tech

Rani Molla3/13/26

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

More Tech

Altman: We do “weird” things like building massive data centers so there will be “universal prosperity”

OpenAI’s CEO spelled out the company’s principles for AGI in a blog post.

12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony - Arrivals

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

The memory crunch has made iPhones a more popular alternative as competitors’ prices rise.

CHINA-ECONOMY-FORUM

tech

Microsoft loses exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and tools while ending revenue-sharing deal with ChatGPT maker

Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

This is a developing story.

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

tech

China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues to restrict sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

tech

Jon Keegan4/24/26

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

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