s private AI cloud compute

Google is introducing its own version of Apple’s private AI cloud compute

In June 2024, Apple announced its Private Cloud Compute scheme, which ensures only the user can access data sent to the cloud to enable AI features.

While Apple’s AI tools have yet to fully materialize, Google’s new offering looks a lot like Apple’s. AI models on its phones process data in a secure environment, and when more computing is needed in the cloud, that security is extended to the cloud to be processed by Google’s custom TPU chips.

A press release said: “This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.”

Amazon says it has 315 million monthly active viewers for its Prime Video ads, according to Deadline, up from 200 million in April 2024. The number comes just a week after Netflix said it had 190 million monthly active viewers.

The self-reported numbers have different methodologies. Netflix counts the number of ad-tier subscribers who’ve watched at least one minute of ads per month and multiplies that by its estimated household size. Amazon’s number represents an unduplicated average monthly active ad-supported audience across its programming from September 2024 through August 2025.

The services themselves also aren’t exactly comparable. Netflix charges $7.99 a month for its ad-supported tier, while Prime Video comes bundled as part of Amazon Prime — and now automatically comes with ads unless consumers pay an extra $2.99 per month to remove them.

Rani Molla11/11/25

Chinese EV maker and Tesla competitor BYD could sell up to 1.6 million vehicles abroad next year, according to a new report by Citi published by Reuters. That’s potentially 60% more than the roughly 1 million vehicles BYD is expected to sell outside China this year. That’s also the same number analysts polled by FactSet expect Tesla to sell in total in 2025.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.

©2025 Sherwood Media, LLC