Wayve

Uber, which exited self-driving in 2020, is now at the center of the robotaxi era

Uber, which plans to launch a robotaxi service with Wayve and Nissan in Tokyo this year, has deals with every major AV player.

Rani Molla

3/12/26 8:36AM

Today, Uber announced a partnership with Nissan and autonomous tech startup Wayve to launch a robotaxi service in Tokyo later this year, as part of a plan to expand autonomous services to 10 markets globally. Yesterday, the ride-hailing platform said Amazon-owned Zoox would deploy robotaxis on the Uber app in Las Vegas this summer and Los Angeles next year.

With more than 20 autonomous vehicle partnerships — spanning nearly every major player, including Baidu, Alphabet’s Waymo, and WeRide — Uber, which sold off its own self-driving unit in 2020, now finds itself in the unlikely position of being a driving force in the dawning robotaxi era.

“They are uniquely well positioned to benefit from AVs,” Jefferies analysts wrote in a note Wednesday, explaining that Uber has created an “ecosystem that provides broad-based geographic coverage and reduces reliance on any single provider.”

On the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi emphasized Uber’s hybrid approach, combining human drivers and autonomous vehicles across multiple partners and markets, as part of what he called the company’s “multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.” The strategy allows Uber to tap into the growth of robotaxis without bearing the steep costs of developing its own technology.

With Uber shares back near last year’s lows on robotaxi fears, Jefferies is heartened by the company’s diversified partnership approach to AVs and sees a buying opportunity.

Jon Keegan

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

Rani Molla

Let Tim Cook

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.

Jon Keegan9h

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

Rani Molla10h

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

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